The Future We Left Behind Read online

  ALSO BY MIKE A. LANCASTER

  Human.4

  EGMONT

  We bring stories to life

  First published in the United Kingdom by Egmont UK Limited, 2012

  First published in the United States of America by Egmont USA, 2012

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 806

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © Mike A. Lancaster, 2012

  All right reserved

  www.egmontusa.com

  www.mikealancaster.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lancaster, Mike A.

  [1.4]

  The future we left behind / Mike A. Lancaster.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: Human.4.

  Summary: A thousand years after the release of the Straker Tapes, when Peter and Alpha discover that stories of human upgrades are true, they strive to stop a group of scientists from making a decision that could destroy humanity.

  eISBN: 978-1-60684-411-3

  [1. Science fiction. 2. Computer programs—Fiction. 3. Technological innovations—Fiction. 4. Family life—England—Fiction. 5. England—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L2205Fut 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2012003794

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  v3.1

  For Fran, for ever

  For Claudia, Meryl and Sofia, for reading

  And for Becky and Philippa, for helping

  And in loving memory of:

  Andrew Paul Lancaster 1964–1995

  Joan Mary Henson 1938–2010

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  File-set 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  File-set 2

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  File-set 3

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  The future isn’t what it used to be.

  Yogi Berra

  Nearly a thousand years have passed since the recording of the Straker Tapes …

  Heisenberg University

  Professor Lucas Whybrow

  Professor of WorldBrain Studies

  The story of Peter Vincent might easily have never been heard. Indeed, it was by pure accident that the flash-memory drive, containing the files and fragments that make up his story, was absorbed into the WorldBrainMass.

  The brain’s annual growth plan meant that new areas of its underground complex were being claimed as sites for further expansion. These areas, or ‘rooms’, were flooded with nutrients and new BrainLobes seeded on to them.

  Janitor’s logs show that the new areas set aside for lobe growth were not properly checked.

  I believe that, during brain expansion, the data storage unit was absorbed by the young BrainLobes and converted into food, and that Peter Vincent’s data entered the BrainMass as a side effect of this process.

  I discovered the data, also accidentally. While checking file systems, I came across sectors that seemed out of place and worked for several days to isolate the data; then spent four months rebuilding them into a file system that I could read.

  Corrupt data was then analysed and has been carefully reconstructed using markers I discovered within the Vincent files themselves.

  I am satisfied that the Vincent data I am presenting now is as accurate as it is humanly possibly to re-create. I have even included fragments – which are in the form of lists that Peter Vincent seemed to like making.

  In this record, Peter Vincent speaks of a world that once was and tells a startling story that seems to contain answers to many of the questions we routinely ask ourselves as human beings. It is also flawed and contains errors and gaps that will only open Peter Vincent’s story to accusations of fraud and dishonesty.

  I will, however, leave you to be the judge.

  ‘The First Day of My Last Days’

  In extraordinary times, the ordinary takes on a glow and wonder all of its own.

  Kyle Straker

  prologue

  File: 224/09/12fin

  Source: LinkDataLinkDiaryLivePeter_VincentPersonal

 

  … Alpha …

  … I want to tell her that I’m sorry, tell her something for hex sake … but the world is ending and this … this is all I have left.

  All we have left.

  It … I … this has all gone badly wrong.

  We are deep underground in these chambers beneath the world we know … thought we knew … beneath the city and I …

  I guess I thought that we had a chance … Alpha and me … that everything that has happened could still have a happy ending, like in the stories my mother used to tell me.

  It’s weird.

  I’ve been thinking about my mother a lot in the last couple of days. Before all of this, I think I would have found it almost impossible to remember what she looked like without consulting my LinkDiary; now I can see her in my mind plainly, I can remember the sound of her voice as if I was still hearing it.

  I remember …

  <… There is a shimmer, like a mirage, a trick of the light, and I am momentarily blinded.

  By the time my vision clears, my mother is gone …>

  Oh.

  I’m letting my mind run away with me again, and I haven’t got time to let it do that. That’s one of the problems with playing around with memories, the wrong ones can bubble up and come into focus at the wrong moment.

  I don’t even know if that’s the actual memory, or my memory of examining that scene later … but now I’m really getting ahead of myself.

  I don’t know if this will be my last diary entry.

  I guess it probably will be.

  So I need to put a copy of my diary on to an external memory source, because people … people need to know. They have to be told. Reminded. Whatever.

  I’m having to edit the relevant memory files on the fly; to con
centrate on the parts of my daily record that will show the world the truth.

  We are in a room full of boxes of useless stuff: relics and papers and an ancient flash drive that I have repaired with my filaments – it should be able to store this data, but I will have to compress the information to fit the limitations of the drive.

  I’m sitting here, in the near dark, and I should be talking to Alpha, or holding her, or something like that – but instead I’m hacking into my own memories and editing and copy and pasting, all with my heart beating out of control in my chest while she watches on.

  So this is fear. I have to say, I can see why we have strived to eradicate it from our lives.

  I’ll start shunting the parts I’ve done on to the memory drive.

  The first diary entries – I can’t believe it was only three days ago.

  Three days?

  It feels like a lifetime.

  The world has changed … is changing … and I am the only one who can make a record of the truth.

  Here we go …

  >Deploying filaments …<

 

  -1-

  File: 113/42/00/fgh

  Source: LinkDataLinkDiaryPeter_VincentPersonal

 

  I know that I have been talking about it for weeks, but today I actually went ahead and did it.

  I signed up for Professor King’s class.

  Next semester I’m going to be studying English literature. I’ve even got a reading list to prove it.

  Which gives me maybe a month or so to pluck up the courage to tell my father.

  Perry came along to offer me moral support. He started grinning when I used my filaments to sign up to the class’s register, and he’s been grinning at me ever since. His mouth is so unused to any kind of smile that it’s not a pretty sight.

  ‘Peter, Peter, Peter,’ he said. ‘I know you’re going through a mid-teen crisis, but what do you think your dad’s going to say about this, eh?’

  I shrugged. ‘He’ll call a medic,’ I said. ‘His only son is going to be reading books that – for once – don’t try to explain the secrets of life, the universe and everything. He’ll probably blame it on a virus.’

  ‘You know, literature can be seen as an attempt to explain those same secrets,’ Perry said. He pretty much has a clever answer for every occasion.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ I replied. ‘What’s that I can hear?’ I cupped my ear with my hand. ‘Oh, it must be my father’s laughter ringing around the house when I try that line on him.’

  Perry spent a couple of seconds thinking.

  The effort made his face scrunch up.

  ‘Well,’ he said, finally, ‘I guess the last line of defence is that it is an extra class …’

  ‘Oh Perry,’ I said. ‘My wonderful, water-brained friend. That’s not going to make him feel any better about it, is it? Not only am I taking a soft subject, but I’m also wasting the time I could be using for extra science studies to do it.’

  Perry grinned again. Wider, if that was possible.

  ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘You’re doomed.’

  ‘I know.’ I matched his grin. ‘Fun, isn’t it?’

  Perry slapped me on the shoulder way too hard.

  In truth it had been his enthusiasm for Professor King’s classes that made me want to sign up in the first place.

  Perry Knight is one of those people who rarely displays any kind of emotion, managing to keep cool at all times. And he has a terribly serious face that makes him look like he’s picking up constant bad news from the Link.

  Hearing him enthusing about the books that Professor King was getting him to read — and watching his face light up with sheer excitement when telling me about it — well, it made me want to see what in the world it was that had got him so animated.

  Plus — and I know my dad wouldn’t like this, but it’s true — I’m getting a bit sick of science textbooks.

  Actually:

 

  In fact:

 

  Can’t be too careful.

  The student lounge was usually a buzzing mass of students, but today Perry and I had the place to ourselves. It was supposed to be a free period, but the college had suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, raised the learning quota a couple of days ago and the empty room was evidence that everyone else was playing catch-up; desperately trying to earn more edu-credits before the big Student Audit next week.

  Perry and I were already way above its threshold.

  That’s why we could afford to be sitting around while everyone else panicked.

  I’m not as crazy bright as Perry, but I reckon I’m not far off. We breezed through pre-prep, prep and then school together, and ended up at the same college in New Cambridge because it was the best. And so were we.

  It might sound like bragging, but it’s true.

  When you’re the son of someone like David Vincent, it’s the very least that’s expected of you.

  Of course, Perry’s father works for my father, so we’ve been friends since we were old enough to, like, have friends. We’re as close as brothers would have been in the old days, before the population explosion led to the One Child Limit on family sizes.

  We are both supposed to follow in our fathers’ footsteps and end up in the very same labs where they work.

  Supposed to.

  If we don’t let Professor King’s Literature class knock us from the path our fathers have so carefully built for us.

 

  Professor King

  2nd Semester Reading List

  1. Gulliver’s Travels

  tags:

 

  2. Romeo and Juliet

  tags:

  3. Wordsworth: Selected Poetry

  tags:

  4. Great Expectations

  tags:

 

  5. Ronnie Barker: Collected Works

  tags: <20th century>

  6. Heart of Darkness

  tags:

 

  7. The Maltese Falcon

  tags:

  8. Midnight’s Children

  tags:

  9. Flanimals

  tags:

  10. Sense and Sensibility

  tags:

 

  11. Beowulf

  tags:

  12. Human.4

  tags:

  -2-

  File: 113/43/00/fgi

  Source: LinkDataLinkDiaryPeter_VincentPersonal

 

  I almost told my father last night.

  I mean: if he had come home I would have. Probably.

  But he pushed me a message saying he was stuck at the lab, and it didn’t feel right talking about it over the Link, so another day passed by without me mentioning it.

  I ended up spending most of the evening reading an actual book on my LinkPad. The process of reading a book takes a while to get used to. It’s so slow and laborious. But once you get into it, once you forget the way you’re reading and concentrate on what you’re reading, it becomes a really unique experience. You have to work to draw meaning from it rather than having a meaning given to you, which is the only way we receive information these days.

  It doesn’t tell you how to think.

  The book is called Gulliver’s Travels and it’s about this sailor who keeps ending up in weird situations in even weirder countries. It’s pretty funny, b
ut in a way that makes you wonder about life and stuff, and it got me thinking about how we put our trust in people who probably don’t actually deserve it.

  The weird thing is, it kept me off the GameServers for the whole evening.

  I realised that I would like to discuss it in class: so many things in it kept popping back into my mind.

  My father would hate it. ‘Waste of time and energy’ he’d call it.

  And this morning he was just too busy to be interrupted. He’s always thinking and theorising, and he often forgets that a son needs a little … I don’t know … parenting, I guess. It might be nice to be asked how things are going at college, or in my life, but my father never thinks these things are worth talking about. He lives in his own head, and his body is just a machine that his brain uses to get from place to place.

  He has a lab in the house, in case of domestic eureka moments. Not that I have ever been allowed to see it: I am so irrelevant to him that he’s never even let me. And I’m so scared of his disapproval that I’ve never dared look inside when he’s not here. How sad is that?

  He expects me to be just like him, too, but I’m not. Not really. I don’t like to think all of the time. Sometimes I actively avoid thinking: logging myself on to one of the many GameServers and losing myself in a Digital Environment.

  The world seems too full sometimes, with so much information that it gets hard to see past it all. You can get lost in data and newsfeeds and SocNetworking and forget that there’s a real world out there, buried beneath all that information.

  That’s why the book surprised me.

  It was talking about an ancient world, but it actually made me think about this one: about the silly things we do as a kind of reflex action, without giving them a second thought.

  Breakfast was spent in silence, with my father frowning at the problem consuming his attention, and I almost interrupted his train of thought just to get him to look at me.

  Or speak to me. If only to tell me off – that would have been OK.

  But I ate my high calcium breakfast quietly instead.