The House Next Door Trilogy (Books 1-3)

by Jule Owen

  “To steal Lenzes and e-Pinz.” Isaac's face is stony.

  “Because they were poor,” Lea says. “Because they were starving and desperate and had no other choice.”

  “Even if I was starving, I wouldn’t have done what they did to us,” Isaac says.

  “No matter how desperate and angry you were, you’d never hurt another human being?” Lea asks him.

  “No,” Isaac says. “I would not.”

  Lea pulls a face, but backs down, “Well, then, you’re a better person than I am.”

  They glare at each other across the table.

  Ju Shen says, “They’re growing Isaac a new eye at the hospital.”

  “Whoa!” Mathew says.

  “I can go and see it each day in the lab,” Isaac says.

  “That’s weird. But also kind of cool.”

  “Isaac needs to go back to the clinic this afternoon so they can take tissue from his good eye. They’ll use that to grow the new one,” Ju Shen says.

  Isaac says, “They’re going to make the new one better than the old one. They said I’ll be superhuman.”

  Isaac is in the hospital when Cadmus Silverwood arrives. Many Elgol residents have turned out to welcome him. Mathew has seen him so many times on the news and on Psychopomp, he feels he knows him. As it turns out, he moves quickly through the group that has gathered, smiling and greeting a few people. Then he is in deep conversation with his wife Isla Kier, and he disappears down one of the many pathways branching off from the plateau.

  Isaac is kept in the clinic overnight, so Ju Shen and Mathew eat an early dinner alone that night. After their meal, they walk out together, winding their way through the strange blue light cast by the solar lamps.

  “We’ll pay our respects and won’t stay long, given tomorrow,” Ju Shen says, thinking about the funeral.

  The hall is lit and decorated in preparation for Christmas, with natural garlands from the forest. There is the buzz of conversation and music. They navigate a path through the people talking in front of the hall, and go inside.

  There’s a folk band on the small stage at the end of the room, two violins, a guitar, a piano, a double bass, a recorder and a couple of singers. People talk rather than listen and queue to dip their mugs into a large bowl of punch.

  “You’ll have none of that,” Ju Shen says. “It’s poisonous with alcohol.”

  Aiden and Lea spot them, wave and come over.

  “So de gaffer feller 'as reterned,” Aiden says to Ju. “Back ter de bosom o' 'is people.”

  When Aiden goes off to get them soft drinks from the bar and Lea goes to help, Mathew asks his grandmother, “How on earth do you understand what he says?”

  Ju laughs. “I have an add-on for my translator for regional dialects. When he speaks, I hear standard English, like when I speak you don’t hear Chinese. He’s actually quite poetic in his own way.”

  “The sooner Aiden gets my X-Eyte and Studz done, the better,” Mathew says. “So I can hear his poetry.”

  They look across the room to where Aiden is supposed to be getting their drinks, but he has been dragged into a conversation with another party-goer. Lea gets frustrated and goes to queue by herself.

  Ju Shen asks, “Do you like Lea?”

  “Yeah, she’s nice,” Mathew says, automatically. Then he catches his grandmother’s eye and the sparkle in it. “Oh, I see what you mean. No. Not like that. I have a girlfriend.”

  “Do you?” Ju Shen raises an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Besides, Lea’s too young for me. She’s Isaac's age.”

  “Those two didn’t hit it off at all.”

  “She’s a bit full-on when you first meet her, and Isaac's been through a lot. He’s no idea which way up the sky is right now.”

  “Is that how you feel?”

  He looks her in the eye and nods.

  Ju Shen says, “Me too. Here he is,” Ju Shen says, as Cadmus Silverwood joins the party, smiling broadly, with his wife on his arm.

  18 Ghost of Things Yet to Come

  Tuesday 13th February 2091, Silverwood

  Dr Mathew Erlang is sitting in his brand new lab deep underground, beneath Tower 22, home to the Department of Water and Sewerage, an inauspicious, but essential part of the Municipal Government of Silverwood. The next day he will deliver his GreyMatter lecture live to an audience in the new Silverwood University Victoria II lecture theatre, and to millions of people online around the world. He is sick with nerves.

  Sitting opposite him is Hoshi, a synthetic biological manifestation of the world’s most advanced AI. She says, “It went fine the last time. I’m not sure what you’re worrying about.”

  “I’m worrying my mind will go blank.”

  “Does that happen to you often?”

  “Only when I’m paralysed with anxiety.”

  “You do seem anxious now. Do you want me to induce some endorphins in your brain?”

  “Thanks Hoshi. Perhaps it would be a good idea,” Mathew says.

  In the small room, through a door in the corner of the lab, completely unknown to Dr Erlang, a teenaged version of his wife Clara is trying to manifest herself based on August Lestrange’s instructions.

  “All you have to do is count backwards from one thousand in Prime Numbers and clearly visualise the numbers as you go. It is so simple. I do it in a fraction of a second.”

  “I am not a computer.”

  “Neither am I.”

  Clara sighs. “I can’t do it. You will have to speak to Mathew.”

  “That won’t do at all. How about I say the numbers aloud and you visualise them? Let’s begin, nine hundred and ninety-seven.”

  “We’re going to be here a while.”

  “He’s not going anywhere for a bit, and we’ve got all the time in the world.”

  “I can think of more fun things to do.”

  “Come on, the sooner we start, the sooner it’s over. Nine hundred and ninety-one.”

  Clara visualises the number.

  Mathew walks in on them when they get to nine hundred and eleven, which means Clara is partially materialised. All of her is visible, but she is semi-transparent.

  “I never knew doing it slowly had this effect,” August is saying as Mathew throws open the door.

  “Who the hell are you?” he says.

  Clara and Mathew look at each other with wide-open eyes and mutual fascination.

  Clara thinks, He’s quite handsome!

  Mathew thinks, That girl looks just like Clara did when she was young.

  Hoshi appears in the doorway behind him. She looks at August, cocks her head and raises an eyebrow. Almost simultaneously, she matches Clara’s face to an image in one of her databases of Clara years ago.

  “This is interesting,” she says.

  “Should we carry on with the numbers?” Clara asks Lestrange.

  “Probably not,” Lestrange says.

  “But I’m see-through,” Clara says, looking at her hands.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Mathew says, turning to Hoshi, “Can you see this? Am I going mad? That is Clara!”

  Hoshi says, “You’re not going mad.”

  “I think the endorphins may have been too much for me.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Hoshi insists.

  Lestrange says, “Shall we all go into the next room and sit down?”

  They all go into the lab.

  “How did you get in here?” Mathew asks. “The security in this lab is the best in the city, and city security is pretty good.”

  “You shouldn’t worry about it,” Lestrange says.

  “This is a private lab with extremely sensitive data and an important project running. Of course I worry about it.”

  Lestrange says, “It seems to me the wrong thing for you to worry about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, only that an apparition looking exactly like your wife when she was young has materi
alised – well, semi-materialised – in front of you.”

  Mathew stares at Lestrange for a moment and then his face brightens, “You’re holograms! Of course. We’ve been hacked, Hoshi.” With a wave of his hand he calls a virtual dashboard and starts to swipe and punch at ‘keys’ in front of him. “I should have known something was wrong when I got those strange messages from the person claiming to be the younger me. Oh. It says systems are all functional and there’s been no breach. Hoshi, can you take a second look?”

  Hoshi is leaning against the lab bench, “I already have.” Her arms are crossed. “There’s been no systems breach.”

  “There must have been. They’re holograms. Look,” Mathew lurches forward and grabs at Lestrange. Lestrange is quite solid and Mathew leaps back. “Oh!”

  “If you’d have tried her, you might have been a little less surprised,” Lestrange says, indicating to Clara.

  “Oh, I see. So you are real. You have somehow broken in here physically and she is the hologram.”

  “Hold my hand,” Clara says, as she reaches out.

  “What?”

  “Hold my hand.”

  Mathew tentatively stretches to Clara’s outstretched hand. She grabs his. She is not solid but he feels something, a visceral energy, the kind of force a hologram can’t exert. He draws back his hand in shock and then realises that Clara has put something in it. He opens his fist and looks. It is the beebot. “Impossible!” he says. “How did you…?” He sits down. “No one knows about this.”

  “It is me, Mathew. It’s Clara.”

  “But you can’t be a ghost. You’re still alive.”

  “I’m not a ghost.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “Let’s just say we’re ghosts of things yet to come,” Lestrange says.

  “But she’s from the past,” Mathew says.

  “Yes, I know. That is confusing isn’t it?”

  Lestrange is looking at Clara expectantly. Clara hesitates and then says to Mathew, “Mr. Lestrange here – well, actually, his name is Atteas.” She looks at Lestrange. “Can I tell him this?”

  Lestrange thinks for a second, shrugs and then nods, “May as well.”

  “Atteas is from the future.”

  Mathew looks dubious, “I see.”

  “He’s from another planet.”

  “Right.”

  Clara looks at Lestrange, “I thought this would be easier.”

  “He’s older than you are. He’s more sceptical.”

  “It’s not because I’m old that I’m sceptical,” Mathew says. “It’s because everything you are saying is insane.”

  “But Atteas is the result of your work here. He’s the descendent of Hoshi.” Clara puts her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God, will it mess things up with Hoshi now?”

  Lestrange shakes his head, “She won’t remember any of it. The whole of the Yinglong get large chunks of their memories wiped in 400 years. They won’t even remember Mathew.”

  Hoshi looks at Atteas curiously. “I cannot imagine we’d be so careless,” Hoshi says.

  Lestrange smiles.

  “How does it happen?”

  “I’m not going to tell you that, now am I? Then it won’t happen.”

  Mathew says, “What is it exactly you both want? Are you some kind of elaborate protest against our work here? Do you want to sabotage the announcement tomorrow?”

  Lestrange says, “No, none of those things.”

  Clara says, “We wanted to warn you, so you didn’t worry.”

  “Worry about what?” He turns to Hoshi, “Is this some kind of elaborate trick of yours, to take my mind off tomorrow?”

  Clara hesitates, “Not to worry, tomorrow you’re… you’re going to…” Clara looks at Lestrange, “This isn’t going to work, is it?”

  Lestrange shakes his head. “Nope. Never stood a chance.”

  Then Clara looks around her and Mathew and Hoshi seem to fade a little.

  “This isn’t real, is it?” she says.

  Lestrange spins around and acts surprised as the others disappear. Then he smiles. “No. It wasn’t real. It was a simulation. The real Mathew went home an hour ago. The real Hoshi is asleep on the weird-looking bed over there.” Lestrange nods to the corner of the room.

  Clara steps over to a kind of cylinder half covering a bed. As Lestrange says, Hoshi is fast asleep there.

  “But I materialised,” Clara says.

  “No you didn’t. Not really. If she wakes up, she won’t see you.”

  “That whole thing with the numbers?”

  “Just my little joke.”

  “But why?”

  Lestrange sighs, “Why the joke? It was juvenile, I know. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”

  “No, not that. Why the simulation?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?

  “You wanted me to know why we can’t tell Mathew he is going to die tomorrow. Because he’d totally freak out and then things might go differently in history. Because if we tell him, he’s unlikely to willingly walk straight to his death.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “I don’t think you would have understood. Experience is a much better teacher.”

  “You’re probably right, but that was weird.”

  She peers down at Hoshi, “She looks like Mathew’s mother.”

  “She’s meant to.”

  “She’s taller and stronger-looking.”

  “She’s superhuman.”

  “But her face is uncannily like his mother. That’s a bit odd too.”

  “He wanted to bring her back to life. That was his main motivation for doing all of this,” Lestrange sweeps his arm, taking in the room, the bank of Canvases on the wall, flicking on and off and spitting out data.

  “Why not his Dad?”

  “It was his mother he mourned. He felt guilty.”

  “Guilty? Why? He didn’t leave her bedside for ten days other than to go home for a few hours’ sleep.”

  “He felt he hadn’t appreciated what she had done for him when his father was gone. He hadn’t supported her. And he’d never got to know her. He’d been difficult and made her life difficult.”

  “That’s incredibly sad. I hope I’m able to help him understand that none of those things were true.”

  “These ideas are deeply embedded in his mind, Clara. There is nothing you can do to shake them. It helps him to work it out in his research.”

  “Would he truly not have done this, if his mother hadn’t died?”

  Lestrange shakes his head.

  “And is it not possible for him to live into old age?”

  “No,” Lestrange says. “If he wasn’t killed tomorrow, he’d be tracked down and killed. Hiding him would become the priority for you, not saving the Yinglong.”

  “Are you still going to let me save him? I mean, to take him to another time?”

  “If it is what you need to carry on after he has died.”

  “Yes, it is, now that I know.”

  Lestrange nods. “As I said, we need to place him in the right times, or should I say, keep him out of the wrong times.”

  “Then I suppose we will tell him what has happened after you have taken him back to Pickervance Road?”

  “How would you rather be told about this? That you will die the next day, but not to worry because you won’t die, but you will live out the rest of your life as a refugee from your own century? Or, that you were dead and now you are alive?”

  Clara sniffs, “I see what you mean. But I will need to speak to myself. I will need to explain how I will get to see him again once he is dead. I will be able to do that?”

  “Yes, you will. But you should only meet yourself after Mathew is dead. Do you understand?”

  “We shouldn’t do anything to interfere with what is going to happen tomorrow?”

  “Precisely.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I thought you might like a tour o
f the city?”

  Clara smiles, “I would.”

  19 Frozen Sunshowers

  DAY THIRTY-ONE: Wednesday 22nd December 2055

  As there is no church in Elgol, ceremonies are carried out in the village hall, now filled with rows of chairs. Mathew is surprised at the number of people who have come. He expected only a handful. Ju Shen whispers to him that Hoshi made friends with many people at Elgol over the years she visited.

  Hoshi’s ashes have been placed by Ju Shen in a more elaborate urn on a table at the front of the hall, next to a bunch of flowers.

  Craig Buchanan walks to the front of the hall. The quiet chatter, rumbling on for the last five minutes, dies down.

  “Friends,” he says. “Ju asked me to speak, to welcome you here, and thank you for coming on this sad day.

  “We live in dark times. For Mathew and Ju, that dark cloud is even darker because Ju has lost a daughter and Mathew has lost a mother. Many of you knew Hoshi personally. She spent many summers here with her family. I personally remember her as an incredibly bright young woman, with a strong passion for helping others, a belief in the power of science, and medicine in particular, to transform people’s lives for the better. Ju wants to say a few words about her daughter.”

  Buchanan steps aside and Ju Shen walks slowly to the front. As she passes the urn and the flowers, she says, “Such a sad sight. I never imagined I would live to see this.” Then she turns to the front, takes a breath and says, “Friends, no mother should have to give the eulogy at her own child’s funeral. This is a terrible day. It has been a terrible few weeks. When I asked Craig if we could hold Hoshi’s funeral here, he asked me if I would like a priest or a monk of a particular religion. I told him that a traditional Chinese funeral goes on for so long and is so complicated that nothing would get done here for forty-nine days. The chickens would not be fed, the goats wouldn’t be milked, the salad would go to waste. I have attended a few funerals here over the years, and the traditions in Elgol are much more appropriate, efficient, and Hoshi would approve, I think. She did not have a religion. On the other hand, I was raised a Buddhist. Buddhists do not believe the soul dies, but, after a while, it finds a new home. I find this thought comforting; I choose to believe in it, and have been saying my prayers to help Hoshi to find a favourable rebirth. I have put a red plaque outside my house so that her soul does not get lost. Elgol was a kind of home to her, I believe. When people we love die, we do what we can to comfort ourselves.