‘Are we not our fathers’ sons?’ I replied, then added: ‘They didn’t have the holographic giraffe again, did they?’
‘And the duck-billed platypus,’ Perry said scornfully. ‘But they’d re-skinned them both in company colours, with a logo and everything.’
‘Making nature better, one animal at a time,’ I said. ‘I’m sooo sad I missed that.’
‘I just bet you are,’ Perry replied. ‘Told your father about the course change yet?’
‘Of course,’ I said, waited a couple of beats and finished it with: ‘Not.’
Perry’s cravat switched from orange to grey.
‘Leave it long enough and you’ll have graduated by the time he finds out,’ he smirked.
‘That’s kind of what I’m hoping,’ I said.
Perry suddenly looked around in a decidedly shifty way, and lowered his voice into a conspiratorial whisper. ‘So what’s this I’ve been hearing about you and a mystery girlfriend?’
I swallowed and it must have been loud enough for Perry to hear.
‘I beg your pardon?’ I said, in my best version of a ‘deny everything’ voice.
Perry just grinned.
‘You can’t hide your filthy little secrets from me,’ he said. ‘There were confirmed reports, from many sources, of a secret tryst between my main man Peter and an as-yet-unidentified female. I just want to hear your side of it so I can keep spreading the rumours.’
I shook my head. My cheeks felt hot. I’d kind of thought that lunch with Alpha wouldn’t have been important enough for anyone to even notice, let alone remark upon.
‘Nothing to tell,’ I muttered. ‘I did buy a girl a fruit soy, but the last time I checked that wasn’t really an important occurrence.’
Perry tutted.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘OK,’ Perry said. ‘Since when is fraternising with girls anything other than an important occurrence?’
‘Well …’
‘The answer, my friend, is: never.’ Perry raised his eyes to the ceiling, then back down.
‘It was a soy,’ I said feebly. ‘Sometimes a soy is just a soy.’
‘Matter. Of. Opinion,’ Perry shot back, making three sentences out of one. ‘Now quit dodging the question and spill the goods.’
But I really didn’t want to spill.
I wanted Perry to shut up.
He knows as well as I do that I’m not supposed to befriend girls, not yet. I am practically forbidden from having any female friends, let alone a girlfriend.
Romantic love is something that is scheduled in when I hit twenty-one.
It’s standard practice that when I make that age, a list of suitable candidates will be drawn up for me, and I will have a month to decide which three are going to make it on to my shortlist.
Negotiations will begin, final criteria will be set, and a month after that I’ll be announcing my engagement.
If my father found out about me sharing a fruit soy with a girl, then it would be even worse than him finding out about me swapping to a ‘soft’ course like English Literature.
The latter could be viewed as an error of judgement, a slip, a moment of madness.
The former would be viewed as something else entirely.
Disobedience.
I guess that was why I was so worried to hear that I was already the subject of college gossip. In a world where all information flows around the Link, nothing is private and no one can tell where it will end up.
My mother used to quote someone called Horace when she came across Link gossip. She’d say: a word once let out of its cage cannot be whistled back again, and I had never really thought about what it meant.
Now I knew.
People talked and stories spread. It made me feel angry.
I was saved from these dark thoughts, however, by the bell. Or, rather, by the start of the Keynote address.
My father walked out into the speaking area and the hubbub of voices around us fell into a respectful silence. I opened my mouth, as if I was just going to tell Perry the details he wanted, then closed it and shrugged.
He rolled his eyes at me and mouthed: ‘Later.’
I turned away and watched my father getting ready to speak.
He looked calm, relaxed even, which is something I’m not really used to seeing in him. For my father, I’m sure, anxiety is the fuel that drives him. That and anger.
As he checked his LinkPad for the playback for his presentation I even think I saw him smile.
Suddenly the room went into darkness.
Total darkness.
There were a few whispers around us, and someone coughed.
Then my father’s voice said: ‘Imagine this. The moment before the universe sprang into being. Nothingness. Void. Blackness. Emptiness. It was a special kind of nothing that we can’t even begin to describe. Because, I’m afraid, we weren’t there. No one was. Nothing was.’ He paused. ‘Then: it happened.’
Suddenly a tiny dot appeared, holographically, in the middle of the darkness, and the contrast made it seem painfully bright.
‘A billionth of a second into the Big Bang, this tiny bubble was formed.’ My father’s face was illuminated on one side by the light. He looked a bit sinister, if I’m honest. ‘It was a fraction of the size of a single atom, yet it contained everything our universe is, everything it would become.’
The bubble started swelling outward, and coloured dots accelerated outward from within it. Red ones and yellow ones, brown ones and black.
‘Everything in the universe,’ he continued, ‘was packed into something that small: every atom in the universe, the seeds of planets and stars. Some people find that utterly amazing. Others find it terrifying. But do you know what I say to myself every time I consider the Big Bang?’
The image changed, suddenly, to a view of the planet Earth, seen from space, then quickly zoomed out to show our solar system; then the galaxy that we are but a tiny part of; and finally thousands of galaxies sitting in coal black space.
‘I think: all that information, in something so small; I want to make one of those.’
The image of the universe faded out and the chamber’s lights gradually came back on.
My father looked around at the faces staring at him and smiled.
‘OK, that’s just me, I guess,’ he said. ‘But we do have a serious problem.’
A beautiful hologram of the Earth, spinning in space, appeared in front of us.
‘This world of ours is awash with information that needs both processing and storage.’
An image showing coloured lines representing that information appeared around the Earth. It didn’t take long before the Earth itself was obscured by all that information.
‘Our Smart Cities are built around huge computer networks that control everything from lighting to heating to the environment. Our medical computers are so very sophisticated that they require vast resources just to manage the systems that keep us healthy.
‘Then there’s the Link. It is the most complex computer network ever created, managing billions of pieces of information every second, and each entry made in a LinkDiary carries not just text, but pictures, sound files and video.
‘We are reaching a point where the demand for space for our physical data is overtaking our supply. We are being saturated with data, and we are reaching the limits of the Link’s capacity.’ My father pressed a stud on his Pad and a large display appeared in the air, something that looked like a read out from a heart monitor – a line that blipped upwards and downwards from a central line, creating a jagged pattern of mountains and valleys.
‘Example,’ he said. ‘This jagged line. It’s a measurement, in real time, of this room, now. Each peak and trough is simply a graphical representation of the Link activity in this room.
‘It’s telling us that there are more than 4,000 pieces of data of a size over one terabyte being transmitted to and from this room. That’s a whole lot of data. And most of you aren’t ev
en trying.
‘I’d like to suggest that we engage in a small experiment. On the count of three I want everyone in this room to open up the Link and browse to one of your closest bookmarked channels. It doesn’t matter which one, but I want everyone to do it. OK?’
He looked around for confirmation, saw it in a few nods and some grunted words of agreement.
‘One. Two. Three. Open Link.’
I did as I was instructed, opening up a GameServer and navigating my way to a multiplayer fantasy game I’ve been dipping in and out of. Yeah, I know, GameServers are a waste of time and credits, but I sometimes need to escape from everything by pretending to be a hero in a virtual world. I don’t know what that says about me, and I don’t particularly care.
The response from the Link was a little sluggish –everyone else was opening up their own channel – but I still completed the action within a couple of seconds.
The ‘Welcome’ image from Last Quest XXII greeted me with a ?resume game? query.
My father’s voice cut in.
‘And now if everyone could leave the Link open, and bring your attention back to our graphic here …’
Looking back at it, I saw the jagged line was now zigging and zagging wildly, with massive peaks and lows and no visible central line.
My father pointed at it.
‘Here’s the Link when it’s busy,’ he said. ‘You can see quite plainly that data activity is now at incredible levels. From nearly 10,000 to 300,000 TB just by everyone in this room opening a single bookmark. You all probably experienced a slowdown in efficiency. It should illustrate my point: the Link uses enormous amounts of data to operate, and we are running out of the capacity to deal with all this demand.’
My father put his hand into the graphic and pulled at it with his hand. The view of the peaks and troughs suddenly became an image of each individual Link transmission, hundreds of coloured lines in a web-like structure. He teased free a couple of strands and then expanded them.
‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Someone’s been making holiday plans.’
A ShopFront portal for a travel agency hung in the air.
‘An adventure holiday. With virtual tours built into the LinkData, all hot-linked to wikis and information databases, with geographical, climatic and historical data. There are multiple links to reviews and photo galleries; and to videos of people who have already been on the holiday.
‘One portal, but it contains a massive amount of information; information that has to exist physically as stored data. One portal out of billions.’
He screwed the ShopFront up in his hand and stretched it back into a thread. Then he opened up the second thread.
‘Ah, I think my son is in the room,’ he said, exposing my GameServer page to everyone in the room. A muscled warrior stood in a verdant landscape, a biomechanical sword in his hand.
‘A simulated world in which millions of Linked players can live out digital dreams of chivalry and heroism in a world of magic and adventure.’
I realised that the odds of my father finding my page were too vast for it to be accidental. He had pulled out that thread from the web deliberately, knowing already that it was mine. I felt sick and embarrassed.
It wasn’t right that my father was using MY personal data as an example. It was an invasion of privacy, just like showing someone’s holiday plans had been.
Perry was grinning again and I felt like reminding him that he and I met up in Last Quest just about every day.
‘We’ll leave debates about the necessity of such diversions for another time,’ he said, and I knew that he was actually talking straight at me. ‘What I would like you all to think about is the enormous amount of information required to keep a simulated world like this going.’
He put his fingers into the image and drew out another skein of data strands.
‘My son has spent …’ he expanded one of the strands, ‘well over a hundred hours in this one game. In that time he has slain over sixty foes, and completed thirty-nine percent of the major campaign for the game, as well as working on four non-essential side missions. He has reached Level 45 as a warrior, has died twice and, due to some of his early decisions in the game, is now incapable of gathering two of the best weapons in the game. Shame.’
He winked at the audience and it got a laugh. I felt like they were laughing at me personally. I gritted my teeth and tried to pretend that it was all hilariously funny.
‘It seems that there is a LinkPortal for everything,’ my father said, shrinking the game back into an anonymous strand amidst hundreds. ‘And that, people, is the problem in a nutshell.
He swatted the strands away and they glistened in the air before disappearing completely.
‘Which is why we have been working on new storage methods, and new ways of handling data. It’s been a daunting task, but we are just about to reveal the fruits of our labours.’
He paused and looked into the audience.
Then he made a dramatic gesture with his hands and a new image appeared before us.
It took a while to even begin to figure out what it was.
It appeared to be a landscape made up of odd, intricate pink trees
It looked like bacteria magnified by the lenses of a powerful microscope.
Or was it a depiction of a coral reef?
I squinted and turned my head to one side, but still had no idea what I was looking at. I did notice, however, that it was moving. The trees, or coral, or whatever the hex they were, swayed slightly from side to side as if moved by a gentle breeze.
‘This is what we are calling a “neural forest”,’ My father explained. ‘And it is the very first of its kind. It is, in effect, the answer to all our data needs. It can store and process massive amounts of data, and it requires only one thing in return.’
He looked around, a serious expression on his face. I suddenly realised that he was nervous. I wondered what it was that he had to feel nervous about – if what he said was true, then he had solved one of the pressing issues of our society.
Then he spoke, and I felt nervous too.
‘It requires food,’ he said, and the whole chamber became full of very loud voices that @*)(34jiojKH(*{)EWQ*{()Q*RW{) EQR)(E{)R(ETRE[YTREYERT09YQR9WQRWE0RT9ER0Y
?Error Report? =
-11-
File: 113/45/02/pdu
Source: LinkDataLinkDiaryPeter_VincentPersonal
We were on the journey back home, and my father was gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white.
‘Idiots,’ he muttered, through clenched teeth. ‘Primitive, backwards-looking idiots.’
‘You did just tell them you’ve grown a massive human brain in a laboratory,’ I said. ‘And that, in exchange for food, it will think us out of our problems. You can see why they reacted a bit negatively, can’t you?’
My father shook his head.
‘It’s not a human brain,’ he said, curtly. ‘It’s artificial. I made it.’
‘All those people heard was that you had made a brain and you were feeding it. You can understand their reservations …’
‘No,’ my father said sternly. ‘I really can’t.’ He connected to the dashboard with his right-hand filaments and the car went to AutoDrive.
‘Do you know how bad things are?’ he asked, looking directly at me. His face was deadly serious and his eyes burned like coals in his sockets. ‘I mean, really?’
I shook my head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t. Nobody does. Because no one has been allowed to see the truth. No matter what people say, the truth really won’t set people free, and it’s not going to lead them to make a reasoned judgement. The truth will send them screaming into their homes.’
‘I can see that we’re using a lot of m
emory …’ I said.
My father let out a tiny fragment of a laugh that sounded more like a bark than an expression of humour.
‘Memory,’ he said. ‘If only people could see how much of a curse that word has become …’
He slammed his left hand on to the dashboard.
I didn’t get another word out of him for the rest of the journey, but sitting there in the passenger seat I suddenly realised that there was something different about him.
It was an odd, inexplicable thing. When my father had looked at me so intently, I could have sworn that his eyes were brown.
Dark, hazel brown.
My father’s eyes are, and have always been, blue.
LinkList/Peter_Vincent
My Top 5 Virtual GameServer Games
5. Everyone’s Polo
There’s Polo, then there’s Everyone’s Polo.
With 30 different genetically engineered horses and another 30 cybernetically enhanced battle steeds, you must rise to the top of the pile in the Premier League of Polo, while managing your stables and budgets, and compete against riders with uncanny AI.
It’s the next best thing to playing.
4. Dimensiongate 4
The first three Dimensiongate games have tried to fuse puzzle solving, theoretical physics and simple yet effective graphics, but with this one LUminOUS games have really pulled out all the stops. You’re still solving complex puzzles based on the laws of physics but it’s never looked better, or felt more important, to solve equations.
3. Corona
This one’s more than a little controversial: the developers got a lot of bad LinkMins for making what is, in effect, a war simulation. OK, they manage to dress it up in hi-tech, outer-space disguise, but at heart this is all about the pure exhilaration of armed combat. As part of a team of space soldiers, the future of the human race lies in your hands. As does a veritable arsenal of flesh-ripping weaponry.
The Future We Left Behind Page 5