We are missing something.
Something elementary.
I need help, so I decide to message Perry.
/Hey man./ I say.
?Where the hex are you? Perry answers, sounding perplexed. /You’ve never missed a day’s schooling in your life, buddy boy./ ?And now, what? ?You playing hooky?
/Something came up./ I tell him. /Something I really can’t get into now. But I need your help./
/Of course you do, Petey. And I want to help you. I really do. But first you have to tell me something./
/Go on./
?Is this to do with the mystery girl? ?Gee, you realise that she’s probably trying to get at me through you? ?You know, date the friend first …?
?Er, Perry?
?Ah, hex, she’s listening, isn’t she? His voice sounds embarrassed. ?OK then, what do you need?
/I was thinking about the tiger on the train./
?You’re weird, you know that?
?I’m weird? /It was you who thought it was a real picture. I remember I was the one who told you it was a fake./
Another one of Perry’s bizarre photos, the tiger on the train was a Link sensation a few months back. An anonymous picture showing a white tiger on board a slider, that had tapped into the gullibility of the LinkGazing masses, and had people believing it without really questioning it.
Perry had sent it to me and I had replied with … well, pretty much what I’ve just said. Perry had then examined the photo and managed to break it down into its component parts. The source of the tiger in the picture had been a zoo in China.
?Is this an I-told-you-so call? Perry says, grumpily.
/On the contrary, I want you to tell me how you managed to work out where the tiger was from./
/Ask me a hard one, Peter! The answer is geotagging, simple as./
Geotagging.
I really am a fool sometimes.
I tell Perry thanks and promise to explain later and then I cut off the conversation.
I have always used Diary Plus for my LinkDiary. It costs, sure, and a lot of people don’t use it, but it automatically logs geographical information and encodes it into every entry in the Diary.
I check the geotag for the entry and it tells me that it was logged as:
Location = outside714-3256-6245.
Which is a numeric way of saying it happened in the garden at my home. I don’t need to look it up, the software’s already done it for me:
LocationLookUp = 7256 Avalon, New Cambridge, UK.
But I know that’s not true, so I access the entry’s code log and scan through code. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t understand, but I know what kind of tag I’m looking for and it doesn’t take long to trace the history of the image.
And I see that the tag was altered:
rewrite geotag
And I see what it was altered from:
Location = outside612-9841-1793.
Again I don’t need to look it up, because the software’s there way ahead of me.
LocationLookUp = Naylor farm silos, Millgrove, New Cambridge, UK.
I hear both Ashley and Alpha gasp.
I think ‘leave’ and step out of the memory. I don’t want to see any more.
I lost my mother at a place that appeared in the Straker Tapes. A place that still appeared on the map software I’m running. Map software that I snagged from my father’s home network.
It turns out that my father had map software that shows places that no longer exist, that were supposed to have never existed, if you were to believe his words.
I open my mouth to speak, but I can’t think of a single word to say.
-14-
File: 113/50/05/wtf
Source: LinkDataLinkDiaryPeter_VincentPersonal
We sat there for a short while, at the table in the Strakerite café, and sorted it through in our heads.
I was thinking about connections.
It seems that we live our lives making them, or looking for them, even sometimes breaking them, but very rarely do we stop to think about how dependent we are upon them.
I think that the Link itself is born from nothing more than a pressing need for us to connect. It’s part of an instinct to reach out and share information, no matter how trivial or dull, just so we can feel like we are a part of a group, a set, a community.
We need to feel like we belong.
The Link provides us with all the connections we need. So much so that we pretty much let it run our lives for us now.
It’s how we make sense of the world. So we look for patterns and linkages, because without them the world is a senseless blur.
Never mind that most of the time we’re linking up with people we’ll never actually meet; sharing memories and secrets and updates with strangers just so we don’t have to feel so alone in the world, just so we can connect, even if the connection doesn’t really mean anything at all.
And then, just today, I discover that everything is connected anyway.
Three days ago I would never have read the Kyle Straker Tapes. I wouldn’t even have considered it. Indeed I would probably have laughed in anyone’s face who suggested it.
Yet in the space of forty-eight hours I discover that everything in my life is connected to that secret history, written so long ago.
My father investigated them.
My mother disappeared out of my life at a location mentioned in them.
My memories have been altered to conceal the connections, but in spite of that, suddenly they have all converged.
One moment in time, where all the sticky threads lead.
The Grabowitz ghosts.
Mr. Del Rey and the other missing members of the committee that investigated the Straker Tapes.
Me. My mother.
Alpha. Ashley.
LinkCrawlers and recovering missing information from eight-year-old memories.
The Straker Tapes themselves.
The Naylor silos – where Annette Birnie finally learned to fit in, and it only cost her her humanity.
A million eyes, watching.
Threads in a web, spun by a single spider?
My father?
Sitting in the middle of the web, feeling it pull as we struggle against our fate, only becoming more ensnared as a result of our actions.
I suddenly realised that anything I had discovered – about my mother and the silos and the next upgrade – must be things that my father already knew. And if he could scoop handfuls of LinkActivity and examine them, like I had seen him do at the Science Council, then he knew that I knew. That was what he had been trying to tell me earlier.
I didn’t know what my father was up to, I couldn’t see what he had been planning for … for, well, years … at least since my mother disappeared. I just knew that he was doing something.
-15-
File: 113/50/05/wtf/Continued
Source: LinkDataLinkDiaryPeter_VincentPersonal
Finally Ashley broke the silence.
‘So it’s true,’ she said in breathless wonderment. ‘All of it. Kyle Straker. Millgrove. Alien upgrades. The 0.4. And the silos … they still exist.’
Her voice was a mixture of wonder and horror.
I just nodded, feeling cold and scared.
‘Do you know what this means?’ Ashley said, her face suddenly pale and tense. ‘We have proof, at last. Proof of all of it.’
‘But we’re running out of time,’ I told her. ‘There’s another upgrade coming and I think it’s happening today.’
‘What are you talking about?’
So I told her about Alpha’s father and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Straker Tapes. I told her about the Grabowitz pictures and the young man counting down on his fingers.
Ashley looked disbelieving, about to laugh, but something in our faces stopped her. Her eyes narrowed into slits as she processed the information, and then her face came
alive with the significance of what we were discussing.
‘I have to tell someone,’ Ashley said. ‘I have to tell everyone.’
Alpha looked at me, and her eyes looked haunted by the sheer weight of the things we were finding out. ‘And we have to go to Millgrove,’ she said with absolute certainty. ‘The geotag gave us the exact geographical location of the silos. That’s where we have to go.’
‘Why?’ Ashley asked. ‘What can you hope to achieve by going there?’
I gave Alpha a weak smile. She was right, of course.
There was nothing else that we could do.
‘Answers,’ I said. ‘Maybe a way to stop it happening again.’
Ashley looked at us like we were insane.
‘Good luck with that,’ she said. ‘I … I have to go. I have to call some people … I’ve got to tell people.’
‘Then that’s what you must do,’ Alpha said. ‘Peter and I have our own path to follow.’
Ashley looked like she wanted to say more, maybe try to talk us out of it; but she only shrugged.
‘I wish you luck,’ she said. Then she stood up and left the café.
The LinkCrawler apparatus she left on the table.
I looked over at Alpha.
‘You sure about this?’ I asked her.
‘I … No, I’m not sure,’ Alpha said. ‘I just don’t see that there’s anything else for us to try.’
‘If nothing else there might be some answers,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’
Alpha reached across the table and took my hands in hers. ‘I’m sorry, Peter,’ she said. ‘I got you into all of this …’
‘I was already a part of it long before I met you,’ I told her, and then did something that surprised even me. I lifted her hands to my mouth and kissed her fingers. ‘You have just shown me the way I guess I was always going.’
‘To the silos?’
‘To the silos.’
We left the café in silence.
-16-
File: 113/50/05/wtf/Continued
Source: LinkDataLinkDiaryPeter_VincentPersonal
I pulled up a map from the Link and entered the precise coordinates of the silos into a ‘search’ field. The software quickly located the place we were headed. Then I laughed.
‘What’s funny?’ Alpha asked, so I shared the map with her, explained what it meant, and she laughed too.
When everything’s connected, and runs along patterns etched beneath the surface, sometimes you can only laugh.
You see, it would have been easy for me to have just lost it then. According to the map, my father hadn’t needed to alter my memory very much at all.
Because that very last memory of my mother, the one I remembered as taking place in the garden of our house, hadn’t been that far wrong.
It just hadn’t been in the garden.
Same location: wrong elevation.
My mother had said her goodbyes to me under the garden.
That was where the Naylor silos now resided. Under the ground beneath my father’s house and land.
I lived over Millgrove.
And I always have.
‘The World Beneath’
Occasionally we catch a glimpse. And tell stories of ghosts and monsters. They’re what make dogs bark at night, or a cat’s hackles rise.
Daniel Birnie
interlogue
File: 224/09/12fin
Source: LinkDataLinkDiaryLivePeter_VincentPersonal
Final set of entries, final few seconds of this world of ours.
There is something in the air. Like a storm brewing. I can taste it in my throat, dull and coppery and unpleasant.
I don’t know how this is all going to turn out.
Whether we did anything at all.
Here are the last entries I will ever make.
-1-
File: 113/50/05/wtf/Continued
Source: LinkDataLinkDiaryPeter_VincentPersonal
Alpha and I rode a slider back to my house, and neither of us really felt much like talking.
You think the world is one way, and you believe it for your whole life, and then something happens and shows you that you were wrong; the ground you thought was solid is made of ice, and it’s melting away beneath you.
You deal with it how you can. That’s all any of us do.
It’s what Kyle Straker and Lilly Dartington did.
It’s what Alpha and I were doing.
As we crossed the city we both stared out of the window, hand in hand, watching as our world rushed past us, looking the same as it always had, but different somehow, too. We flashed each other thoughts, and talked a bit about our fears, but mostly we just watched the city.
I guess you only really start to see something – really, truly see it – when it is in jeopardy. I suddenly realised that it all could just end in an instant. That the world we were passing through could suddenly become another one, just because of a signal transmitted from the depths of space, and everything we knew, everything we were, could just change.
Whether it would be a better world was irrelevant, really.
It wouldn’t be ours.
And Alpha and I wouldn’t be us.
Not really.
Not any more.
After the upgrade, Kyle Straker’s parents were no longer his parents. They might have looked the same, but they weren’t. They had become something else. Something more like us, like Alpha and me, creatures that could network through fleshy wires in our hands, and that could communicate without speaking.
To Kyle they were monsters.
Just like we would be monsters to people who missed the next upgrade.
Do you know something?
I realised then that I actually liked being me.
I liked being the way that I am.
I wanted to hang on to me.
And if that meant going up against alien programmers, or worse, my father, then so be it.
I would do everything in my power to remain me, and to keep Alpha Alpha.
We reached our stop and left the slider.
-2-
File: 113/50/05/wtf/Continued
Source: LinkDataLinkDiaryPeter_VincentPersonal
I had to log Alpha in as a guest so we could get through the security fence. She held on to my hand as the fence performed its checks, a few nervous seconds passed, and then we were through.
‘Nice,’ Alpha said, staring up the path at the house. ‘So this is where you live, huh, Peter?’
I felt a jolt of guilty embarrassment, thinking about what she had said earlier about the crystal neighbourhoods being slums in all but name.
‘You’re not going to get all Kyle Straker on me and stop calling, are you?’ I joked.
‘There’s a reference you wouldn’t have known to make last week,’ Alpha said, rolling her eyes. ‘You’ve got to admit that hanging around with me is nothing if not educational.’
I gave her a smile, but then purpose filtered back in, and humour suddenly felt out of place so we consulted the GPS.
We made our way in silence to the precise spot indicated on the map and stood on the lawn, pretty much in the centre of the front expanse, looking at the ground and trying to figure out how the hex to get under it.
The garden was calm and tranquil and there was a hazy quality to the light that made the place seem unreal and unfamiliar.
I’ve heard about archaeologists finding the past in the ground, digging up remnants of that which went before, but I don’t think I have ever stopped to think just what that meant. That societies have always built upon the past, new societies on top of older societies; that layers of history stretch down into the very earth itself, sleeping, awaiting discovery.
I really didn’t think that digging was going to be our way in, though. My memory had been altered so that it looked like it took place in this gar
den, when it had actually taken place beneath it, and I doubted that we got down there through spadework.
But get down there we did. Somehow.
Alpha stood there, looking baffled. ‘So what do we do now?’ she asked.
‘There must be an entrance somewhere.’
‘But why?’ Alpha said, frustrated. ‘Why would there be?’
And that was a good question. A really good question. Why the hex would there be an entrance to an underground world in the garden of our house? It was stupid. Just plain stupid. Like something out of a Last Quest scenario, but not the kind of thing that happened in real life.
Unless …
Oh, no.
Unless …
I shook my head and realised what I fool I had been.
The answer was right in front of me, and had been all along. ‘What if my father’s research into the Straker Tapes didn’t end with that committee?’ I said. ‘What if he’s known about the silos all along, and it’s why we live here? He might be the world’s greatest critic of your beliefs in public, but in private he’s looking like a devoted believer. Except with him it’s not even belief. It’s not faith. It’s certainty. He was on that committee and he found out the truth. He even built us a house slap bang over the evidence. Alpha, my father knows that the Straker Tapes are true. That was the real finding of the committee. It’s true. It’s all true.’
My voice had been steadily rising in volume, until I was almost shouting by the end of it.
Alpha looked at me with narrowed eyes.
‘But why?’ she asked me. ‘Why would he pretend like that? Why would he hide the only real evidence of what Strakerites have been saying for centuries? Why, Peter?’
‘Because he’s up to something,’ I answered.
I broke off, feeling sick to my stomach.
I couldn’t say what had just occurred to me.
I just couldn’t.
Alpha, however, could. ‘And your mother?’ she asked.
I had tears in my eyes. ‘And my mother,’ I whispered. ‘She didn’t leave us. He did something. He took her away from me.’
The Future We Left Behind Page 12