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Alpha looked at me, her eyes squeezed into suspicious slits, like she was still expecting me to run away, or insult her or something. What she saw must have surprised her because her face softened, and her eyes opened wide.

‘You’re different,’ she said, quietly.

‘I am? To what?’

‘To everyone else,’ Alpha said. ‘I told you that I was in trouble,’ she said, ‘but that wasn’t the complete truth. It’s not me, exactly, it’s my dad.’

‘Why, what’s wrong with him?’

‘That’s the problem,’ Alpha said, close to tears. ‘I don’t know. He’s . . . gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Disappeared. No one’s seen him. He was supposed to meet my mother for lunch today and didn’t turn up. She couldn’t reach him in the Link. She checked everyone she could think of and no one has seen him since he left the house this morning.’ She grimaced. ‘Yes, we live in New Lincoln Heights.’

‘Looks like an amazing place,’ I said. ‘I like the crystal engineering methods – the buildings look like diamonds or something.’

‘It’s a scary place.’ Alpha said. ‘It may look great on the outside, but the way the authorities are cramming Strakerites in . . . it’s becoming a slum.’

I thought about what my father said about them being ghettoes, and it was odd to be hearing the same sort of ideas being spoken by someone on the
other side
of those crystal walls.

‘So where do you think he’s gone?’ I asked her. ‘Your father, I mean.’

She shrugged.

‘If he was the only one that has disappeared I guess I wouldn’t be worried,’ she told me. ‘But I have to show you something. I just don’t want you to freak out on me.’

‘I’ll try not to,’ I said, wondering what she was talking about.

She put her hand next to mine and deployed a single filament, and I did the same. We interfaced and she sent an image that hung in the air between us.

The image was a photograph of a row of five people – all men – standing in a line.

They looked like friends, and they were all grinning at the camera lens, arms around each other’s shoulders.

They were all wearing identical lab coats.

I didn’t know who four of them were, but was shocked to see that the one in the middle was my father.

He was a fair bit younger-looking, but it was unmistakably him.

Alpha used her hand to point to the people in the photo, starting on the left and working right.

‘This is Edgar Nelson,’ she said pointing to a tall, thin man. ‘His family reported him missing five days ago.’

She moved on to the next man, a shorter, grey-haired older man with a kind smile. ‘Leonard DeLancey: missing now for three weeks.

‘I’m sure you know the next person in the line, and the next one along from your father is
my
dad, Iain del Rey. And this man . . .’ she pointed to the last man in the line, an intense-looking man with piercing dark eyes, ‘was called Tom Greatorex. Apparently he told his family he was sure he was being followed, and when they didn’t believe him he said they were ‘in on it too’. They thought he was paranoid, and he ended up jumping from a high building.’

I felt my skin bristle.

‘When did that happen?’ I asked her, little more than a croak.

‘Earlier today,’ she said.

I shook my head to clear the image of the bystanders gathering around the person on the tracks of the slideway earlier.

‘It seems that our fathers used to work together,’ Alpha said. ‘And judging by this picture they used to be friends.’

‘But if the other four people are . . .’

‘. . . either missing or dead,’ Alpha finished my sentence, ‘it means
your father
, the great David Vincent, is probably next on the list.’

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It didn’t make any sense.

Any of it.

So many things happening today, it was like time was being compressed, and I wasn’t fast enough to keep pace. ‘Where was this photograph taken?’ I asked Alpha. She shrugged. ‘I’d never seen it before. Neither had my mother. She was in a state when she couldn’t get in touch with him – I mean, now that we have the Link it’s not as if we can’t find anybody whenever we need to – and she went through the house trying to find some clue as to where he could have gone.

‘Eventually she found an old-fashioned data storage drive hidden away in my dad’s study, it was taped to the bottom of his desk. It’s an antique – the drive, I mean, not the desk. We were surprised it still held data. The only thing on it was this picture.

‘My dad never hides anything away; what you see is what you get with him. But he hid this, and then he disappeared. It makes no sense. My mum vaguely remembered that this photo was taken just after dad graduated – when he was an information technologist on some special project.

‘Don’t you think it’s a real coincidence that your father is in the photo too?’

‘My mother used to say that a coincidence was what we called events that we just hadn’t seen the connection between yet.’ I said.

‘Sounds like your mother had read the Kyle Straker Tapes.’ Alpha said. ‘When Kyle reaches the silos on the outskirts of Millgrove he makes a very similar observation.’

I gave her a quizzical look.

‘Do you know anything about Strakerites?’ she asked.

‘Only what I hear from my father,’ I said.

She frowned. ‘Maybe not the best source. Strakerites believe that Kyle Straker existed. He was a boy who lived a long, long time ago. He watched on as the whole of the human race was upgraded by unknown forces, but remained untouched by the programming.’

‘I’ve heard that much,’ I said. ‘I just couldn’t really make the leap to believing it.’

Alpha winced.

‘The Straker Tapes are only the start of the journey,’ she continued. ‘But it’s not just blind faith in an unprovable proposition – there’s a lot of evidence to back it up.’

‘My father would disagree,’ I told her.

‘Yeah, well, he probably has his reasons.’ Alpha disconnected filament networking abruptly. ‘Look, maybe this was a bad idea.’

‘What was a bad idea?’ I asked, suddenly feeling like I’d upset her.

‘Asking you for help. You are, I guess, your father’s son.’

‘That’s hardly my fault,’ I argued. ‘Yes he raised me, but I’m not the same as him.’

‘You sounded like you thought I was insane for believing in Kyle Straker though,’ she said.

‘OK, I’m sorry about that,’ I replied. ‘I have been raised to believe that science shows the way forward and that Strakerites are trying to drag humanity back to a dark age of superstition. I’m completely open to hearing another side of things. And I didn’t mean to make out that you were crazy, it’s just hard to fight against . . .’

‘. . . your father’s programming?’ Alpha finished, and she actually smiled. ‘I think you might be surprised by how much science Strakerites employ in their attempts to make sense of the words of Kyle Straker.’

I felt the tickle of her filament against my hand and linked back and the photograph reappeared in front of us.

Alpha pointed at the line of men, or rather at the white coats the men were wearing, and I could see an indistinct crest or logo on the breast pocket of each coat.

Alpha did an ‘expand’ gesture with her thumb and forefinger and the image zoomed in, on to the pocket of my father’s lab coat.

Thanks to the image’s fractal compression the tiny details of the zoomed image were stored along with the larger ones, and the blow-up of the pocket was sharp and clear.

There was a design that looked like a snake. The snake seemed to be eating its own tail.

Beneath it, in embroidered lettering, were the words: Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Straker Tapes.

“The Doomsday Clock”

I saw the people in the crowd, all of them, and they had become. . . were becoming . . .
something else
.
Something . . . impossible.

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We never actually stood a chance.

Our lives were mapped out for us even before we were born and there was no hope that we would ever break free of our destinies.

I even thought that I could swap courses and learn about literature.

One of the stories my mother used to read to me was about Chicken Licken. She used to do all the voices for all the animals that Chicken Licken enlisted in his mission to see the king. He had to see the king, you see, because he thought that the acorn that hit him on the head was a piece of the sky. I guess I’m a bit like Chicken Licken, you know.

I am the boy running around trying to tell the world that the sky is falling.

And you know what? It’s not an acorn this time.

The sky really is falling in.

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The bottom of my world didn’t quite drop out, but it suddenly got a lot shakier beneath my feet.

A photograph that proved my father was on a committee that had studied the Straker tapes?

That was like finding a photograph of Charles Darwin, hidden away in a secret laboratory, creating a monkey out of clay, or something.

All I could think of was that the photo
must
have been faked.

I mean, my father, DAVID VINCENT, undertaking a scientific study of Strakerism? He would never be a part of such a thing.

Would he?
Not the David Vincent I knew. He
hated
Strakerites. He despised the fact that their beliefs were given any weight in this world of ours.

So to suggest that my father had ever taken their ideas
seriously
. . .

I tried to turn my questions into something we could use and the picture that Mr Del Rey had hidden beneath his desk seemed a good place to start.

‘The people in this picture – what else do you know about them?’ I said.

Alpha shook her head. ‘Nothing. My mother remembered a couple of the names, the others I got because they were meta-tagged into the photo. Then I searched the Link with the names and found out about the disappearances and the suicide.’

‘Hmm,’ I said, ‘but they must have families. Can we find them, talk to them?’

‘Sure,’ Alpha said. ‘But why? What help can they be?’

‘I don’t know. I guess I need to know whether they have anything
else
in common, apart from this photograph. Are the people who disappeared all Strakerites? Did they say they felt they were being followed too? What have the families done to find the missing people? And, most importantly, what did the committee find out?’

‘You can ask your father . . .’

‘Yeah, I’m just not sure that is such a good idea. Not yet, anyway.’

I didn’t want to talk to him until I had more information. It could be a dangerous way to proceed – if everyone else on that photo was either missing or dead, then I had to at least
warn
my father – but I needed to find more information before approaching him.

Gather supporting evidence.

Test and retest the hypothesis.

Scientific rigour: my father would expect nothing less.

And he had to be safe inside our house – the security fence would surely keep anyone out who meant him any harm.

‘Are you suggesting that we play detective?’ Alpha asked, grinning at the idea.

‘I guess I am,’ I said.

‘You’re full of surprises, Peter. I’m glad I called you.’ ‘Me too. This must be horrible for you.’

‘It was,’ Alpha said. ‘But I feel better doing something about it. People don’t just disappear, they have to be somewhere.’

The brain makes some weird connections. Something about her last sentence made me remember the Grabowitz photos.

‘People don’t disappear.’ I said. ‘But they’ve been
appearing
recently.’

Alpha raised an eyebrow.

I told her about the pictures that Perry had sent me, and she asked to have a look.

She frowned at the photographs for a while. ‘It’s weird,’ she said. ‘And it’s another of those coincidences.’

‘What is?’ I asked.

‘Have you ever heard of the nought-point-four?’ she asked me.

I nodded. It rang a bell somewhere.

‘It’s a Strakerite thing, isn’t it?’ I asked.

She sat there a while, looking at the pictures. Her pupils were reduced to pinpricks.

‘I need to tell you the story of Kyle Straker,’ she said. ‘I know that it’s going to sound a little . . .
out there
, but I want you to keep an open mind.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘That’s all I can ask.’

She sat there a while longer, gathering her thoughts, and then she began.

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