1.4 (16 page)

‘I have to tell someone,’ Ashley said. ‘I have to tell 
everyone
.’

Alpha looked at me, and her eyes looked haunted by the sheer weight of the things we were finding out. ‘And we have to go to Millgrove,’ she said with absolute certainty. ‘The geotag gave us the exact geographical location of the silos. That’s where we have to go.’

‘Why?’ Ashley asked. ‘What can you hope to achieve by going there?’

I gave Alpha a weak smile. She was right, of course. There was nothing else that we could do.

‘Answers,’ I said. ‘Maybe a way to stop it happening again.’ Ashley looked at us like we were insane. ‘Good luck with that,’ she said. ‘I . . . I have to go. I have to call some people . . . I’ve got to tell people.’ 

‘Then that’s what you must do,’ Alpha said. ‘Peter and I have our own path to follow.’

Ashley looked like she wanted to say more, maybe try to talk us out of it; but she only shrugged.

‘I wish you luck,’ she said. Then she stood up and left the café.

The LinkCrawler apparatus she left on the table. I looked over at Alpha.

‘You sure about this?’ I asked her.

‘I . . . No, I’m not sure,’ Alpha said. ‘I just don’t see that there’s anything else for us to try.’

‘If nothing else there might be some answers,’ I said.

‘Let’s go.’

Alpha reached across the table and took my hands in hers. ‘I’m sorry, Peter,’ she said. ‘I got you into all of this . . .’ 

‘I was already a part of it long before I met you.’ I told her and then did something that surprised even me. I lifted her hands to my mouth and kissed her fingers. ‘You have just shown me the way I guess I was always going.’ 

‘To the silos?’ 

‘To the silos.’ 

We left the café in silence.

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I pulled up a map from the Link and entered the precise coordinates of the silos into a ‘search’ field. The software quickly located the place we were headed. Then I laughed.

‘What’s funny?’ Alpha asked, so I shared the map with her, explained what it meant, and she laughed too.

When everything’s connected, and runs along patterns etched beneath the surface, sometimes you can only laugh.

You see, it would have been easy for me to have just lost it then. According to the map, my father hadn’t needed to alter my memory very much at all.

Because that very last memory of my mother, the one I remembered as taking place in the garden of our house, hadn’t been that far wrong.

It just hadn’t been
in
the garden.

Same location: wrong elevation.

My mother had said her goodbyes to me
under
the garden.

That was where the Naylor silos now resided. Under the ground beneath my father’s house and land.

I lived
over
Millgrove.

And I always have.

“The World Beneath”

Occasionally we catch a glimpse. And tell stories of ghosts and monsters. 

They’re what make dogs bark at night, or a cat’s hackles rise.

Daniel Birnie

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Final set of entries, final few seconds of this world of ours. There is something in the air. Like a storm brewing. I can

taste it in my throat, dull and coppery and unpleasant. I don’t know how this is all going to turn out.

Whether we did anything at all.

Here are the last entries I will ever make.

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Alpha and I rode a slider back to my house, and neither of us really felt much like talking.

You think the world is one way, and you believe it for your whole life, and then something happens and shows you that you were wrong; the ground you thought was solid is made of ice, and it’s melting away beneath you.

You deal with it how you can. That’s all any of us do. It’s what Kyle Straker and Lilly Dartington did.

It’s what Alpha and I were doing.

As we crossed the city we both stared out of the window, hand in hand, watching as our world rushed past us, looking the same as it always had, but different somehow, too. We flashed each other thoughts, and talked a bit about our fears, but mostly we just watched the city.

I guess you only really start to
see
something –really, truly see it – when it is in jeopardy. I suddenly realised that it all could just end in an instant. That the world we were passing through could suddenly become another one, just because of a signal transmitted from the depths of space, and everything we knew, everything we were, could just
change

Whether it would be a better world was irrelevant, really. It wouldn’t be
ours

And Alpha and I wouldn’t be
us

Not really.

Not any more.

After the upgrade, Kyle Straker’s parents were no longer his parents. They might have looked the same, but they weren’t. They had become something else. Something more like us, like Alpha and me, creatures that could network through fleshy wires in our hands, and that could communicate without speaking.

To Kyle they were monsters.

Just like we would be monsters to people who missed the next upgrade.

Do you know something?

I realised then that I actually liked being me.

I liked being the way that I am.

I wanted to hang on to me.

And if that meant going up against alien programmers, or worse, my father, then so be it.

I would do everything in my power to remain me, and to keep Alpha Alpha.

We reached our stop and left the slider.

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I had to log Alpha in as a guest so we could get through the security fence. She held on to my hand as the fence performed its checks, a few nervous seconds passed, and then we were through.

‘Nice,’ Alpha said, staring up the path at the house. ‘So this is where you live, huh, Peter?’

I felt a jolt of guilty embarrassment, thinking about what she had said earlier about the crystal neighbourhoods being slums in all but name.

‘You’re not going to get all Kyle Straker on me and stop calling, are you?’ I joked.

‘There’s a reference you wouldn’t have known to make last week,’ Alpha said, rolling her eyes. ‘You’ve got to admit that hanging around with me is nothing if not educational.’

I gave her a smile, but then purpose filtered back in, and humour suddenly felt out of place so we consulted the GPS.

We made our way in silence to the precise spot indicated on the map and stood on the lawn, pretty much in the centre of the front expanse, looking at the ground and trying to figure out how the hex to get under it.

The garden was calm and tranquil and there was a hazy quality to the light that made the place seem unreal and unfamiliar.

I’ve heard about archaeologists finding the past in the ground, digging up remnants of that which went before, but I don’t think I have ever stopped to think just what that meant. That societies have always built upon the past, new societies on top of older societies; that layers of history stretch down into the very earth itself, sleeping, awaiting discovery.

I really didn’t think that digging was going to be our way in, though. My memory had been altered so that it looked like it took place in this garden, when it had actually taken place beneath it, and I doubted that we got down there through spadework.

But get down there we did. Somehow.

Alpha stood there, looking baffled. ‘So what do we do now?’ she asked.

‘There must be an entrance somewhere.’

‘But why?’ Alpha said, frustrated. ‘Why would there be?’

And that was a good question. A really good question. Why the hex would there be an entrance to an underground world in the garden of our house? It was stupid. Just plain stupid. Like something out of a Last Quest scenario, but not the kind of thing that happened in real life.

Unless . . .

Oh, no.

Unless . . .

I shook my head and realised what I fool I had been.

The answer was right in front of me, and had been all along. ‘What if my father’s research into the Straker Tapes didn’t end with that committee?’ I said. ‘What if he’s known about the silos all along, and it’s why we live here? He might be the world’s greatest critic of your beliefs in public, but in private he’s looking like a devoted believer. Except with him it’s not even belief. It’s not faith. It’s certainty. He was on that committee and he found out the truth. He even built us a house slap bang over the evidence. Alpha, my father
knows
that the Straker Tapes are true. That was the real finding of the committee. It’s true. It’s all true.’

My voice had been steadily rising in volume, until I was almost shouting by the end of it.

Alpha looked at me with narrowed eyes.

‘But why?’ she asked me. ‘Why would he pretend like that? Why would he hide the only real evidence of what Strakerites have been saying for centuries? Why, Peter?’

‘Because he’s up to something.’ I answered.

I broke off, feeling sick to my stomach.

I couldn’t say what had just occurred to me.

I just couldn’t.

Alpha, however, could. ‘And your mother?’ she asked.

I had tears in my eyes. ‘And my mother,’ I whispered. ‘She didn’t leave us. He did something. He took her away from me.’

‘And my father?’ Alpha said weakly.

I nodded.

‘It’s all connected,’ I said. ‘Everything. And my father . . . he must be behind it all.’

It was a startling and terrible thought, one that reached into the very heart of who I was, or who I
thought
I was.

I’m not naïve.

At least not much.

But I genuinely thought that my father was a decent man. Driven in his work, maybe; surly and often indifferent to me, of course; cruel and dismissive to people who didn’t share his opinions, always; but I never suspected him of being utterly dishonest.

Now I was certain of it.

Weird how your life changes, isn’t it?

Well I had to do something, and standing in the garden was getting us nowhere, so I reckoned that there had to be a clue in the house, somewhere.

A secret door in his lab – and maybe that was why he’d never let me in there – or a hatch in the floor?

I was about to tell Alpha about my father’s lab-at-home when she let out a sudden shriek and started flapping at her neck with panicked hands.

‘Something just bit me.’ she said indignantly. ‘Right on the hexing neck.’

I hurried over to her and she stopped flapping, so I looked at where her fingers were now busy rubbing at a red patch on her skin.

‘Let me look.’ I said, and she moved her fingers aside, drawing back her hair so I could see clearly.

An angry red bump stood up from the surface of her skin, with a red pinprick at its summit. I thought that the red spot looked like a drop of her blood.

‘That’s weird.’ I said. ‘Maybe it is a bite. Or a sting.’

I put my finger on to the bump and it felt hot and inflamed. Alpha grunted in discomfort and I was just about to say ‘Sorry’ when I felt a sudden, sharp pain on the back of my hand.

I looked at it and for a second I thought that someone was playing a practical joke. There was an artificial bee sitting there, in the spot where I’d just felt pain: four centimetres long and glinting in the light of the sun.

It was just so strange. I mean the bees, they don’t interact with humans at all. They’re programmed not to. They’re programmed to stay away from us.

This one didn’t seem to know that.

In fact, it had just stung me.

I tried to shake it off, but it was clinging on tight, so I had to swat it free with the other hand.

‘Are you all right?’ Alpha asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I just got stung. By a bee.’

‘A bee?’ Alpha said.

‘A bee,’ I repeated. ‘One of my father’s robot bees just stung me on the hand.’

Alpha looked at my hand, and at the twin of the bump she had on her neck, and her brow creased up.

‘It must be the same one that stung me. It has to be a malfunction, or something.’

‘Artificial bees don’t have stings,’ I said. ‘Why would they? They don’t need defence mechanisms, they’re made of metal.’

‘Well, this one did. Weird.’

‘Weird indeed, I mean I have never heard of someone being stung by a bee before, and here we are, two in a minute . . .’

I broke off. Alpha was looking around and looking a little freaked out.

‘What?’

‘Ssshhhhh,’ she said, waving me quiet with her hand. ‘Listen.’