1.4 (20 page)

‘It’s breathtaking, really: the data that we have managed to extract from the Naylor silos. We have been able to tap into much of the history of our software upgrades, and to trace human development by the computer code that caused its changes.

‘Did you know that an earlier upgrade, about five hundred years ago, was actually produced without human lips? It didn’t last long – a decade, give or take – before it was reversed in a small update that also corrected a bug they were having with our dreaming states. But do you see what it means?

‘We have always believed that our evolution was a oneway process of development, and that when we lose things we lose them forever. That there is no regaining lost abilities, lost attributes.

‘Turns out that it’s completely untrue,’ he said, with something approaching glee. ‘Tomorrow could see us with fins and gills.’

He switched from gleeful to solemn without missing a beat. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You both know what today is, don’t you? It’s why you’re here.’

‘It’s the last day for humanity as we know it,’ Alpha said, and her voice was raw and full of anger.

‘And here’s the thing,’ my father said. ‘If they can control our development, then they can always make sure that we are
less
than they are. By upgrading us they can
limit us
. Keep us their slaves. Forever.’

‘And you’ve known about all of this, and kept it a secret, for how long? Years?’

I’m not sure what Alpha had been expecting my father to say, but she seemed genuinely derailed by what he
did
say.

‘Decades,’ my father answered. ‘So you’re the girl that’s filling my son’s ‘Lilly’ paradigm. How sweet.’

Alpha looked at him with wide eyes, and demanded: ‘What does that even mean? What the hex is a Lilly paradigm?’

My father gave her a cryptic look.

‘Why did Lilly Dartington put her hand up at the Millgrove talent show?’ he asked her.

‘No one knows,’ Alpha answered quickly. ‘We only ever find out Kyle’s side of the events; Lilly’s thoughts are never revealed.’

My father shook his head.

‘The Straker Tapes weren’t the only record of the events at Millgrove,’ he said, and there was a triumphant note in his voice. ‘Lilly left a diary, you know. Handwritten, if you can believe it. It takes up pretty much where Kyle’s story left off, as if he had passed the baton on to her as chronicler of the new world.

‘The
Travel Diary of Lilly Dartington
is, in many ways, a more fascinating text than the Straker transcriptions, because Lilly had an intellectual depth to her observations that is often missing in those of her boyfriend. She also details the mental struggle of being left behind, and describes encounters with some 1.0.’

‘There is no such book,’ Alpha said through gritted teeth.

My father smiled.

‘Not seeing something is not a logical case for something not existing,’ he said smugly. ‘I’ve never seen gravity, but I know it exists.

‘Lilly’s diary is real. I should know. I own it. Anyway, in an early entry she recalls the moment that she volunteered to be a subject for Daniel Birnie’s stage hypnotism. What is the Strakerite view on the subject of her motivations?’

‘That it is unknowable.’ Alpha said, and there was an edge to her voice.

My father didn’t notice.

‘You don’t even while away the evenings in New Lincoln Heights by wondering?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Alpha said. ‘We don’t. There is enough information in the tapes without us creating groundless interpretations.’

My father stroked his chin thoughtfully.

‘Well let me clear up the mystery for you,’ he said, ‘using evidence from another, contemporary source. Lilly saw Kyle’s hand go up, and she was aware that his own experiences as a stand-up comedian made that a courageous thing for him to do. He was willing to risk embarrassment in front of his peers, just to save his friend from being embarrassed himself.

‘Lilly couldn’t bear to be a part of an audience that was laughing at Kyle. It took less than a second for her to run it through in her head and for her to reach her decision; indeed her hand was already rising before Kyle’s hand made it fully up into the air.

‘In that instant, she sided with Kyle against the majority. And against Simon who was, nominally at least, her boyfriend at the time.

‘Lilly later says in her diary that in that moment, when she chose to side with Kyle, she also chose her future path; that while Kyle blundered into being a 0.4 in a 1.0 world – with his attempt to save Danny from embarrassment – Lilly chose to follow him, and thus chose her path.

‘And never once in her diary does she consider that the choice that she made was the wrong one.

‘That is the Lilly paradigm.

‘Peter was always going to be a Kyle, someone dragged into events beyond his understanding; I’ve known that since the day he was born.

‘But you,’ he shook his head, ‘You are the proof of the Lilly paradigm. That someone always chooses to follow a Kyle into the fire, regardless of the consequences.’

I suddenly felt my scalp bristling. I could hear the voice of the strange man in my dream as he said:
She’ll follow you into fire, but why would you lead her there?

‘I’m here because I’m looking for my father,’ Alpha said. ‘Not because of some invented ‘paradigm’.’

‘Oh, really?’ My father’s eyes rolled back to whites and then he started speaking in a voice that wasn’t quite his own.

File:
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I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about him, about Peter. There is something so tragic about the path he is walking, and I find myself running it over and over in my mind. I thought that he was helping me find my father, but now I am sure it is more than that. This sounds crazy, but I think I’m helping him, by making sure that he does not tread that path alone.’

My father’s eyes rolled again, and the whites were no longer showing.

Alpha’s face was taut, her jaw clenched, and her eyes looked like steel ball bearings.

‘That is my
private diary
,’ she snarled.

‘
Was
, my dear girl,’ he said. ‘Those tenses can be a little tricky, can’t they? It WAS your private diary, but then you traded link addresses with my son and I gained access to it and it stopped being private. My son has no secrets from me; he just thinks he has.

‘Now I don’t know if either of you will ever be truly satisfied with any answers I can give you, and time really is running out . . .’

He pointed to the countdown clock, which had reached 48.22.

‘. . . so if we could hurry this up, I really need to get back to work . . .’

‘What work?’ I said angrily. ‘Fiddling while Rome burns?’

‘Ah, the benefits of a proper education,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Seeing as you are asking, I am the process of engineering a better tomorrow. A delicate operation that requires my full attention . . . well, about now.’

He walked back into the geodesic dome without another word.

After a few seconds Alpha and I followed him.

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Inside the dome it was almost unpleasantly warm and humid, and the air tasted bad. A small space was packed with racks of computer equipment of a type unfamiliar to me.

Bundles of grey cables and rainbow-coloured wires ran along nearly all of the available wall space, and they all fed into a large processing unit in the middle of the room, which then fed out into smaller units and a triptych of large display screens.

My father immediately started pushing buttons and tapping keys.

The central monitor of the three was filled with a bizarre language of hooks and eyes and shifting characters. It looked like Kyle’s description of the alien code on the screen of Mrs O’Donnell’s computer, and later in the silos themselves.

It was no real surprise that it was also the exact same language I had seen infecting the city in my dream.

To the left was a screen that seemed to be translating the alien language into columns of what looked like binary code. To the right was a selection of animated readouts and dials, showing some kind of power grid.

Alpha touched my arm and pointed to a space between the central hub and the outer wall of the dome.

‘Is that . . .?’ She asked, breathlessly, and then I felt the same kind of switching feeling in my brain that I’d had seeing the people around the silos, and suddenly the contact lenses I was wearing pulled a shape out of the ether.

Another ghost, coming into focus.

Oh, this just wasn’t fair.

This wasn’t fair at all.

I had imagined this moment, played it over in my mind so many times, but not here, not like this.

The person resolving out of the murk – becoming visible as the perceptual filter concealing her was stripped away by the lenses’ adjustments – was my mother.

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She was
almost
there, phasing half-in and half-out of the everyday world, and then the image sharpened, and she was standing in front of us.

My mother’s lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear anything she was saying.

It couldn’t be.

It couldn’t be
her

‘Your mother just asked you a question,’ my father’s voice bled in over my internal chaos.

‘Is there an ear thing so I can hear her?’ I asked.

My father let out a dry chuckle and I saw that in the time we had been inside the dome he had been busy attaching wires and electrodes to his own head, so that his skull was festooned with a squid-like arrangement of coloured wires.

It was another bizarre moment in a thoroughly bizarre day.

‘There’s no need,’ he answered, attaching another skein of wires to himself. ‘It’s a perceptual filter, but its effect is already shifted and you are now aware of her. Just concentrate. I know it’s difficult for you but . . .’

Any opportunity to criticise me. Still, I did what he said.

I concentrated on my mother’s face, watching her lips move soundlessly, and I struggled to make her words audible.

At first there was nothing, but then I heard a voice phasing out of nowhere, like speech, but as if it was being heard underwater.

I focused on the sound, and it wasn’t long before it became so clear that I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t heard it before.

‘. . . to see you,’ my mother was saying.

‘Mum?’ I asked, a bare whisper, my voice throttled with emotion.

She looked different than I remembered, but of course she did. That was seven years ago. There was grey in her hair, and her clothes looked . . . well,
older
I guess.

My mother nodded.

‘I have never been far away,’ she said. ‘I . . . I had to . . . stay close to you. I’ve watched you grow. It’s so good to finally be able to talk to you.’

‘Mum . . . how . . .?’ I felt like I was eight years old again; as if the years that had passed in between our meetings had been a dream, and now I was finally waking up.

‘It’s all so complicated,’ she said.

‘Try,’ I said, with a little more edge than I knew was there. ‘Where did you go?’

‘Nowhere. I’ve always been right here.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The project required for someone to . . . downgrade, back to a previous software version. I insisted that that someone should be me. You father argued against it, but I am pretty stubborn when I need to be.’

‘Downgrade?’ I spoke the word and it ended up a question.

My mother nodded.

‘Once we started studying the code that upgrades us, it wasn’t long before it became possible for us to reverse the process. To send someone
back
to a previous software version. To travel into the kind of world that Kyle and Lilly describe in their accounts.

‘We needed someone to make that sacrifice. I couldn’t let anyone else do something I wasn’t prepared to do myself. I argued, won . . .’ a slight smile played across her lips, ‘and I fell through the cracks.’

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, or what I was hearing. I was in a seething turmoil, and a flicker of anger boiled to the surface.

‘You wanted this? You
left
me . . .’ I said.

‘I HAD to, Peter, you can see that, can’t you? Everything we are doing here today hinged upon having someone who could report from . . . the other side of human existence. We didn’t know then that it would be a one-way trip, but it was a risk we were willing to take. That I was willing take.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked desperately. ‘What is this all about? I don’t understand.’

‘We are in the process of making things better,’ my mother said. ‘For millennia we have continued along a path that is not our own. Our minds and bodies have been subject to the whims of our programmers. We no longer know what it even
means
to be ‘human’, we’re nothing more than a commodity that just so happens to be a race. All these thoughts and feelings, the majesty of human existence, the specific individual experience of simply
being alive
, they can all be taken from us in an instant.

‘Peter, it isn’t right. And it certainly isn’t the way that things are supposed to be for us.’

‘Leaving me wasn’t right,’ I said, and I felt Alpha squeezing my arm. ‘I can’t believe this. I always thought that it was something I’d done that made you leave, but this . . .’ I gestured around me, ‘I don’t get it.’

My mother looked at me, and I realised that there was no kindness or love in the look. In that moment I knew that I had been wrong about her. I had thought that she was all the good things that my father lacked. All I saw in her eyes was a passionate intensity for this
project
. They were the eyes of a zealot.