Alt.History 102 (The Future Chronicles)

by Samuel Peralta

  * * *

  Mr Weyland paused before opening the cell door. He took a moment to collect himself. It had been a while since he’d done any fieldwork, but events had come to a head more quickly than he’d expected, and he had a strong hunch that Eric Critchley was the architect of the disastrous events that day. This was too important to delegate.

  He turned the key and stepped into the dark space. It was one of dozens of holding cells in the Cambridge Bunker. Once it had held Soviet agents, insurrectionists, anarchists, or just desperate folk who had been caught looting in the dark years of the 1990s. Now it was used for political prisoners.

  Eric Critchley was bound to a wooden chair in the centre of the room. He squirmed under the hot glare of a spotlamp trained on him from one corner. The floor was dust and muck; cobwebs laced the concrete walls.

  The boy looked up at Weyland with absolute terror.

  “What am I doing here? Why have you arrested me?”

  He looked much younger than his twenty-three years, and he was dressed like a teenager, in black jeans and a white T-shirt, with a denim jacket thrown over the top. There was a bloodstain on one sleeve and an ugly bruise around his left eye.

  “My name is Guy Weyland,” he said, “and I am the Minister of Information. Do you understand me?”

  The boy nodded, eyes fixed on Weyland’s face like a rabbit frozen in headlights.

  “Good.” Weyland smiled. “Do you know why you are here?”

  “I’ve done nothing wrong. All I did was dial into the Acanet—”

  “Yes, and transmit code that disabled eighty-five per cent of the Internetwork and crippled our war effort. Thousands of European troops have died because of you. Belgrade is an irradiated crater in the ground because of you, Critchley.”

  Eric gaped. No sound came from the black hole of his mouth.

  “I’m not going to tell you there are two ways this can play out,” Weyland continued, “because you know very well that isn’t true. But I would very much like you to tell me who you are working with.”

  “I had nothing to do with anything. I’m just a kid who likes computers. I just wanted to talk to my friends.”

  “That won’t do, Critchley. We know you are working with Terry Richards—he’s dead, by the way—and also others in a Norwich terrorist cell. I would like their names, please.”

  Eric’s expression changed slowly, from fear to something Weyland interpreted as realisation. He seemed calmer now.

  “You’ve shut down the Acanet, haven’t you?” Eric said. “Terry always said the Government hated people to have free access to information, but I didn’t believe him. Maybe he was right.”

  “Obviously he was right. Information is dangerous.”

  “Information is freedom,” Eric whispered.

  “And freedom is dangerous,” Weyland said wearily, now convinced that Eric was a Web supremacist, and probably under Soviet control—whether he was aware of it or not. “Look. This is really quite pointless. I am going to be honest with you. Yes, we shut down the Acanet. It has always served as a breeding ground for traitors and free-thinkers, and it has no place in modern Britain. We are at war. That is our reality, but the present generation is unable to accept that total war requires total obedience, total sacrifice. They don’t know what’s good for them.”

  “And you do?”

  “Yes.”

  Eric sighed and looked at his feet. “I’m not going to go home, am I?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “You’ll figure out who I’ve been talking to. You don’t need me to tell you anything.” He looked up, and Weyland was surprised at his composure. “But I want you to know that I’ve been framed for this. Someone must have planted that code in my software. It wasn’t Terry. He believed in a free and open Web where people could talk to anyone in the world, share knowledge... not in making the war worse.”

  ‘The two go hand in hand, I’m afraid. Look, are you or are you not B.RIC? Tell me now and perhaps things will be a little easier for you later on.”

  “What? I don’t know what that is.”

  The confusion in the boy’s eyes was genuine. Weyland believed him when he denied it.

  So the search must continue. He left Eric Critchley in the hands of the secret police, and followed the scent further down the trail.

  * * *

  Mandy returned home later that evening, overjoyed at the success of her interview. Something had clicked in her mind as she’d walked down the street earlier that afternoon, wrapped up warm against the cold; she’d been sober for once, without a penny in her purse, and had realised that something in her life had to change. The revelation had stopped her in the street and risen up like a wave of tears and sorrow inside her, making her gulp for air.

  She wasn’t a bad person—she loved her family, although they drove her up the wall—but she’d lost touch with what she wanted, let it all slip away and followed the easy path, punishing herself for making the wrong decisions and never forgiving herself, then making the same mistakes over and over again. Sabotaging her own half-hearted attempts at getting a job. Being a cow to Eric, and a stroppy little shit to her father. Blaming everyone around her, while not admitting the awful storm of guilt at the core of her being.

  I screwed up when Mum died. I went to pieces and abandoned the people who needed me.

  Her mum’s disappointment when she failed her exams had burned like a glowing coal in her heart for so long. She had to let it go. She had to forgive herself, and her brother and her dad too, both of whom did the best they could and had to put up with her rebellious temper as well.

  So she went into the interview with a positive frame of mind, answered every question truthfully, and was offered the job then and there. Her life was about to change. And she wouldn’t screw it up this time. She owed everything to Eric and the opportunity he had given her to change her own life.

  But when she got home everything was chaos.

  She noticed the door had been smashed in when she was still fifty yards away down the street. Then she saw the broken windows, then the reels of police tape hurriedly stretched across the garden fence and the open gate, flapping in the wind like a string of yellow bunting at a fair. She dropped her handbag and ran.

  “Eric? Oh God, Eric!”

  Mandy clawed her way through the police tape, stepped over the wreckage of the front door into the narrow kitchen. The first thing she noticed was that the tap had been left running, overflowing from the sink and pooling on the lino floor, spreading out into the living room and lapping at the bottom of the staircase. She splashed through the puddle and wailed as she saw the wreckage beyond: sofa gashed as if by the claws of some animal, pictures ripped from the walls, shards of glass everywhere.

  There was Eric’s wheelchair, standing calmly in the middle of the floor, pristine and undamaged. But Eric was not sitting in it.

  She took two strides over to the wheelchair and gripped the handles as if expecting to feel the reassuring weight of her brother in the seat. She cried out for him again, as if he might somehow have crawled upstairs by himself, but knew such a thing was impossible. He was gone.

  As she looked around wildly, desperate for any clue, she saw a sheet of notepaper with the heading MINISTRY OF INFORMATION. She read it, then read it again, refusing to believe the contents.

  “Eric Critchley has been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit cyber-crimes under the 1983 Regulation of Electronic Communications Act. For further information about this case, or to request an audience with the suspect, please call the number below.”

  Oh God, how am I going to tell Dad that I left Eric alone and this happened? I have to get him back home.

  She looked for the telephone, but it had been unplugged and left on one side. Where’s the damn phone cable? Then she saw it—snaking from the socket in the wall to what looked like a bundle of old wires underneath the TV cabinet. She frowned. It looked suspicious. What if Eric hadn’t been taken by the poli
ce at all? What if this was some kind of terrorist attack, and they’d planted a bomb in the house before abducting her brother? Such things were reported on the news every week.

  In times of unrest or suspected terrorist activity, the standard advice to citizens for many years had been, Turn on the TV and tune in to Ceefax. The emergency broadcast system will tell you what to do.

  So she turned on the TV. Nothing but static; no channels seemed to be working as she thumbed through on the remote control. Then she pressed the Ceefax button, and leapt back in shock as huge, blocky letters covered the entire screen, a message of horror and hope that slowly scrolled up and up before starting again from the beginning.

  * * *

  This is a broadcast to the people of the United Kingdom.

  A disabled British boy, Eric Critchley, has been abducted by the secret police on suspicion of terrorism. Unless we help him, he will be interrogated and murdered without trial, just like my brother Terry was murdered in his home today.

  Eric Critchley is innocent. Terry Richards was innocent too.

  I know this because I am the one they seek. But I am no terrorist. I fight for the liberty of information and the liberty of our people.

  Today the Government destroyed the Academic Subnet, which has long served mankind as an unrestricted and open exchange of ideas. It was the last refuge of free speech in our country.

  Your masters did this because they are afraid.

  For twenty years, our government has fooled us into thinking it serves our needs, that we live in a democracy. The reality is that we serve its machine of war. The Prime Minister is a dictator and the members of his cabinet are appointed criminals. You did not vote for any of these men, yet they have ruled for a decade or more.

  You are a slave. I am setting you free.

  Today I destroyed the Government’s control of the Internetwork. It is free and open once more. Computers have been ignored and maligned, but they are tools of freedom; use them to connect with one another, to take back your right to free speech and freedom of the press.

  I have embedded software tools within every subnet to allow a new and open Web to emerge, controlled by no-one and free for the use of all. The Acanet is dead but from its ashes a new World-Wide Web will rise.

  My name is Brian Richards and I declare that the Information Age has begun.

  * * *

  Throughout the rebellion of 2016, Mandy and her father kept their heads down. Both were desperate to avoid the violence and to keep what remained of their family together, for Eric’s sake. Mandy never stopped believing that her brother was alive, and would one day be released.

  She heard their father howling in grief late at night. He had lost his wife, and had now lost his son; the only good thing to come out of that dark time was that Mandy would never take what she had for granted ever again. She learned how to be clever, and kind, and resourceful as the money dried up and the food became scarce.

  They heard nothing for a very long time. It was hard to carry on, to go to work at the council office that now represented the slavery of the British people. Eggs were thrown at her on the way to work. The word “TRAITOR” was painted in bright, blotchy red on their front door.

  Slowly, the violence escalated.

  It took time for the rebellion to build momentum, and the people did not rise up at first. They had played at revolution once before, in 1996, and the backlash by the state had been savage; this time they were more cautious. But when the truth finally dawned, the impoverished and exploited citizens of the UK broke down the walls of their prison and deposed their cruel masters. There was no army to stop the rampage; most of the British armed forces had died in the nuclear onslaught following the great reset of the Internetwork, and the Government had failed to restore their systems. They had no control and were butchered by the mob.

  Even throughout the great anarchy, Mandy and her father never lost hope that somehow Eric might be alive. The people had long forgotten the message of support for Eric in the effort to purge Britain of the criminals who pulled the strings.

  But two years later, long after the lights had come back on and communities had started to rebuild, Mandy received a message that filled her with a new hope:

  Hi Mandy,

  I’m alive. Just wanted to tell you that, and that I’m sorry for everything. For a long time I thought it was all my fault, then I blamed Brian, hated his guts, but he’s here with me now and he has helped me to understand why it was necessary. It had to happen. To bring about a new world where people govern their own destinies, there had to be one last sacrifice—one last act of pain in a country that could stand no more.

  I’ll see you again one day, but it will take time. We are building a new network. When Britain’s ready, we’ll throw the switch and nobody will ever be alone or isolated ever again.

  I love you. Tell Dad I miss him too.

  Eric

  A Word from Alex Roddie

  Today, the Web is the cornerstone of our entire society. But what if the technology had failed to take off? What would the world of 2015 look like without the transformative power of the Information Age?

  The Web was able to grow because of the microcomputer explosion of the 1980s. IBM's motto was a computer on every desk, and they achieved that goal. Numerous other companies—Apple, Acorn, Sinclair, Commodore, to name but a few—tried their hand at building micros, and a few of them are still household names today, developing the next wave of portable tech based on their success in traditional computers.

  This great expansion of computing would not have happened if the microcomputer had been killed at birth. In “The Locked Web,” events take a dystopian turn. A massive Soviet cyber-attack in the early 1980s cripples the government computer networks of Britain and the USA, combined with the discovery that listening devices have been planted in many commercially available microcomputers. The small computer for home and business dies in the marketplace, IBM and Apple go bankrupt, and the “computers for schools” programmes in the 1980s are cancelled. An entire generation grows up mistrusting computers and everything they stand for. The Western governments are only too happy to step in and take control of the technology, using it to retaliate against the Soviet menace. The rest is history.

  In reality, the Web is a potent tool of freedom that has gradually liberated power away from governments and placed it in the hands of ordinary people, but only because it is universal and unregulated, not controlled by governments or vested interests. It's easy to take the Web for granted in 2015, but without it we would be less informed, less empowered, and less able to communicate with others. At a time when Internet neutrality is under threat, we should make it a priority to safeguard the freedom it has given us.

  Alex Roddie is a British writer and editor. He draws inspiration from the abandoned and the desolate, and is fascinated by the effects of technology on the human psyche. He has contributed stories to the speculative fiction anthologies No Way Home and Crime and Punishment.

  Alex also writes outdoor non-fiction on the subjects of mountaineering and backpacking, which are his passions. His novels The Only Genuine Jones and The Atholl Expedition are tales of adventure based on the emerging mountaineering culture of the 19th century.

  For more information visit www.alexroddie.com.

  You can follow Alex on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Alex_Roddie.

  A Note to Readers

  Thank you so much for reading Alt.History 102. If you enjoyed these stories, please keep an eye out for other titles in The Future Chronicles collection, a series of short story anthologies in speculative fiction. You can find a full list of titles here:

  www.futurechronicles.net

  And, before you go, we’d like to ask you a very small favor, if you please: Would you write a short review at the site where you purchased this book?

  Reviews are make-or-break for authors. A book with no reviews is, simply put, a book with no future sales. This is because a review is more than
just a message to other potential buyers: it’s also a key factor driving the book’s visibility in the first place.

  More reviews (and more positive reviews) make a book more likely to be featured in bookseller lists (such as Amazon’s also-viewed and also-bought lists) and more likely to be featured in bookseller promotions. Reviews don’t need to be long or eloquent; a single sentence is all it takes. In today’s publishing world, the success (or failure) of a book is truly in the reader’s hands.

  So please, write a review.

  Then tell a friend. Share a link to us on Facebook, or maybe even a Tweet—link to our books at www.futurechronicles.net. You’d be doing us a great service.

  Thank you.

  Samuel Peralta

  www.amazon.com/author/samuelperalta

  __________

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