Free The Future We Left Behind by Mike A. Lancaster

things.’
    Alpha looked at me, her eyes squeezed into suspiciousslits, 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 had 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 thecamera 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, 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 in 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 all the others 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 sense.
    Any of it.
    So many things were happening today, it was like time was being compressed, and I wasn’t fast enough to keep pace.
    ‘Where was this photograph