1.4 (21 page)

‘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 nose, then shrugged.

She pointed to the door of the dome.

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

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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 themselves 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 here 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 plastic-steel 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 too.

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 was 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 read to 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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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 selfsimilarity – 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 kinds 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 that 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
possibly
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 should 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 to me, 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?’

‘What?’

‘Sending out technical support is only one solution for them. But the last time I broke a LinkPad – when I dropped it on a slider and watched it smash to pieces at my feet – do you know what I did? I decided it wasn’t worth repairing, and I bought a new model. Shinier, with more features.’ My anger took over. ‘Your whole plan hinges on some mighty big assumptions.’ I pretty much shouted at her. ‘That they will think that coming here will be viable; and that there are no other races in the universe that they can use as the latest, shinier, model. How can you be so sure?’

The question hung there in the air like a tangible thing. My mother suddenly looked uncomfortable as my words sank in. ‘Even if they don’t come we will be free of them . . . ’

‘Really?’ Alpha interrupted. ‘Peter, what happened to your old LinkPad?’

‘It was recycled,’ I said. ‘Broken up for its components, and then melted down.’

Alpha nodded.

‘It’s David Vincent’s fatal flaw,’ she explained. ‘It always has been. He has tunnel vision. He sees one way forward and pursues it. And that leads to the
Law of Unintended 
Consequences
‘Our first discussion,’ she turned to me and smiled, ‘Our first point of similarity.’

Already I could see my mother’s face had completely altered, from superior, haughty pride to immediate concern. 

‘He invented an artificial honey bee and then stood by and watched as the last real bees died out,’ Alpha said, ‘when he should have targeted the mite that was killing them. His ideas are so bold, so
clever
, so
visionary
that people kind of forget to question them. They get so wrapped up in them, in his sureness, in his arrogant certainty, that they forget that he might not be right'.