Lost Worlds (5 page)

Calum looked him up and down. The muscular development, the tight clothes that wouldn’t restrict movement, the expensive high-end trainers . . . He thought he knew what this boy was
doing.

‘
Parkour
?’ he asked. He’d heard of the discipline before.

The boy looked up at him with a frown. ‘Hey,
parkour
is serious, hardcore stuff,’ he said. ‘I am a free-runner.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘
Parkour
is all about efficiency. It is about finding the lowest-energy route around obstacles. Free-running is about the art, and about self-development. If it is not beautiful,
it’s not free-running.’ The boy raised an eyebrow. ‘You obviously know a bit about this stuff.’

Calum shrugged. ‘I’ve seen it in films, and played computer games with it in.’ He cocked his head to one side, gazing at the boy, evaluating him. His face was open and honest,
although it was currently screwed up into a pained scowl, and he was making no moves to conceal his identity, escape or threaten him. Calum didn’t think he was a thief.

‘What’s your name?’ Calum asked.

The boy struggled to a sitting position. ‘You can call me Gecko.’

‘Have you got a
real
name?’

‘What – so you can report me to the police?’

Calum just remained silent, and waited.

‘What the hell – enough people around here know me, know what I do and know where I live. They even did a feature on me in the
Big Issue
.’ He shrugged, and winced as a
spasm of pain shot through his shoulders. ‘My
real
name is Eduardo Ortiz.’

‘Brazilian?’ Calum guessed.

Gecko nodded. ‘Came over to England ten years ago with my mother. She is a cleaner. Works on the stock exchange, believe it or not.’ He shook his head. ‘She is always looking
down at floors, carpets and skirting boards. Never looks up at the sky. I keep telling her there is a whole new world up there, but she doesn’t even know what I’m talking
about.’

‘I’m Calum. Calum Challenger.’

Gecko gazed around the apartment. ‘You live here by yourself?’

‘Yeah.’

When Calum didn’t elaborate, Gecko went on. ‘What is it with all the straps hanging from the ceiling, then? Are you in training for something?’ He looked over at Calum, and
seemed to suddenly spot the way that Calum was standing awkwardly, with one hand braced on the back of a chair and the other casually entwined in one of the straps. His gaze travelled up and down
Calum’s body, taking in the overdeveloped arms and shoulders and the comparatively underdeveloped muscles of the legs. ‘You have a problem?’

Now it was Calum’s turn to shrug, and the pain was inside rather than outside. ‘Car crash, a couple of years back. I was paralysed. My parents were killed. I spent a long time
wishing I’d been killed along with them.’

‘Never wish for death,’ Gecko said, shaking his head firmly. ‘It spends all its time slinking around, watching us from the shadows. Never invite it into the light.’

‘It’s OK. I got over it.’

‘So I see.’ Gecko ran his hands along his arms, down his chest and stomach, and then along his legs. ‘Not much damage done, I think.’

‘You were lucky,’ Calum pointed out.

‘I twisted when I fell, to minimize injury, and I kept my muscles relaxed.’ He smiled slightly. ‘Of course, none of that would have done me any good if I had landed on
concrete. I was lucky you put your sofa there.’

‘Actually,’ Calum admitted, ‘I put it there because the skylight was there. More light to read by.’

Gecko’s attention was caught by the ten-screen computer display in Calum’s workspace area. ‘Sweet system,’ he said with awe in his voice as he crossed over to take a
closer look. ‘That is a high-end gaming set-up. I have seen stuff like this before – only with fewer screens.’

‘I don’t use it for gaming,’ Calum replied. ‘Not often, anyway. Some of the stuff I do needs really good graphics and processing power.’

‘Video editing?’ Gecko guessed. ‘Or are you hosting a web service?’

‘A little bit of both.’ Calum shifted position, aware of the muscle he had pulled when Professor Livingstone and her daughter were there. ‘You want something to
drink?’

‘Do you have Coke?’

Calum smiled, despite himself. ‘Have
I
got Coke? Prepare for a surprise, Gecko.’

As usual, Tara Flynn was hunched over her tablet. This time, however, she wasn’t in her college room. She was in the campus library.

She wasn’t there for information or for the peace and quiet. She was there because her own room had been invaded. And she hated it.

She’d been at college for almost a year now, studying a combined degree in History of Art and Graphic Design. She was only fourteen, but the college had taken her in early, partly because
of her impressive exam results and partly because she had hacked their admissions database and changed her age. It wasn’t that she felt any great calling towards making art; more that she
wanted to be a computer-games designer – preferably working full time on some massive multi-player online role-playing game – and she knew she already had all the computing skills
necessary for the job. What she lacked was the ability to quickly create a character graphic, or build a world that actually looked realistic, down to the waving of the grass. The course kept her
interest, and it was fun, but she didn’t seem to be engaging with the other students. They avoided her, for some reason, and she couldn’t find a way to break into their little cliques.
Her room was where she retreated to, a sanctuary. And now someone had got inside – virtually, not in reality, but it still felt like an invasion.

She had to decide what to do. She’d started out trying to destabilize those big financial and defence companies who seemed not to care that their activities were grinding entire countries
into poverty, but now it seemed as if she was going to end up working for one of them. That, or face jail. She didn’t know enough about the legalities of her situation, but what she did know
was that these big companies had a lot more money behind them than her family did, and they could hire a lot more lawyers with a lot more experience and a lot fewer moral qualms. They could crush
her, if they wanted. The only reason she’d got away with her hacking activities for so long was because she was beneath their notice, like a mosquito quietly sucking blood from an exposed
leg. But she’d bitten too deep, and now they had her in their sights.

She felt desperate. She felt as if she didn’t have anywhere to turn, anyone to talk to. She supposed she could get in contact with her hacker friends, but they were just presences on the
other end of an electromagnetic wave. They might be in the next room to her in the halls of residence or they might be on the other side of the world. She would probably never know.

Her tablet was on the table in front of her. It suddenly flashed into life as another message came through.

Books are so very old fashioned, don’t you think? How did people ever manage to find what they were looking for without the use of a decent search engine?

A pause, and then:

Have you come to a decision yet? Time is ticking away, and we have solicitors to instruct.

She typed in a response:
You’re blackmailing me!

The reply came so quickly that her hand was still lifting away from the tablet’s touch-sensitive screen.
Of course we are. You seem surprised.

Tara took a deep breath.
What is it you want me to do?
she typed.

The answer took a few seconds this time.
There is a website at www.thelostworlds.com. We want you to investigate it for us. We want you to find out everything you can about it. We want to
know who set it up, who administers it, who updates it and who is viewing it on a regular basis. We also want a copy of all the images and text on the site.

Tara frowned. That sounded suspiciously easy.
Can’t you do that yourselves?
she typed.

Of course we can, but it might be traced back to us. Far better if we use a dupe who has no connection to us.

She had to admit it made sense.
And when I get that information for you, I’m clear? You won’t ask me for anything else?

The letters that arrived on the screen were just pixels, assembled into patterns. They had no emotional context, no overtones, but somehow she knew that they were lies.
Of course not
,
they said.
After this, if you leave us alone, then we will leave you alone.

Tara sat there for another twenty minutes, waiting to see if the disembodied communicator was going to send her anything else, but there was nothing. Eventually she tapped her finger on the
website address that she had been sent: www.thelostworlds.com.

The site seemed on the surface to be someone’s attempt to pull together lots of information about creatures that might exist out in the world somewhere but were either thought to be
extinct or had never been identified by scientists. There were links on the home page to information on things she’d heard of, like the Loch Ness Monster (which might be some kind of aquatic
dinosaur – a
plesiosaur
, apparently), and the Sasquatch (which she knew was a big hairy ape-like creature in the forests of America, but which was more likely to be a hoax, she found).
But there were also links to things she’d never heard of – everything from bacteria in frozen underground lakes that had been sealed away from the rest of the world for hundreds of
thousands of years to something called the
chupacabra
, or ‘goat sucker’, which was supposed to be (according to eyewitness reports from Mexico and Puerto Rico, at least) some
kind of hairless dog or large rat that sucked blood from livestock. The overall term for these things, Tara discovered, was
cryptids
, and whoever was behind this website was fascinated by
them. Not just that though – he (and she was positive that it was a man) was very even-handed. If there was evidence about the cryptids, then he would report it fairly. The various
photographs and mangled corpses that turned up as
chupacabras
, for instance, were almost always eventually identified as coyotes with severe mange.

It all looked innocent. It looked like the hobby of someone with an obsession and a lot of time on their hands. But if Nemor Incorporated thought there was something odd about it then she had to
investigate.

After all, she thought bitterly, she worked for
them
now.

‘Well, what’s so fascinating about these . . .’ Gecko hesitated for a moment, trying to find the right words. ‘These
espécies ameacadas de
extincao
?’

The kid with the paralysed legs – Calum Challenger – had been telling him about his hobby – finding creatures that were supposed to have been extinct for thousands of years or
which had never been known about in the first place. Well, ‘hobby’ probably wasn’t the right word. ‘Obsession’ was closer to the mark. Gecko knew the signs of
obsession. He’d run across rooftops until his lungs burned, jumped across gaps that he shouldn’t have been able to cross and generally pushed things too far, all in the cause of his own
obsession – free-running. But that was about beauty and freedom of movement. Trying to find dead stuff – that was just lame.

Calum shrugged. He was sitting on the sofa, now that it had been cleared of glass, and both he and Gecko had drinks. ‘I guess it has to do with my parents,’ he said softly. ‘My
father was a palaeontologist.’

‘A what?’

‘He studied fossils. His particular field was the early evolution of the human race.’ Calum smiled. ‘He used to talk to me for hours about what he was doing, and what he hoped
to prove. At the beginning I only understood a fraction of what he was saying, but as time went on I picked up more and more. It was his life – his passion.’

‘What about your mother?’ Gecko asked.

‘She was a geneticist. She was trying to find ways of curing disease by modifying the human genome.’

‘I’d say you were lucky they ever met,’ Gecko pointed out. ‘It is like he is at one end of the football field and she is at the other. My father was a janitor and my
mother is a cleaner. Same world.’

‘You would think,’ Calum replied. ‘But they met at a scientific conference. My mother had got interested in whether our remote ancestors had genes which might have protected
them from diseases like cancer. She asked my father about the chances of finding DNA samples from some of the predecessors of
Homo sapiens
, like
Australopithecus afarensis
,
Australopithecus sediba
or
Homo erectus
. She even wondered whether
Homo neanderthalis
might have some genetic material that could prove useful.’ He smiled, obviously
remembering some story his parents had told him. ‘They talked all night. By morning they’d realized two things – they could work together on this project, and they were in
love.’

Gecko shook his head. He was getting lost. ‘This genetic thing,’ he said. ‘I do not understand it.’

‘It’s pretty simple,’ Calum said. ‘Genes are the plans for what we are – what
any
living thing is, right? They’re like little sections of blueprint
that tell chemicals and cells how to work together to make something – like an eye, or a hand, or a tentacle. The great thing about genes is that they pretty much don’t care if you mix
and match them.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Let me give you an example. A few years back scientists managed to move certain genes in a fly’s DNA around so that instead of growing antennae, it grew an extra set of legs out of
its head. They just replaced the “antenna-making” gene with a duplicate copy of the “leg-making” gene.’

‘Yes, I think I saw that film,’ Gecko said drily. ‘It didn’t end well for mankind.’

Calum shrugged. ‘That was just an example, to prove that genes could be moved around. There’s no actual
need
for a fly with legs growing out of its head.’

A thought struck Gecko. ‘Does that make it a spider instead?’ he asked.