Free 1.4 by Mike A. Lancaster Page A

things happening today, it was like time was being compressed, and I wasn’t fast enough to keep pace. ‘Where was this photograph taken?’ I asked Alpha. She shrugged. ‘I’d never seen it before. Neither had my mother. She was in a state when she couldn’t get in touch with him – I mean, now that we have the Link it’s not as if we can’t find anybody whenever we need to – and she went through the house trying to find some clue as to where he could have gone.
    ‘Eventually she found an old-fashioned data storage drive hidden away in my dad’s study, it was taped to the bottom of his desk. It’s an antique – the drive, I mean, not the desk. We were surprised it still held data. The only thing on it was this picture.
    ‘My dad never hides anything away; what you see is what you get with him. But he hid this, and then he disappeared. It makes no sense. My mum vaguely remembered that this photo was taken just after dad graduated – when he was an information technologist on some special project.
    ‘Don’t you think it’s a real coincidence that your father is in the photo too?’
    ‘My mother used to say that a coincidence was what we called events that we just hadn’t seen the connection between yet.’ I said.
    ‘Sounds like your mother had read the Kyle Straker Tapes.’ Alpha said. ‘When Kyle reaches the silos on the outskirts of Millgrove he makes a very similar observation.’
    I gave her a quizzical look.
    ‘Do you know anything about Strakerites?’ she asked.
    ‘Only what I hear from my father,’ I said.
    She frowned. ‘Maybe not the best source. Strakerites believe that Kyle Straker existed. He was a boy who lived a long, long time ago. He watched on as the whole of the human race was upgraded by unknown forces, but remained untouched by the programming.’
    ‘I’ve heard that much,’ I said. ‘I just couldn’t really make the leap to believing it.’
    Alpha winced.
    ‘The Straker Tapes are only the start of the journey,’ she continued. ‘But it’s not just blind faith in an unprovable proposition – there’s a lot of evidence to back it up.’
    ‘My father would disagree,’ I told her.
    ‘Yeah, well, he probably has his reasons.’ Alpha disconnected filament networking abruptly. ‘Look, maybe this was a bad idea.’
    ‘What was a bad idea?’ I asked, suddenly feeling like I’d upset her.
    ‘Asking you for help. You are, I guess, your father’s son.’
    ‘That’s hardly my fault,’ I argued. ‘Yes he raised me, but I’m not the same as him.’
    ‘You sounded like you thought I was insane for believing in Kyle Straker though,’ she said.
    ‘OK, I’m sorry about that,’ I replied. ‘I have been raised to believe that science shows the way forward and that Strakerites are trying to drag humanity back to a dark age of superstition. I’m completely open to hearing another side of things. And I didn’t mean to make out that you were crazy, it’s just hard to fight against . . .’
    ‘. . . your father’s programming?’ Alpha finished, and she actually smiled. ‘I think you might be surprised by how much science Strakerites employ in their attempts to make sense of the words of Kyle Straker.’
    I felt the tickle of her filament against my hand and linked back and the photograph reappeared in front of us.
    Alpha pointed at the line of men, or rather at the white coats the men were wearing, and I could see an indistinct crest or logo on the breast pocket of each coat.
    Alpha did an ‘expand’ gesture with her thumb and forefinger and the image zoomed in, on to the pocket of my father’s lab coat.
    Thanks to the image’s fractal compression the tiny details of the zoomed image were stored along with the larger ones, and the blow-up of the pocket was sharp and clear.
    There was a design that looked like a snake. The snake seemed to be eating its own tail.
    Beneath it, in embroidered lettering, were the words: Committee for the Scientific Investigation of