Alt.History 102 (The Future Chronicles)

by Samuel Peralta

  Delving into the Acanet was not for the faint of heart. In order to access anything worth seeing, or finding people worth talking to—which is what Eric craved—you had to know the address of the server and the name of the file where the data was stored. Server addresses were basically strings of numbers, and filenames could be anything at all, but most information on the Acanet consisted of Penmaestro book files or proprietary databases. A huge whiteboard on one wall of the computer room held scrawled addresses for some of the most useful servers.

  It was amazing what you could find on here. For a skilled operator, it was often faster to find a book on the Acanet than it was by browsing the shelves of the physical library upstairs. The average layman didn’t stand a chance, of course, but Eric had spent years in this place teaching himself how to use a computer terminal. And it had been the one and only thing he’d known how to do at school.

  / access 184.11.254.1

  / 184.11.254.1 > WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA

  / 184.11.254.1 > SCHOOL OF COMPUTING SCIENCE

  / 184.11.254.1 > authentication required

  Eric smiled and logged in. He wondered if his friend Brian would be online. Brian was a postgraduate student at UEA in Norwich, and they had chatted over the Acanet many times over the last few years. He was one of a small group of online “friends” Eric enjoyed talking to, even though he had never met any of them in real life. Not many people used the Acanet, but Brian had been one of the first to seek Eric out when he first started going online, and was kind enough to show him the ropes.

  / yo eric

  / Hey Brian, what’s up?

  / not much just working on my thesis

  / Any progress?

  Eric was interested in Brian’s thesis. He was working on a study about the potential of microcomputers in education—a concept which had failed to take off the last time anyone had tried to introduce it, thirty-odd years ago. The public had turned against the idea, and who could blame them in the circumstances?

  / yeah got a school happy to do the survey, just need some results now. not sure what kids these days would make of computers though haha

  / Haha yeah, too busy with video games and their radiophones I suppose.

  Eric paused. He’d been meaning to ask Brian a question for a while, but something always held him back. Was it a bad idea? Probably—but maybe he had to do something for once, instead of sitting about and relying on the charity of his family, who worked so hard to keep him clothed and fed.

  / Got something to ask you, mate.

  He paused again. Maybe this was a bad idea.

  / yeah what is it? give me a sec just got code from the compiler

  / You know I have to come to the library when I want to get on the Acanet? I want to be able to get online at home.

  / yeah mate wouldnt we all. I practically live in this lab, haha

  / Seriously though, I want to build my own computer. There’s nothing I’d like more.

  Nothing came through for thirty seconds. Eric touched the arrow keys to scroll back up, but before he could do so more data spooled through.

  / right. I can probs help with that, but you seem to know nearly as much as I do already. get involved! set the information free, haha!

  Eric smiled.

  / Appreciate that. I have a few parts but will need to source the rest. And I’ll need some code.

  / let me know if I can help, bro. anyway must get going, late for a meeting.

  / Catch you later.

  * * *

  Mandy didn’t come back after an hour, so he got in the elevator and trundled through the computing science section of the library. He reached for volumes on storage I/O, on processor architecture, on the rise of Acornsoft from a small garage in Cambridge to a global software corporation. Then he saw the small, well-thumbed book he had read many times before, the pages dog-eared and crinkled, called The Micro-Computer Revolution.

  He read the book while he waited in the foyer for Mandy to arrive. Ten minutes passed, then twenty. Not long until curfew, he thought, and his anxiety increased. Just as he was about to head out into the dark streets by himself, Mandy lurched into the foyer and made a beeline in his direction, tottering over the concrete floor in her high heels.

  She smiled vaguely when she reached him, and Eric could smell the wine and cigarette smoke on her breath.

  “Just in time,” she said. “Just in time.”

  “Yes, only half an hour late.”

  She shrugged. “I bet you had your nose in those computers of yours. Let’s go.”

  He didn’t want to argue with her. Mandy’s good moods did not tend to last long. He decided to savour it while it lasted.

  It was dark and spitting with rain when they left the library. The city streets he knew so well often took on a menacing appearance after dark, and the cobbles underfoot were just about the worst possible surface to navigate in his wheelchair. They turned the corner into St. Andrews Street, passing the ruins of Christ’s College, now just a few crumbling towers surrounding the bomb crater from the blast that had devastated much of central Cambridge in 1996.

  Mandy stared at the silent ruins as she pushed him unsteadily over the cobblestones. Neither of them spoke.

  * * *

  GCHQ, London

  “Mr Weyland, we’ve had a new transmission from Cambridge. Shall I send it through?”

  Guy Weyland looked up, bleary-eyed, from his Inkpaper desk. Virtual documents covered most of it—rectangles of various sizes containing exquisitely crisp text and photographs, held on memdisk or tape somewhere in the armoured core a kilometre beneath the facility. Beyond his desk, bookshelves and filing cabinets groaned under the weight of the physical paperwork they had not been able to banish. His hand hovered, poised with light pen in hand, over the document he had been agonising over.

  The paperwork was relentless. It followed him home every day, and it invaded his sleep. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a true day off.

  His radiophone bleeped again. He sighed and touched a key on the side of the device.

  “Is it important?”

  “Not my call to make, sir, but you told me to keep you informed.”

  “Then send it through, but keep it off the Polnet until I’ve taken a look. I don’t want the Met getting their paws on it yet.”

  A new document appeared in his inbox. He selected it with his light pen and it expanded to fill his desktop, nudging everything else out of the way. It detailed a conversation that had taken place on the Acanet, but one side of it had been encrypted and was indecipherable. The other side of the conversation referred to building a new computer. In the Britain of 2015 that was enough to trigger suspicion and alarm at the highest level.

  “So,” he mumbled to himself as he read, “Cambridge giving us grief again. Damned academics.”

  He reached for his radiophone and called his assistant back. “John, you were in the Ministry in 1996, weren’t you? What was the name of that Web supremacist fellow?”

  ‘The one who wanted free and unregulated information access for the public?”

  ‘The extremist, yes.”

  “We never found out his real name, but he had a codename—B.RIC.”

  Mr Weyland rubbed the stubble on his chin. B.RIC. He remembered now. Those had been dark times for the UK: revolution in the streets, imminent atomic attack, the entire country held to ransom. One name cropped up again and again from that era: B.RIC, an individual who wanted to liberate the world’s information and just give it to everyone, free of charge.

  And all the arrows pointed back to those who guarded their free little corner of the Internetwork so jealously—the Acanet, a bright garden of knowledge the watchful powers had reluctantly allowed to exist for decades. The academics thought that their enlightenment and science, their collaborations with peers in the Soviet lands, could transcend the demands of the state as it entered its seventh decade of cold war.

  “We allow them the sli
ghtest bit of freedom,” he said tiredly, “and look what happens.”

  He looked at the surveillance camera photos of Eric, sat in his wheelchair, hunched over the terminal as his hands flew over the keyboard. In a world where most people hated and distrusted computers, this young man was a pro. Mr Weyland’s gut reaction was that he didn’t look like a terrorist or a Russian spy—he was dressed in black, with short wavy hair in the current fashion, and looked thin, almost frail, small for his age. Still, many years as Minister of Information had taught Weyland that there was no typical profile for a traitor.

  It could be coincidence. This Eric looks like any other geeky kid.

  But B.RIC was a clever bastard. Remember?

  Weyland nodded slowly.

  “Sir, what’s your take on this?” John said patiently.

  “We have an agent at the library, right? Let’s push Eric a little. We have to find out what he intends to do with this computer he’s building. And I want to know who he has been talking to—this person in Norwich who is so good at encrypting all his communications.”

  * * *

  Cambridge

  Eric lay on his bed, staring up at the ceiling of his room. Shadows of bare branches moved there, cast by the neon glow of the lamp outside in the street. A book lay forgotten on the quilt next to him.

  He was thinking about the computer he intended to build. Since childhood he’d had the gift of visualisation, being able to see and remember things others could not; unfortunately it had not helped him succeed at school, in an era when free education evaporated overnight during the Great Austerity of the early 2000s. Since then he’d done his best to teach himself and learn what he could.

  An array of tape drivers for mass storage. The guts of an old Nintendo for the system bus, but I’ll need software...

  He knew a lot, but there was so much more he didn’t know. How could he write firmware for a cobbled-together bunch of hardware? Where would he find memdisks fast enough? He sighed. Brian would know, or one of his other friends on the Acanet.

  The radio was on, tuned to the BBC, but it was full of terrifying stuff about how many tank brigades had been wiped out in Yugoslavia and those two horrible words “nuclear readiness”. He reached out and switched it off.

  The phone rang four, five times downstairs before someone answered it.

  A minute later, he heard someone climbing the stairs—clomp, clomp, clomp, that’ll be Dad, then—and a double-knock on his bedroom door.

  “Eric? Can I come in?”

  He didn’t really want to talk to his dad, but he couldn’t very well ignore him, so he said yes.

  The door opened. Eric’s dad was a tall man and he had to stoop to avoid the door lintel, set low in the old Victorian house. With difficulty, Eric turned and propped himself up on his elbows. The room was not large, sparsely furnished with a bookshelf, desk, wardrobe, and very little else besides the bed. When someone else came into the room it suddenly felt cramped, claustrophobic.

  His dad ran a hand through his thinning head of white hair. By day, Paul Critchley laboured at the brickworks on the outskirts of town and his hands were uncommonly large and muscled, criss-crossed with scars and scabs.

  “Lady from the library called, son,” his dad began, then stopped.

  Eric felt a panicky sensation in his gut. “What did she want?”

  “Says you’ve been hanging around the computer a lot.” His smile was awkward. “I know how much that technical stuff means to you.”

  Eric felt the resentment creeping back—the resentment he’d tried so hard to bury. You knew how much it meant to me at school, he thought for the thousandth time, yet my ambitions, however small, meant nothing to you.

  “So what if I have?” he replied in a calm monotone.

  “She … look, there’s no easy way to say this. You’ve been banned from the library.”

  “What?”

  His body buckled; if he’d had the use of his legs he would have shot upright. His one thought was, They can’t take this away from me. I’ll go insane.

  His dad looked ashamed but did not turn away. “Maybe it’s for the best, eh? You’re not a student, and—”

  “And whose fault is that?”

  He raised both hands in surrender. “All right, but I’ll say this: what’s the use of learning if it’ll do you no good? You can’t work, Eric. Maybe it’s for the best,” he repeated.

  Eric tried to get his rapid breathing under control. When he’d calmed down a little, he looked at the electronic parts, hooked together with wires, over on his table underneath the bookshelf.

  “I could work, you know,” he said. “If things had been different.”

  His dad’s face was haunted with a shadow of anguish when he looked up again, but it vanished in a moment. “Let it be, Eric.”

  * * *

  It was several weeks before Eric found the opportunity to access the Acanet again. Several weeks isolated in the house, unable to interact with the small sphere of Acanet friends that made him feel human again. It was agonising, but he had a plan, and it all depended on Terry, the sysadmin who worked at the library. Eric thought he could count on his help.

  Getting Mandy out of the way was the easy part. She found looking after him an odious chore at the best of times, often complaining to Dad about the injustice of the situation. His response was inevitably “Why don’t you get a job, then?” but that only made her fly into a rage. Eric thought she didn’t like to be reminded of her own failures.

  After Eric had caused the argument and tempers had flared, after Dad had gone to work looking hopeless and angry and not knowing what to do to resolve the conflict in his home, Mandy had stormed out—just as Eric hoped she would. He didn’t know if she would go to the pub or to the job centre in a futile attempt to ease her conscience, but he doubted she’d be back until the evening.

  He wasn’t supposed to leave the house by himself. It was difficult to manoeuvre his wheelchair through the streets without someone to help him, but he stuck to the main roads and took his time.

  The little shop on Bridge Street didn’t look like much on the outside: a crumbling brick facade with a banner of faded blue proclaiming “Cambridge Computers, Est. 1995”. There was an Acorn Inkpaper desk in the window next to a Sinclair graphics terminal, but the display looked drab and uninspired—just two strange objects sitting on upturned boxes in a shop window that nobody ever looked at or admired.

  The door was open, so Eric propelled himself through.

  Nobody was about. Network cable hung coiled on pegs all across one wall. Another Inkpaper terminal took pride of place in the centre of the shop, surrounded by a decorative cordon and a price tag that made Eric’s eyes water.

  ‘Terry?” Eric called after a moment.

  He heard a noise from the back office, and soon Terry emerged, blinking with surprise to see a potential customer. His eyes widened even further when he saw Eric, and he shuffled out onto the shop floor, stooping to avoid the bunches of cables that looped down from the ceiling on their way to the telephone exchange down the road. Terry looked tired and deprived of sleep. In Eric’s experience, he always looked like that. He worked mornings in his shop, and afternoons and evenings as sysadmin at the library computer core. By Eric’s calculations the man worked about ninety hours a week.

  “Eric! Don’t think I’ve ever seen you outside the library. What can I do for you, lad?” the thin man said in a very uncertain tone of voice.

  Eric wondered how he could approach this. Obviously Terry would have noticed that Eric had stopped visiting the computer room, but did he know he’d been banned from the library?

  “I need to get on the Acanet for half an hour,” Eric said, smiling far more confidently than he felt. “I know you have Internetwork access here. Can you help me out?”

  Terry looked at him for a second, then broke his gaze and sighed.

  “Shouldn’t you be at home?”

  “I should be, yes. But I’m not. Despite
what everyone seems to think, I’m actually a grown man.” Maybe that had come out more defensive and prickly than he’d intended.

  Terry smiled at that. “Well, I suppose I don’t have anything else to do,” he said, gesturing to his empty shop. “Follow me.”

  * * *

  / You online?

  Eric waited. Nothing. He looked at his watch—11.00 a.m. Brian would almost certainly be in his lab.

  If only I had his phone number, he thought.

  Terry hovered in the background, leafing through a book and occasionally glancing at his visitor. Eric saw his reflection in the terminal’s glass monitor but the older man looked away when their eyes met.

  “Any luck?” Terry asked after a while.

  “He isn’t online.”

  “Hmm.”

  Eric tried not to feel too disappointed, but it stung. He’d looked forward to this moment for so long—not just to get the information he needed, but to feel as if he belonged to a group of friends again, like he had for a while as a child at school. Perhaps it was to be expected. Perhaps he would never get a break. He hadn’t so far in life; why should things change now?

  Terry stood up and walked over to the terminal, rested his hand on the desk. “What is it you’re trying to do?”

  “I need to talk to my friend in Norwich. He’s a computer expert.”

  “A tough line of work these days,” Terry said with a slight smile, but there was an awful hopelessness in his tone. “I have family in Norwich.”

  Eric looked up at him as if seeing Terry for the first time. They’d chatted together many times over the years, mainly about computers and electronics, but never really talked. He knew nothing about the older man’s life and background—why he seemed to live alone, or why he kept the doors of his shop open despite rarely attracting any customers.