The Future We Left Behind

by Mike A. Lancaster

‘Is that …?’ she asked, breathlessly, and then I felt the same kind of switching feeling in my brain that I’d had seeing the people around the silos, and suddenly the contact lenses I was wearing pulled a shape out of the ether.

  Another ghost, coming into focus.

  Oh, this just wasn’t fair.

  This wasn’t fair at all.

  I had imagined this moment, played it over in my mind so many times, but not here, not like this.

  The person resolving out of the murk – becoming visible as the perceptual filter concealing her was stripped away by the lenses’ adjustments – was my mother.

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  File: 113/50/05/wtf/Continued

  Source: LinkDataLinkDiaryPeter_VincentPersonal

 

  She was almost there, phasing half-in and half-out of the everyday world, and then the image sharpened, and she was standing in front of us.

  My mother’s lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear anything she was saying.

  It couldn’t be.

  It couldn’t be her.

  ‘Your mother just asked you a question.’ My father’s voice bled in over my internal chaos.

  ‘Is there an ear thing so I can hear her?’ I asked.

  My father let out a dry chuckle and I saw that in the time we had been inside the dome he had been busy attaching wires and electrodes to his own head, so that his skull was festooned with a squid-like arrangement of coloured wires.

  It was another bizarre moment in a thoroughly bizarre day.

  ‘There’s no need,’ he answered, attaching another skein of wires to himself. ‘It’s a perceptual filter, but its effect is already shifted and you are now aware of her. Just concentrate. I know it’s difficult for you but …’

  Any opportunity to criticise me. Still, I did what he said.

  I concentrated on my mother’s face, watching her lips move soundlessly, and I struggled to make her words audible.

  At first there was nothing, but then I heard a voice phasing out of nowhere, like speech, but as if it was being heard underwater.

  I focused on the sound, and it wasn’t long before it became so clear that I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t heard it before.

  ‘… to see you,’ my mother was saying.

  ‘Mum?’ I asked, a bare whisper, my voice throttled with emotion.

  She looked different than I remembered, but of course she did. That was seven years ago. There was grey in her hair, and her clothes looked … well, older I guess.

  My mother nodded.

  ‘I have never been far away,’ she said. ‘I … I had to … stay close to you. I’ve watched you grow. It’s so good to finally be able to talk to you.’

  ‘Mum … how …?’ I felt like I was eight years old again; as if the years that had passed in between our meetings had been a dream, and now I was finally waking up.

  ‘It’s all so complicated,’ she said.

  ‘Try,’ I said, with a little more edge than I knew was there. ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Nowhere. I’ve always been right here.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The project required someone to … downgrade, back to a previous software version. I insisted that that someone should be me. Your father argued against it, but I am pretty stubborn when I need to be.’

  ‘Downgrade?’ I spoke the word and it ended up a question.

  My mother nodded.

  ‘Once we started studying the code that upgrades us, it wasn’t long before it became possible for us to reverse the process. To send someone back to a previous software version. To travel into the kind of world that Kyle and Lilly describe in their accounts.

  ‘We needed someone to make that sacrifice. I couldn’t let anyone else do something I wasn’t prepared to do myself. I argued, won …’ A slight smile played across her lips. ‘And I fell through the cracks.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, or what I was hearing. I was in a seething turmoil, and a flicker of anger boiled to the surface.

  ‘You wanted this? You left me …’ I said.

  ‘I HAD to, Peter, you can see that, can’t you? Everything we are doing here today hinged upon having someone who could report from … the other side of human existence. We didn’t know then that it would be a one-way trip, but it was a risk we were willing to take. That I was willing take.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked desperately. ‘What is this all about? I don’t understand.’

  ‘We are in the process of making things better,’ my mother said. ‘For millennia we have continued along a path that is not our own. Our minds and bodies have been subject to the whims of our programmers. We no longer know what it even means to be ‘human’; we’re nothing more than a commodity that just so happens to be a race. All these thoughts and feelings, the majesty of human existence, the specific individual experience of simply being alive, they can all be taken from us in an instant.

  ‘Peter, it isn’t right. And it certainly isn’t the way that things are supposed to be for us.’

  ‘Leaving me wasn’t right,’ I said, and I felt Alpha squeezing my arm. ‘I can’t believe this. I always thought that it was something I’d done that made you leave, but this …’ I gestured around me. ‘I don’t get it.’

  My mother looked at me, and I realised that there was no kindness or love in the look. In that moment I knew that I had been wrong about her. I had thought that she was all the good things that my father lacked. All I saw in her eyes was a passionate intensity for this project. They were the eyes of a zealot.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry that you think your precious childhood was more important than the future of the human race,’ she said coldly.

  The mother that I’d clung to in my heart was a myth.

  I felt sick.

  ‘And my father?’ Alpha suddenly demanded. ‘What happened to him? And Leonard DeLancey, Edgar Nelson, Thomas Greatorex? Were they ‘sacrifices’ too?’

  My mother glanced at Alpha for the first time, as if only just noticing her presence. The look she gave was both stern and dismissive.

  ‘The findings of the Straker Committee could never be made public,’ she said. ‘But everyone involved with it was changed by the experience. Changed forever. Far from disproving a tiresome folk tale, the committee ended up confirming its reality.

  ‘The other people you mention, the other members of the committee, they all agreed that silence was in our best interests, and they accepted their roles in what needed to be done: they have been downgraded too.

  ‘All except for Tom.

  ‘Yes, poor Tom. The responsibility never sat easily on his shoulders, you know. Some things are just too big. Too important. It takes a special kind of person to do what needs to be done. Instead of fulfilling his sworn duty, Tom Greatorex chose to take his own life.

  ‘The future does not belong to the weak. To the cowardly. It belongs to people of vision. Of courage. Of fortitude …’

  ‘Nice sound bites,’ I interrupted. ‘But if it’s true about Alpha’s father, then I think she deserves to see him, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s not possible,’ my mother said. ‘The Naylor farm silos are not the only focus point for the alien programming code. Iain – your father – he’s acting as downgrade liaison to the Wiltshire site; Lenny DeLancey is heading up things in Egypt; Ed Nelson is involved in the Chinese project. Tom was to headline the European end of things, but as the time drew closer he started behaving erratically and became increasingly paranoid.

  ‘Someone else is handling things there.’

  ‘What, so you’re really a band of global resistance fighters?’ I asked mockingly.

  ‘If that’s how you want to look at it,’ my mother responded, ignoring my sarcasm. ‘We are simply no longer going to tolerate the interference of others in our evolutionary path.’

  ‘And how, exactly, do you intend to stop them interfering?’ Alpha asked.

  My mother wrinkled her n
ose, then shrugged.

  She pointed to the door of the dome.

  ‘Follow me,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you.’

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  File: 113/50/05/wtf/Continued

  Source: LinkDataLinkDiaryPeter_VincentPersonal

 

  So we followed my mother’s ghost across the crater, picking our way through the machinery and cabling, and into the mouth of one of the tunnels.

  Earlier I had wondered about the number of people that maintained this place; now I found myself thinking about the amount of manpower that had gone into the creation of the whole complex.

  How had this all stayed a secret?

  How many people knew what was going on down here?

  It seemed that my mother was casting herself in what my father would probably call the Danny Birnie paradigm – the one who would take it upon himself to detail the brutal truths of our situation, and take pleasure from it.

  I was tired of it all.

  I didn’t want to be here.

  I’d come for answers about my mother, and to find Alpha’s father, but none of it had turned out the way I wanted. I no longer cared what would happen when that clock counted its way down to zero, I just wanted to be somewhere else. Preferably without prior knowledge of what was going to be happening very soon.

  Maybe I could be sitting on the lawn outside the college refectory, sharing fruit soys with Alpha, back when all I had to worry about was the fact I’d just enrolled in a Literature class.

  Instead I was walking down a plasteel half-cylinder towards … well, who knew what?

  Alpha was by my side, but she had descended into silence … probably unable to believe that her father was a part of this vast conspiracy too.

  I knew what followed from that discovery, and felt her pain. Her father had lied to her as well.

  I took Alpha’s hand in mine as we moved closer to whatever awaited us at the end of the tunnel.

  Already I could see the first hints of our destination. We were approaching the outer edges of an odd, pallid-blue, bioluminescent half-light, and I wondered how long we had left before the digits on that infernal timer behind us counted down to 00.00.

  So this is progress, I thought grimly. You get to see the precise moment that future hits. You’re able to see what’s coming. And as Kyle Straker once said: Nothing good.

  I thought of everything that had happened to us today, each event and discovery, the trail of breadcrumbs that had led to this subterranean world. And that made me remember the story of Theseus that my mother had told me and I realised that – even as she was reading it to me – she had been aware of the tunnels and caverns beneath her.

  Had she drawn a secret pleasure from knowing that she had a labyrinth all of her own beneath the house?

  Well, I was in that labyrinth now, and at its centre two monsters had been waiting for me.

  My parents. My own flesh and blood.

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  File: 113/50/05/wtf/Continued

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  The sickly blue light was an artificial sun for the things that grew underneath it.

  At the end of the tunnel was another crater, a pit sunk even deeper into the earth.

  Deeper and deeper into the underworld.

  The geography of despair.

  Where tunnels led on to craters led on to tunnels led on to more craters.

  This one was vast. The size of two sports fields at least.

  A forest of colossal, pink, fern-like structures pressed tightly together, filling the whole area, with cables and wires entering into the pulsing biomass that sat below the fronds.

  There had to be millions of the things in there.

  I was looking at my father’s neural forest. It had been weird enough hearing about it at the Keynote – although my memories of that were sketchy at best – but seeing it in the flesh was truly, profoundly disturbing. A storage and processing device made entirely from living tissue. In effect: an artificial brain.

  We stood on the lip of the pit, bathed in the pale light, and my mother stood back, letting us soak up the sight.

  I could see that the ferns of the structure were swaying in unison, as if stirred by a breeze. But there was no breeze down here. The neural forest moved, and it moved by itself.

  ‘This is the MindFeather,’ my mother said, and there was wonderment in her voice.

  Wonderment and something else.

  Pride.

  ‘A network of interconnected minds. Each growth, each feather of the brain, is fractal: a geometrical shape that endlessly repeats down to the tiniest level. If you were to magnify a single branch, then you would see exact self-similarity – another branch, identical to the larger one. Magnify that one, and you would see that it repeats, down and down to the microscopic level, utterly identical.’

  ‘What does it do?’ Alpha asked.

  ‘It thinks. It holds information. It is the engine of victory. It is, ultimately, our salvation.’

  ‘Yeah, and it makes toast,’ I said. ‘But what is it really? What is its purpose?’

  My mother joined us at the edge of the crater.

  ‘With every upgrade, everything that we are is altered by a signal from somewhere else,’ she said. ‘We have had no success in tracing that signal’s origin, and we have no idea what kind of creatures may be transmitting it.

  ‘It didn’t take long for The Straker Committee to confirm that aliens were interfering in human affairs. There is evidence all around us. The existence of the Link was our strongest example. Kyle Straker told us that the creatures were using the human race as some kind of data storage. The storage units had to be connected somehow.

  ‘That’s the true secret behind the Link. It is nothing more than a by-product of our necessary connectivity. It is a symbol of the power that enslaves us. And, ironically, it is our connectivity that will save us.

  ‘This neural forest is upgrade-proof; it exists in a state of deep hypnosis. It was designed to provide a massive memory that would not be affected by any future modifications to the human operating system.

  ‘But it has also been programmed with the history of, and the specific code for, every past upgrade.

  ‘Every MindFeather is aware of the different versions of human existence, stretching back to the earliest software.

  ‘In just under twenty minutes, the human race will be upgraded. This is unstoppable. We do not have the technology, nor the understanding, to disrupt the coming signal.

  ‘But this upgrade will not go the same way that all the others have. We might not be able to stop it, but we are now – for the first time in human history – in a position to make it happen on our own terms.’

  ‘You’re going to interfere with it,’ Alpha said, her voice shocked.

  My mother shrugged.

  ‘We will no longer tolerate the interference of others in human affairs,’ she said proudly. ‘That was the decision of the committee. There is a period in human development where the child outgrows the parent. We have reached that point.’

  ‘What have you done?’ I asked.

  ‘We have made sure that this upgrade does not go as they intend. Running computer code adapted from the code in the silos, we are going to disrupt it. We have taught the fractal forests to resist and we are going to broadcast that resistance – via the Link – into the minds of every man, woman and child on planet Earth. We are confident that we will cause a fatal error in their process.

  ‘Very few people are going to be in the correct state for the latest upgrade to take. When the MindFeather starts transmitting, the message will be the history of human upgrades. We’re going to knock everyone back to one of many past software versions. Some will become 1.2. Some will become 0.4. Some will be 1.0. Just about everyone on the planet is going to be left behind.’

  ‘To what end?’ I asked, horrified by what she was telling us. ‘What can you possibl
y hope to gain?’

  ‘Only everything,’ my mother said, as if I was a total idiot and it was beneath her to have to explain it to me. ‘Can you imagine what our programmers might look like? The things that we would learn if we were to meet them? Can you even begin to comprehend how utterly different to us they must be? They must be to us as we are to amoebas. We might as well call them gods.’

  My mother’s voice became quiet and reverential.

  ‘Well, we intend to see the face of God.’

  Flashes of my nightmare came back, and I kept seeing those terrible creatures pressed against the skin of the sky.

  Who said they even have faces? I thought grimly.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Alpha’s voice rose. ‘How will this allow you to see the face of God?’

  ‘It’s so easy,’ my mother said. ‘The people of Earth are nothing more than an organic computer to them. If a computer breaks down – if it freezes or crashes – what does a person do? Peter, your LinkPad suffers a fatal crash, what do you do?’

  I thought about it. She couldn’t mean … She couldn’t … It was insane.

  ‘I’d call out a tech guy,’ I said, feeling the weight of the idea expanding within me, chilling and inescapable.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘When planet Earth malfunctions, they’re going to send out their technical support department.

  ‘And we are going to be waiting for them.’

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  She grinned.

  I had a clenched fist in place of a stomach, and the thoughts in my head were dark and ugly.

  ‘That’s your whole plan?’ I asked her. ‘You intend to lure aliens down to Earth to repair their computer?’

  The tone of my voice made my mother narrow her eyes.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ she said. ‘We’re going to end this, once and for all.’

  ‘Oh, you’re going to end it all right,’ I said. ‘But what makes you think they’ll want to fix us?’