The House Next Door Trilogy (Books 1-3)

by Jule Owen

  As he stares at the rotating lunar landscape cycling on the far wall of his room, a message materialises in front of him. An advert for security software:

  Act quickly to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime offer!

  “Accept,” Mathew says, smiling. “Who am I today?”

  “You’re Difficult Child – I’m Sleeper. I have news.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Ithaca is unhackable. I know this will not especially impress you, but it impresses me. At first, I thought there wasn’t even a network there. There is a fairly normal one, however, and something else, something beyond any kind of technology I’ve ever seen; and it’s all rolled in a kind of wrapper like an opaque, slick, wet ball. Once you think you have a handle on it, it slips through your fingers, but not in any brutal kind of way. It’s a curious thing. It’s like it smiles at you before it goes. It’s way beyond me. I’d like to get some other friends to check it out. Are you okay with that?”

  “Go for it,” Mathew says.

  He pings Clara. “Back home,” he says.

  “How was it?”

  “Horrible.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Not much. It just makes me feel terrible. Like I’m no longer in control of myself.”

  “You never were.”

  “I guess. I have news about our friend. Can you come over tomorrow?”

  “Yes, for a short while.”

  Later, Mathew and Hoshi are sitting in the kitchen watching the Canvas. They have eaten. A newsreader is announcing that the government is investigating plans to ban the Blackweb.

  His mother studies him and says, “I don’t want to know what you’re up to. I don’t want you to explain, but please be careful.” She rises slowly. “I’m exhausted. I’m going to have an early night for once.” She leaves the room and climbs the stairs slowly, wearily.

  While Leibniz is cleaning around him, a written message comes through on his Lenz. It’s from an unknown sender. It says:

  Don’t believe everything you hear. Trust what you know. Remember the Nexus is physically in the control of the SIS. The Blackweb is not. Learn to use quantum key distribution. Photons generate an encryption key and anyone intercepting the key touches the photons. They can’t find you without telling you they are searching for you. Work with people you trust to create a maze to play in. They will never find you.

  “Who is this?” Mathew messages back.

  But there is no response.

  15 Letting Go the Dragons

  DAY SEVEN: Sunday, 28 November 2055, London

  Mathew wakes early and lies awake pondering the dragons and Project Yinglong. Still in his bedclothes, he sits at his desk and works on some fixes to align with Eva’s code base. Building a little routine, he addresses the bulk of differences in syntax and edits the rest by hand. It’s easier than he anticipated. He’s decided to upload an updated version of the dragons’ code base to Eva’s world, so the dragons can grow, breed, and evolve.

  His mother says her goodbyes through the door.

  “Is O’Malley in there with you?”

  “Yes, he’s here.”

  “Don’t let him out,” she says.

  “I won’t!” he replies with slightly less conviction than he used to have.

  After breakfast, he wanders aimlessly around the house, finds himself in the Darkroom and logs on to the Blackweb, where he discovers Eva present and sends her a message.

  “Can you talk?”

  Her armchair materialises in the Darkroom. She has her legs curled up in it and appears as comfortable as O’Malley does in his bed upstairs.

  “How’s the robot soldier rally going?” he asks.

  “They’ve taken their sabre rattling on tour. It’s in St Petersburg now. TV’s still full of it, though. Good news is my dad has gone. He’s a propagandist or journalist, take your pick, for one of our state-sponsored channels. He’s gone to cover the circus, and I’m home alone.”

  “Great! Because the dragons are ready to be released.”

  “Good to know. Your world awaits you.”

  “Our government is threatening to close the Blackweb.”

  “Yes, ours too. But it’s all talk.”

  “Yes, you said so last night.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Quantum key distribution. Remember?”

  “I know it’s one of the reasons they’re going to have trouble shutting us down, but I didn’t message you last night.”

  “Someone did. It came through on the Blackweb as an anonymous message. I thought it was you.”

  “Nope.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t know who else it could be.” He thinks of his hacker friend. “Or maybe I do . . .”

  “It could be a scatter message from some of the people on Psychopomp or MUUT reassuring their user base. They might be worried people will be frightened off the service. There are some things you should be doing, if you don’t know already, to set traps around your connection and also to jump to random locations. I’ve virtualised all my data and hidden it dispersed in different places. The virtual worlds I’ll create for you will be literally no place. But the first one is set up, so we should go.”

  “If you give me access, I’ll upload the Yinglong code.”

  “Doing so now. Get your bits done and then meet me here in five minutes. I’ve established some additional security. It represents itself visually to you, and I want to show you how to get through it.”

  He receives a location and then an invitation to a holosession and pulls on his skullcap. He doesn’t sit, having a notion this session will be interactive.

  After a few moments of darkness, foliage begins to grow all around him. A single leaf at first sprouts from the Darkroom floor, curling upwards on a thickening stem, then others grow from the ceiling, crawling across the back wall. He has to move his foot as tendrils grasp at his ankle. Moving through the spreading green, he brushes leaves and branches from his face. Then before him is a large wooden door at the top of some grey steps in a high stone wall. The door has a round rusted iron handle. He tries to open it, but it’s locked.

  “You need to do this.” Eva is suddenly beside him: a diminutive person, her head barely reaches his shoulder. He likes that she hasn’t chosen to appear as an avatar. Or perhaps she has. He supposes he wouldn’t know. She runs her hand along the wall. “Three across, fourteen down.”

  “Pi.”

  She smiles. “We’ll keep changing it.”

  The brick comes loose. She retrieves a large key.

  “There’s no keyhole,” he says.

  She pulls a knife from a belt around her waist he hasn’t noticed before.

  “You have one too,” she says.

  He looks down at his waist. So he has.

  She cuts her finger and smears a symbol on the door. It’s the Greek letter gamma. “Again, we’ll change it regularly.”

  A lock appears.

  “How did you do that?” he says.

  “It’s reading my bioID.”

  “You got those too, huh?”

  “We’ve had them for ages. There were never any civil liberties to speak of in Russia, remember.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I’ll enable it for you too, so you can come in on your own, anytime you like. We’ll need to exchange a bit of data after this session.”

  Eva puts the key in the lock, and the door swings open.

  They step into a large open space. A fertile grassland spreads before them, spotted with moss-covered granite rocks, rolling to mountains, skirted by forests. It is a lush alpine world.

  “This is amazing, Eva,” Mathew says.

  They start to walk.

  “The dragons are over there,” Eva says, pointing.

  He sees two crates, the sort used to transport animals, with wooden plank sides and bars at the front. As they approach, he spots the dragons, larger and wilder th
an the ones he has in the house. They’re restless in the confined space and come towards them, to the front of their crates, biting at the bars.

  “You should let them go,” Eva says.

  “Yes.” Mathew climbs onto one of the crates, the one housing the female, and raises the bars. She comes crashing out, stretching her wings, breathing fire. The grass in front of her singes black. In this world her actions do have consequences. Mathew is grateful it’s only his virtual body that’s vulnerable to harm. The female looks back toward her mate and lets go a tinnitus-inducing screech.

  Mathew climbs onto the second crate and frees the male. In keeping with his programming, the second dragon leaves the crate more cautiously, sniffing at the unfamiliar grass, and spooking when Mathew jumps off the box.

  The two dragons go to one another, bashing heads and wrapping necks. The female surveys acres of sky with her red and gold eyes. She beats her wings and lifts off, whirling around, climbing higher and higher above their heads, catching thermals. The little male clumsily follows after her.

  They watch for a while as the dragons fly into the distance, their bodies illuminating periodically with fire.

  “I think you may have a few forest fires on your hands,” Mathew says.

  Eva shrugs. “Hey, it’s your world,” she says. Then, turning and nodding in the direction of the forest behind them, she says, “I built you a hut, in case you wanted to come in here and explore and watch them for real, as it were, and stay for a while. There’s real weather in this world, you know, and it’s not always nice. Of course, you may prefer to watch them on your Paper.”

  She leads the way to a little copse. Sheltered amongst the trees is a small wooden house. They go inside. It’s furnished rustically, with a log fire blazing in a wood burner, a rug on a rough wood floor, and a rocking chair with a blanket.

  “It’s a Russian hunting lodge,” she says.

  “I love it,” Mathew says. “Thank you, Eva.”

  “It’s the only house in any of my worlds. If you go through this door here, there’s a shortcut back to reality.”

  He follows her through and finds himself back in the Darkroom, facing her in her armchair.

  “Well, that was fun!” she says. “I’d better run. Let’s keep in touch. If you want to discuss the world, or the dragons, or anything else, let me know.”

  “I will, for sure.”

  At four o’clock he’s standing at his bedroom window. Clara’s car makes its appearance in spite of the newly erected roadblocks, and he wonders if she’s chipped too by now.

  Mr Lestrange does not appear in his bay window. He thinks about what Wooden Soldier / No Right Turn / Sleeper said about Lestrange’s home network being impenetrable and hopes his hacker friends are having some luck.

  Mathew turns his gaze back to the road. Clara is staring right at him. She holds up her hand, half a salute, half a solidarity wave, and he mimics her gesture. She smiles and he smiles back, and then she disappears.

  Automatically, he turns from the window and runs down the stairs. Clara’s car is just turning out of the street.

  Mathew steps over to the front door of the house next door. There is no bell, so he knocks and waits. Time passes. The door remains closed. He knocks again, louder. The door stays firmly shut in the sphynx-like house.

  He looks at the window. The curtains are drawn. He’s never noticed them drawn before, but then he’s never really paid attention. He tries one last time.

  “Mr Lestrange!” he says loudly to the unresponsive door. He opens the Nexus and searches for the house in the freely available directory, but then, of course, it isn’t there. Lestrange has never broadcast any data. It’s like his house is sealed. Whatever is in there, he really doesn’t want anyone knowing about it.

  Mathew glances over his shoulder. Across the line of garden walls, he can see the roadblock at the end of Pickervance Road. A couple of the soldiers are staring his way. He decides on a tactical retreat and goes back inside his own house.

  Clara comes at five. They go to his room. He offers her his seat at his desk, sits on the edge of his bed, and gives her a summary of what he and his hacker friend have done to find out about Mr Lestrange.

  “He might just have been out,” she says when he tells her about knocking on his door.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think he goes out. Cars don’t visit his house. I’ve never seen him on the street. It’s so frustrating. His house is just there, through that wall. Last night I was lying awake thinking maybe I should just break in.”

  “You’re not going to do that! Seriously?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  She turns to scan the bay window. “You haven’t seen him in the window again?”

  Mathew shakes his head.

  Her eyes drop to his desk, and she sees the beebot. “What’s this?” she says. “Is this the thing you sent down his chimney?” She glances at him. He nods. She says, “Can I pick it up?”

  “Yeah, you can’t break it. It’s pretty tough.”

  “It’s so small!” She turns it over in her hand.

  “We need a way to talk to one another,” he says. “Privately, without fear of being listened to.”

  “Can’t I just come here?” she asks, smiling cheekily.

  He smiles, then blushes and coughs. “You can.”

  They both laugh.

  Then he says, “But we can’t really chat on Consort. It would be good if we could chat the way I talk to Wooden Soldier.”

  “I hate Consort anyway. It’s a meat market.”

  “Exactly. And Nexus is mainlined to SIS. I wanted to talk to you privately because of what you said about your parents.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  “Guess.”

  “Wow… The Blackweb? No! Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Actually, it’s not illegal. The prime minister is only threatening to outlaw it. He hasn’t done it yet.”

  “But it’s full of criminals and terrorists, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve never met any, if it is. But then I haven’t used it long, to be honest.”

  “Won’t SIS track us using it?”

  “It’s a lot harder for them to monitor us on the Blackweb than on the Nexus. But if you’re worried, I won’t do it.”

  “Actually, I think it’s kind of exciting.”

  He smiles. She smiles.

  “But I wouldn’t know how to start. How do you even access it, anyway?”

  He examines the beebot again and remembers Mr Lestrange’s message.

  Why don’t you use it to talk to Clara?

  He says, “I have an idea, but I don’t know if I can make it work.”

  “What is it?”

  “I might be able to turn the beebot into a Blackweb communication device.”

  “My guard is pinging me,” she says, standing up.

  He shows her downstairs. At the door, they reach for the latch at the same time, feel a sudden spark of electricity, and withdraw their hands like they’ve been bitten.

  “Sorry!” they say at the same time and laugh.

  He steps back.

  She catches his eye, serious now. “Please be careful.”

  “I will,” he says.

  After she’s gone, he sits at his Paper and starts to edit the beebot blueprint. As he works, he listens to a recording of Clara playing. Music is her gift to him, he thinks, so he will send her something in return.

  “This is great, Leibniz,” his mother says.

  Like Mathew, she feels compelled to thank the robot for the things it does.

  “You’re welcome,” Leibniz says.

  “We’re getting new locks,” Hoshi says to Mathew.

  “What’s wrong with the old ones?”

  “Nothing, but now we can use our bioID to open the doors rather than a hackable digital key fob we might lose.”

  “Surely our bioID details are freely available to the security services. Doesn’t it mean they can march in h
ere anytime they want to?”

  “Not with these locks,” his mother says, holding her son’s gaze and smiling, somewhat mischievously, he thinks. “Anyway, the locksmiths are coming at 2:30 tomorrow afternoon to fit them, front and back of house and all of the windows. Will you let them in and make sure O’Malley doesn’t get out?”

  “Of course. No problem.”

  16 The Beekeeper

  DAY EIGHT: Monday, 29 November 2055, London

  Nan Absolem is sitting in her office. The war has killed her exuberance, or perhaps she thinks it’s a more fitting setting to pass on bad news.

  “I’m afraid it’s no go with Eva and your dragons project, Mathew. I’m sorry.”

  He considers whether he should tell her that he’s already started working with Eva. He thinks better of it and says, “Oh. Bad news.”

  She doesn’t notice how flat his voice sounds. She says, “Yes. I know. I did try. I argued that your project would be a symbol and hope of peace, a beacon in the darkness, but the school board, the regional education board, and the police thought it would be a security risk. I hope you’re not too upset.”

  “No, it’s fine. Really.”

  “I’m afraid it means we still need to find a way to get you collaboration credits. We’re scheduling a holophone session on the Nexus with your robotics class.”

  “Alright.”

  “Are you okay?” she says.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “You’re unusually agreeable.”