by Teri Terry
Then I slowly bring my hands together. Start to collapse the walls of Gecko’s S’hack.
I stop when the screaming starts.
26
I sit up abruptly in the PIP. I didn’t unplug. At least, I didn’t mean to. How am I back here?
The door is ripped open: Tempo. ‘What’s happened? Were you screaming?’ She comes in.
‘I…I don’t know. I have to go back. It’s Gecko; he’s trapped, and I tried to get him out. But it didn’t work.’
Now Crystal is in the doorway, staring at me. ‘You let her plug in?’ She stares at Tempo in outrage. ‘What’s she done?’ she demands.
Tempo gives Crystal a quelling look, but she stands her ground. ‘Tell us about Gecko,’ Tempo says, with slight stress on his name as if saying not to mention the memory beads. As if I was going to. As if I can concentrate on anything now but the sound of his voice still ringing out in pain inside my head.
‘We were talking, and—’
‘But I told you not to message anyone.’ Tempo’s face is coldly furious.
‘I didn’t! He’s in his S’hack.’
They exchange a look of disbelief. ‘You went to his S’hack?’ Crystal says. ‘How on earth did you find it?’
‘Can’t you do that? I just thought of Gecko, and an arrow appeared that led me to him. Let me go back, and…’
Tempo shakes her head. ‘Not until you explain.’
‘Shut up and I’ll try,’ I snap. Anger crosses Tempo’s face but she keeps her lips pressed together, silent.
‘He said he was caught; that they gave him some drugs, and then he was in the void. He’s in his S’hack but can’t get out. I made a door I could get in and out of, but when he tried, it disappeared, and he slammed into the wall. I went back in, and—’ I hesitate, with a glance at Crystal, but her stance says she’s not going anywhere, and time may be important. So I continue in a rush ‘—I spun the void to see if collapsing his room could get him out.’
‘You did what?’ Crystal says, jaw dropping.
‘Spun the silver, then folded it in.’
There is an odd look on Tempo’s face, a trace of satisfaction, almost, that is quickly replaced by coldness. ‘So, let’s see if we have this straight. He was trapped in a room, and you collapsed the room while you were both in it. Doesn’t sound too clever. And then?’
‘I stopped before it collapsed completely, when he started calling out. And somehow what happened made me unplug here, pull myself from there to here – I didn’t decide to do it, it just happened. Let me go back and see if he is OK.’
‘You unplugged from the void?’ Crystal says, shock on her face. Despite everything else some small part of me notices Tempo isn’t reacting, not to that; not that way.
‘You dys!’ Crystal pushes her hands into my shoulders. ‘Don’t you know what will happen to him if his virtual self is destroyed in the void, and can’t go back to his body? He’ll be a shell, like he’s in a coma, for the rest of his life.’
‘But I thought people died in games all the time. It doesn’t do anything to them!’
Tempo shakes her head. ‘It’s not the same. Places created by PareCo have escape code; this is what allows you to unplug from Realtime or games at will, or if something happens to you. The void and S’hacker spaces do not.’
I stare at her, shocked and terrified at what might have happened. ‘I have to go back.’
‘I’m coming with you,’ Crystal says.
‘No,’ Tempo says. ‘You know this is one for me. Stay here, Crystal,’ she says, her voice gentle this time, then turns to me. ‘Plug in. Climb into the void and find me. I can help.’
I lie back into the PIP, and will the connection to be quick. It almost slams into me, and I gasp; circles spin in front of my eyes but soon vanish. The Realtime hallway is there, the silver ladder. I race up into the void, then focus on finding Tempo. The arrows are instant and bright, and I run.
She’s just emerging from her hatch when I find her. She looks different in the void – younger – her hair is loose, but doesn’t whip around like mine. It behaves, hanging all around her head weirdly, as if suspended in midair.
‘Ah, there you are,’ she says. ‘Now, can you find Gecko?’
I concentrate on his face, and the arrow appears.
‘Clever,’ she says. We follow the arrow, and as always time in the void seems different; I can’t tell if we run for a minute or an hour, and then…
We’re there. His room is distorted, misshapen, flattened. ‘Gecko?’ I call out, and can hear the panic in my voice.
‘Stand back, Luna,’ Tempo says. ‘I’ll take time back.’
I do as she says. After, when I think about it, I can’t work out what happened next. There was some sort of swirl, a vortex, about Tempo, but not like when I do it.
And the next thing I know I’m back in his S’hack, staring at Gecko. No sign of Tempo. He’s standing there; the room is upright and square. As it was when I first arrived. Has Tempo really spun us back in time?
‘What is it?’ he says. ‘Isn’t it working?’
I don’t answer, and just stand there, looking at him. Struggling not to rush over, to check if everything is still where it should be.
‘The spinning and collapsing the room thing. Can’t do it?’ he prompts.
‘I…no. I can’t do it. I’m sorry.’
He shrugs. ‘I was hoping. But never really believed it was possible. Don’t worry about me; I’ll find a way out of here. There’d be no point to them leaving me in here forever. Whatever it is they want from me, I’ll find out when they’re ready.’
‘Right.’
‘You better get going. Tempo’s kind of impatient; she’ll wonder what you’re getting up to, plugged in for so long.’
She knows. Can she hear us, out there? But out loud all I say is, ‘OK’. And then – ‘Before I go, there is one other thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I’m sorry for what I said before. I forgive you. For not telling me stuff.’
I take a step towards him; he takes one towards me. He hesitates, unsure, and I reach out my hands, pull him closer. His arms encircle my shoulders, mine go around his waist. I turn my head and nestle against his chest. His breath is warm in my hair; his heart beats under my cheek. Virtual this may be, but it feels close, warm, real. I breathe in and hold this moment, this memory, and fill myself with it. To make it take away the one before of him screaming in pain, pain that I caused. Stuff that I’ll never tell, so how can I hold anything he never told me against him?
We obliterate and erase it until it never was.
Once we unplug, Tempo takes me back to the room where I sleep, tells me to rest, that the timing she did in the void with me in the centre of it is like I lived extra days. She actually gets me to lie down and tucks the blankets around me. I’m so tired that I let her, eyes already closing.
‘We’ll talk tonight,’ she says.
As I drift off I hear her on the other side of the door, reassuring Crystal that Gecko is all right. It must make Crystal furious that I saw him in his prison and she didn’t, but there is no comfort in that. I almost killed his virtual self, didn’t I? Without that part of him there would have been no Gecko, none of what makes him who he is. If we’d thought it through a little more, collapsing his S’hack with him and me in it when he couldn’t escape wasn’t going to do anything good, was it?
And I feel lost, drifting, as if my anchor has been cut. The questions are too many, almost as if I can’t focus through them all to the ones that are most important, and the answers are things I can’t face or understand. Nanna would have said this day was a four: that I need to centre, endure and persist. But the stability is elusive.
I slip into uneasy dreams: of liquid power rushing throug
h my veins, bleeding out and covering the world in beautiful, glistening silver. Opaque, smothering the land and blocking the sun.
27
‘You must have questions,’ Tempo says. We are in a back office, alone, and I’m fixed in her eyes. They’re an odd colour: the silver-grey, like Astra’s, like my own eyes, is there, but mixed with some indefinable other that seems to shift in the light. The same eyes that can unravel time in the void? Undo things that have been done. I shiver. What is she? What am I?
‘I don’t know where to start,’ I say, feeling subdued, quiet, and still all wrong in the head from Tempo timing the void; not like myself, at all. And who am I, really?
‘With everything else that happened, I didn’t get a chance to ask how you got on with the memory beads. Did you manage to access them?’
I nod. The rush of Astra’s warmth, and love. The shock revelations. ‘So I’m some sort of genetic experiment, is that it?’’
She doesn’t deny it. ‘I wouldn’t put it that way,’ she says, eventually.
‘How did my parents end up together?’
‘There were a number of possible male candidates with the desired trait present in their own mothers. This was important as it is linked to the X chromosome, so a man, who has only one X chromosome, will pass a copy of the genes involved to all of his daughters. Women have two X chromosomes, and your mother was already known to carry one copy of the gene, so in this match any daughter would have a fifty-fifty chance of having the trait. We managed to get DNA samples in various ways. Your dad was the most likely candidate: his mother had the strongest desired trait.’
‘Stop with the genetics lesson. So what happened is this: she checked out his genes not his jeans, and then targeted him.’ He didn’t stand a chance. Astra was beautiful, poised, smart. Everything my bumbling dad wasn’t. A swirl of anger on his behalf brings me out of this trance. ‘This is so wrong! Nobody asked him what he wanted. Nobody asked me.’
‘A little hard to do before you were born.’ She hesitates. ‘No matter how things started, Astra loved you, Luna. She came to care for your dad very much also.’
I shrug. Too little, too late, to make up for what she did? But I know she loved me. I felt it, all tied into her memories from years ago. Is that why those memories were placed there with the others? Emotional manipulation from beyond. I’m tired: I don’t want this. I want to go home.
‘And what about your grandmother, Luna? She wasn’t involved in any of this, and she has paid the ultimate price.’
The anger comes back in a rush. I slam a fist on the desk. ‘But what is it you think I can do about any of this? Look what happened when I tried to help Gecko. I don’t know what I can do, what I can’t. I could have as good as killed him.’
‘What you did was dangerous.’
‘I know that now.’
‘Luna, if you are going to go to the void you have to learn what you can control and what you can’t. If you are with us, I can teach you.’
Part of me sings yes; more says no. And there is so much that I don’t know. ‘You haven’t told me everything about who you are, what you are, have you?’
She smiles, pleased. ‘About our organisation? Heywood and friends – the Worms—’ she smiles again ‘—are a small offshoot of something far greater that he knows nothing about. It is COS – the Council of Scientists. I’ve been on the board for many years; your mother used to be the chair.’
‘Astra mentioned it in her memory, but apart from that, I’ve never heard of it before. What is it?’
‘The NUN cult of rationality is stifling all human advances. Without imagination – and intuition – there can be no progress, in science or any other areas for that matter. And PareCo has exploited this weakness, and manipulated NUN for their own ends. COS formed to stop them: we need you. Join us, Luna. We can train you.’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t want to go back to the void.’
‘You may be the only one who can find Gecko again. He’s invisible to me when he’s in his S’hack. I’ve no idea how PareCo imprisoned him there; we have to work out how to get him out.’
‘But I don’t understand any of this! I don’t even get what the void is, or how I can manipulate it. Stuff just happens. It scares me.’ True, but it is also exhilarating. I’ve never felt more alive than with the power rush of gathering and using silver; everything in the real world feels dull, colourless, in comparison.
‘I know,’ Tempo says, as if she acknowledges what I said and what I didn’t say at the same time. And her eyes are both sad and angry – a strange mix. She shakes her head. ‘All these are things your mother was starting to teach you. And your father stopped me from seeing you, or you would know all of it and not be in this sea of confusion. He seemed to think you’d be safer if you didn’t know, but he was wrong. I can help you understand.’
I say nothing. Even though Astra said he knew I was a S’hacker, I’m still stunned to think that Dad could have known any of this. And he didn’t tell me?
‘The virtual world everyone knows – Realtime hallways, personal and group spaces, holiday worlds, games – are all constructed out of the void by PareCo. Coded computer language creates three-dimensional places that are completely real to our virtual selves. Ordinary Hackers can manipulate the places built out of the void by PareCo by mentally tapping into the code.’
‘Gecko told me that. That PareCo allows this, uses it to monitor Hackers. To keep tabs on them and what they can do. But what about S’hackers?’
‘S’hackers can use the void themselves and create their own spaces, like Gecko’s S’hack, and even whole worlds. This is what Astra did with her space game worlds, so famous even now.’
‘But how do S’hackers manipulate the void?’
‘How do you do it?’
‘I have no idea. It was more random to start with; I didn’t even know I made things, or the arrow that led me to Gecko the first time I did it, or the hatches and doors. How do I do it?’
‘Because you are of the void.’
‘But what does that mean?’
‘The void runs in you; in your DNA. It is programmed to be part of you, like the S’hacker marks in your skin. Hacker tattoos are ink in flesh tattoos; yours are of the void.’
‘I don’t understand. How can the void be programmed to be part of me?’
‘Early Hackers worked with scientists to find ways to get around PareCo’s control. They needed to be able to manipulate the void themselves. They engineered this into their DNA; now this ability is passed from parent to child. It’s running in your veins. It’s part of you, like your name.’
‘My name? But Luna was from a character in Virtual Harry Potter World. My parents met there.’
She shakes her head. ‘Not that name. What is your S’hacker name?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Think about it. I’m Tempo – time. Astra – the stars. Crystal – ice.’
‘What about Gecko? Isn’t a gecko a lizard?’
‘Yes. One that can walk on ceilings, unnoticed. Gecko – the spy. He has been our best spy on PareCo. Insinuates himself into their worlds without notice. Or so we always thought. What is your S’hacker name?’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘You must choose it yourself. Most S’hackers do so when they are much younger, by ten at the latest. Once they know what skills they have in the void.’
‘I have none.’
‘Is that so? What you could do hadn’t fully manifested when Astra died, but I know she thought your abilities could be crucial, especially combined with the double awareness you indeed inherited from your grandmother, as was hoped. And the ability to unplug from within the void that seems to have come with it.’
‘But what do you—’
‘Enough questions for now, Luna. I ha
ve one for you. What are you going to do?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your mother and I were both committed – and I still am – to stopping PareCo’s relentless manipulation and control of the worlds, virtual and otherwise. You’ve seen with your own eyes how PareCo has used the tests to their own ends; how they’re willing to go to any lengths – even murder – to keep their secrets. Your mother died in this quest; your grandmother was a victim of it. Where do you stand?’
Anger struggles with caution. Gecko said to keep away from PareCo. And Tempo’s words don’t quite jive with Astra’s: something is troubling me, deep inside, about Astra and Tempo. Astra was against the RQ tests and PareCo manipulating them for their own purposes. She said I could change things. What about Tempo? ‘What is it that you want?’ I ask her.
She smiles, pleased. ‘Power can’t vanish, only change form. If PareCo isn’t in control there will be a power vacuum that must be filled. With our abilities, S’hackers are the logical replacement.’
‘Astra never said anything about taking over.’
‘Your mother was an idealist. I’m more…practical. But if she knew what they’ve done with the new Implants, she’d agree with me. And our goals were always the same: unmask PareCo. The emperor has no clothes.’ Prickles run up my back: the same words Astra used in her memory.
‘But I don’t understand what you want from me!’
Her eyebrows go up. ‘That is for you to determine. What can you do for us? Why? Think about these things, Luna. These things will become obvious when you choose your name.’
I am thinking about it. But I just want to go home. I want none of this to have happened. I stare at my hand, turn it over. The veins faintly visible in my wrist look the same as anyone else’s – a faint blue-green under the skin – but I know different now. Silver runs through my body, whether I want it to or not.
Wanting things to be as they were won’t bring Nanna back, won’t change that everything I thought I knew about my mother, about my parents’ relationship, was wrong.
