1.4 (13 page)

‘I wonder how he
knew
there was an
us
.’ Alpha reflected. She snapped the case shut and handed it back to me. ‘I’ve hardly slept. But I had a few thoughts on some people we can speak to. If you still want to?’

‘Of course I do. I’ve had a few ideas of my own.’

‘A couple of soys while we compare notes?’ Alpha said, smiling. ‘My treat.’

‘You’re on,’ I said, pocketing the case that my father had given me.

‘I know a place,’ Alpha said, ‘close to here, but a little off the beaten track.’

‘Let’s go,’ I told her.

A few hundred yards, and a couple of side streets later we were standing in front of a gloomy looking little building on a street of gloomy looking buildings. Weirdly, I’d never ventured off the main beltways and slidewalks, so I had only ever seen the shops and buildings that advertised the new world we were living in: the ones with neon and poured granite; plasteel and plexiglass.

Far from the usual hi-tech, sparkling shops I was used to seeing, these ones looked like they belonged in the pages of a history book. They seemed to have been built of original materials that I had only ever read about.

Concrete and brick.

And the weirdest thing? They were three storeys high. Not twenty or thirty like the buildings that hemmed this strange little street in on all sides.

In a place where living space was at a premium, where the only way to find new real estate was by building upwards, it seemed inconceivable that this place hadn’t been demolished for more space-effective development.

It was like stepping into another time period.

‘Welcome to
my
world,’ Alpha said, indicating the row of shops with an expansive sweep of the hand. She must have seen the look on my face because she followed it with: ‘Not quite what you’re used to, Peter?’

‘I didn’t know there were streets like this left in New Cambridge,’ I confessed.

‘People choose not to see them,’ Alpha said. ‘Some Strakerites even believe that these are the kind of places that Kyle talks about on the tapes – places that have become irrelevant to the upgraded masses.’

I raised an eyebrow.

‘You’ve got to admit,’ she said, ‘They really shouldn’t be here.’

She smiled and pointed to a door handle.

‘So how about this soy, then?’ she asked.

The door opened and there was an odd, metal tinkling sound. I looked up and there was a small metal bell at the top of the door, triggered to ring when it was opened.

‘A Straker-themed place?’ I asked with a laugh, remembering the bell in the Happy Shopper in Millgrove, and how Kyle Straker had thought it out-dated and oldfashioned even then.

Alpha smiled, but it was a bit thin. I guess I was kind of attacking her beliefs by making light of them.

The café we walked into could have been a museum exhibit. My shoes squeaked on boards underfoot, and looking around at the furniture I realised that we were surrounded by wood.

We have a few window frames made out of wood at home, and I know that my father paid a whole lot of money to acquire them, and called in a favour or two to get the necessary permits. To him, I’m sure, wood is nothing more than a status symbol, something to flaunt his wealth and power.

Here, in this weird café on a street that shouldn’t even exist, people sat on chairs and stools made entirely of the stuff; they put plates and cups and cutlery
directly
on to the surfaces of wooden tables. They even walked on wood as they moved about the room.

There was a literal
fortune
in the stuff; but it wasn’t displayed for people to admire as a luxury item or status symbol, but rather as practical objects to be used and enjoyed by people.

I couldn’t believe it.

Alpha waited patiently by my side for me to take it all in. ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘It’s . . . incredible,’ I said quietly.

She nodded. ‘Incredible will do,’ she said and marched up to the counter. I followed along in her wake, feeling out of place and out of my depth.

I’d spent my whole life thinking that the world was one way, and then in the space of a day or two I’d discovered that maybe I was wrong. I’d spent too much time believing the words of others, and not enough time opening my eyes and just looking at what was really around me.

It made me feel . . . well, kind of an ass, if I’m honest.

It was no real surprise that the man behind the counter seemed to know Alpha pretty well. He smiled a big, warm smile and knew exactly what she wanted before she had to order. Alpha held up two fingers and the man nodded, turned his attention to me and raised an eyebrow before looking back at Alpha. She nodded, he shrugged and then he went out the back, coming back after a few moments with two glasses of pinkish liquid.

Glasses.

As in ‘made of glass’.

Not plastic, or paper, or some new polymer that all this year’s must-have items were made of.

Glass.

Alpha tried to flash him some cash, but the man shook his head.

‘You brighten the place up,’ he said. ‘That’s payment enough.’

Alpha thanked him and we found ourselves a table in the corner of the room.

The place was small and very busy, but it was a friendlier sort of busy than I’m used to. The air was full of fruity smells mixed with polish and antiquity. There were no tense faces or grudging expressions from people who didn’t want to be pressed in so close to other people.

And no one seemed lost in their own Link activity.

I liked it immediately.

I sipped my drink and was startled to discover that it was probably one of the most delicious things I had ever tasted. Not like a normal soy at all. Sweet, but with a surprising natural sharpness.

‘It’s made with
real
raspberries,’ Alpha explained. ‘Not the mass-produced GM things that get passed off as raspberries these days, but the real thing. Grown just like they were in the olden days.

‘What is this place?’ I asked her. ‘I mean, what . . . how . . .?’

I was full of questions, but Alpha didn’t seem to mind. She sipped her raspberry drink and then started talking.

‘Most people would be as shocked as you are to find out places like this exist,’ she said. ‘To them Strakerites are nothing more than superstitious fools. But whatever you might have heard, Strakerites have a simple belief that underpins everything we do: that this world we live in is not the one that we are supposed to occupy; that every time humanity is upgraded it loses something . . .
vital
. . . in the process.’

She gestured around her.

‘Places like this try to recreate the world as we think it should
really
be; to bring ourselves closer to what the world would be if it wasn’t for the constant interference of those alien programmers.

‘So we use books and video files of things as they once were, and we try to live the
old
way. We use old technologies and old things. To better understand ourselves as
separate
from the programmers.

‘To work out who we would be, if things were different.’ She broke off and rolled her eyes.

‘It’s OK.’ I told her. ‘I really don’t mind. I want to know all about you . . . er . . . all about Strakerites . . .’

My last minute revision was so obvious, so blatant, that I stared down at the tabletop and tried to will my face not to blush with embarrassment.

Alpha looked at me and I could see a tinge of sorrow in her eyes. ‘It must be hard being David Vincent’s son.’ She said.

‘I don’t know what it would be like to be anyone else.’

‘Until the next upgrade,’ Alpha said solemnly. ‘So, is there a Mrs Vincent?’

‘No, I never married.’

She swatted my arm. ‘Very funny. I meant your mother . . .’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘And I deflected your question with some sparkling wit. It’s called a defence mechanism.’

Alpha arched an eyebrow; surprised that I should remember her words of the day before so clearly.

‘My mother . . .’ I stammered, searching for the right words, ‘. . . my mother is no longer with us.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Peter, I didn’t mean to . . .’

‘It’s OK,’ I told her. ‘I was a little kid when it happened.’

‘So what
did
happen?’ There was a softness to Alpha’s question that made me feel that I could actually talk about it, perhaps for the first time ever. I mean, I don’t even think I’ve talked about it in my LinkDiary before.

But Alpha had asked and I suddenly flashed on the dream I’d had, the strange man talking to me just before the sky fell in.

She wants to find her father
, he had said,
but the key is with
your
mother

‘Let me show you,’ I said, and extended my hand towards hers, placing it on the table.

She hesitated for a couple of seconds then laid her hand flat on the table in front of her, next to mine.

We let our filaments out, and the glistening ropes met, joined and merged.

I accessed deep memory storage and selected the file.

File:
040/7/113/mother/
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Deep_Storage\key_memory

I am eight years old.

I’m in the garden, watching the bees.

And I am recording it straight on to the Link.

They fascinate me, the bees, they always have. It’s the way that they seem to be living creatures, even though I know that they aren’t.

I mean they move and fly and buzz and – occasionally – swarm, and if you sit and watch them you can see them do something that looks too much like play to be anything that could have been programmed into their circuits.

I’m watching two of them as they perform a sort of dance on the leaves of a flower in the garden. One is circling around in a clockwise direction, shaking its body every few seconds or so; the other is moving anticlockwise and seems to be echoing the shakes of its companion.

I think they are talking.

Communicating.

And I’m wondering just what it is that synthetic bees have to talk about.

A gentle hand on my shoulder pulls me out of my thoughts. The hand squeezes and I know it is my mother without turning around. My father doesn’t do shows of affection.

I turn around and there she is, my mother, and the way she’s standing – in front of a blazing sun – makes it seem like there’s a halo of light surrounding her.

I feel myself smile.

She is my world, I think, and it makes me feel safe. And then I notice something.

My mother is not smiling.

She is just standing there, looking down at me, her edges blurred by the brightness of the sun and her face looks... sad. As if she is on the edge of tears.

I’m wondering what it is that I have done to make her look so upset, but then she is swooping down and wrapping me up in her arms and I feel her breath on my face and feel her tears on my cheek and she holds me for a long time and I can hear the bees buzzing and feel her heart beating against me and I know that it’s not me that has made her sad, but that I am somehow the focus of her sadness.

‘Mummy?’ I say, and I feel her whisper against my ear in reply.

‘I love you, Peter,’ she says, little more than a soft breath made into words by the shaping of her lips. ‘If you remember nothing else, remember that.’

I touch her hair and it feels like silk, looks like spun gold in the sunlight. I can feel more of her tears, and I don’t know what to do, what to say.

Parents are supposed to make a child’s tears go away, and I am overwhelmed by the discovery that they can cry themselves.

I hold on to her for a long time, and then she ruffles my hair, releases me from her hug. She looks down at me, her face filled with sorrow, with regret. Then she bends down and kisses my cheek, stands up, turns and walks away.

The sound of bees is the soundtrack to her departing.

There is a shimmer, like a mirage, a trick of the light, and I am momentarily blinded.

By the time my vision clears, my mother is gone.

File:
113/47/04/sfg/Continued
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

I let the memory run its course and then retracted my filaments. I wasn’t surprised to find that there were tears in my eyes.

I rarely visit that memory.

It hurts too much.

That was, after all, the last time I saw my mother. Alpha was studying my face, looking confused. ‘I – I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘That was the last time you saw her?’

I nodded. It was all that I could manage by way of reply. ‘Where . . . where did she go?’ Alpha’s voice was quiet, but there was a tension to it, too, as if she wasn’t quite satisfied by the contents of the memory I had shown her.

I shrugged. ‘My father said that she left us. That she no longer wanted to be with us. That she had other places she wanted to see, other things she wanted to do, and those plans just didn’t include a family.

‘I never understood. I still don’t. I’ve spent the last seven years wondering what could have been so important that she walked out on her own son. She loved me; at least, I think she did.’

Alpha stroked the back of my hand with her fingertips. ‘What else does your father say about it?’ she asked. I shook my head. ‘He’s never spoken about it since that day,’ I told her. ‘He’s not really the type to talk about feelings and stuff. I guess it’s too painful for him.

‘You know the stupid thing? For the first year or so there wasn’t a day that passed that I wasn’t thinking about her, hoping to see her face in a crowd, hoping to get a LinkMessage from her telling me she was OK. Anything.

‘But as time passed I started to think about her less and less. Now I can only remember her face if I look at stored memories.’

Alpha’s face was creased with concern. She was frowning and I had a sudden horrible thought that I had upset her somehow by showing her the memory. Then her expression changed, and there was a sudden intensity to it.