Extropia

by Robin Bootle

  Perfect, thought Edward, a substitute teacher. Hopefully he could daydream his way through the lesson. The sooner it was over, the better. He skimmed through Gamerz magazine as a few of the students continued whispering at the back of the class.

  ‘Anyone who has anything to say that is not in response to me will find themselves in detention. Is that clear?’

  The class hushed. Edward rolled his eyes.

  ‘Good.’ Mr Hound approached the first bank of desks. ‘Apparently Mrs Marven would like you all to do a test. But first…’ He poked his index finger firmly onto the DeskTop of the pupil closest to him. ‘I want your names.’ He peered down at the boy, Rick. ‘Well?’

  Rick slowly lifted his head. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Dean, sir. Richard Dean.’

  Mr Hound gave Rick one last look before his eyes flicked back a row, to Edward. One stride placed him right beside Edward’s desk. ‘Well?’

  ‘Holloughby, sir. Edward,’ he replied, trying to avoid Mr Hound’s glare.

  ‘What’s that? Edward?’ Mr Hound leant in closer. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Holloughby? Are you certain?’

  A pinpricking tingle flushed Edward’s face. What does he mean, am I certain? Why would he think otherwise? And why is he studying the detail on my face like I’m some kind of alien? ‘Yes, sir. Always have been, always will be.’ The corners of his lips curled upwards involuntarily as the class erupted in sniggers.

  ‘Very well. Please wait behind after class.’

  ‘But what…?’

  ‘For making fun of your teacher. End of discussion.’

  As if today couldn’t get any worse. He swiped the exam icon on his DeskTop to display Mrs Marven’s test as Mr Hound continued around the room. All the questions appeared to require formulas he’d been instructed to revise the night before. But he hadn’t. He’d spent the night in his room trying to keep it together, his mind relentlessly drifting back to the moment a year before when he’d discovered James and Dad’s bodies.

  He was about to guess the answer to the first question when his DeskTop turned unexpectedly blank. He checked the DeskTop to his right. It was fine. But only for a moment. One by one, all the DeskTops in his row turned black, followed by those in the rows behind. Three words in the top left of his own screen drew his attention. Next to them, the cursor blinked as though awaiting another command.

  > Communication Link Open

  ‘Er, Mr Hound.’ It was Freya, near the back. ‘I think something’s wrong with my DeskTop.’

  ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘It just went bla…’ Freya’s hands shot to cover her ears as the piercing sound of interference erupted from the DeskTops. Nervous smiles and yelling broke out across the room, some students looking at Mr Hound in the hope that he might have an answer.

  The blank screen in front of Edward switched to static, as did every other DeskTop he could see. Through the fizzing and cracking came a subtle, human-like moan. Behind it was something else. A voice, softly repeating one word. He lowered his ear to the under-desk speaker, and the air refused to leave his lungs.

  E d w a r d, the voice was calling. He listened more closely, hoping to discover that his ears were deceiving him. But it only became clearer.

  E d w a r d. Softly, over and over. The voice was distorted and faint, as though calling across a great distance.

  ‘Making friends with the computers again, Holloughby?’ Simon was sure to speak loudly enough for everyone to hear and the pent-up nervousness of the moment was released in a roar of laughter.

  Edward could at once see he was the only one who didn’t find it funny. Why was it getting to him so badly? There were several Edwards at Greywell School. Why should he assume that whatever was happening had anything to do with him?

  His question was answered as his screen, and only his screen, began to flicker. With each flicker came a clear image – an ancient stonewalled city, consumed by fire and surrounded by fields burnt to black. The hairs on his neck stood on end. Something about it seemed so real. He closed his eyes, but the flames remained imprinted on his eyelids. When he reopened them, the DeskTop had returned to static.

  He glanced about, expecting that others would also have seen it. Everyone seemed transfixed by the ceiling. The lights were flickering on and off, and whirring as if they were about to pop. His arms leapt to shield his face as the light bulbs exploded into a rain of shattered glass. Someone screamed. Others looked at each other, nervously trying to laugh off whatever was happening without anyone really saying anything.

  That was when Edward saw him, staring back with unflinching eyes over a row of snowy static screens. Mr Hound was glaring almost accusingly, as though the whole thing was Edward’s fault.

  Edward’s DeskTop went blank again, releasing him from Mr Hound’s stare. In the top left corner of the screen flashed the three white dots of an impending reboot. The moan and the interference stopped. A sense of relief fell and the room quickly began to fill with the sound of chattering voices.

  ‘Nice one, Mr Hound,’ someone called from the back. ‘Good job on your first day!’

  ‘Be quiet!’ The headmaster was leaning against the doorframe, panting. ‘Mr Hound, you’re needed in the server room.’

  ‘What’s happening?’ Mr Hound marched to the front of the class.

  ‘How in the hell should I know? Some sort of intrusion. You’d better come, quickly.’ With a cursory glance around the room, the headmaster asked, ‘Is anyone hurt? No? Excellent.’ Then he left in a hurry with Mr Hound.

  Edward’s gaze fell to the shattered glass around his feet. To his crashed DeskTop. Where had the image come from? Why this particular DeskTop with Edward sitting in front of it? Before he knew exactly why, he too was heading for the door.

  He peeked into the hallway. To his left, Mr Hound and the headmaster were approaching the end of the corridor. When they rounded the corner, he made his move.

  In the next room, the teacher was passing a dustpan and brush to one of the students. In the next, a student was walking towards the door accompanied by another, a trickle of blood running down her temple. In the third he found what he was looking for. An empty classroom.

  He glanced back to check no one was watching, then darted inside and ran to a DeskTop positioned out of sight from passers-by. Pulling up the virtual keyboard, he logged in using the school’s Admin account, the password to which was easily gleaned by watching over the shoulder of the school’s careless IT assistant every few months. He navigated to the school’s servers. Then to the user log. An unidentified user was currently accessing a folder labelled Student Records. He tapped the folder’s icon.

  Access denied. As expected, whoever was behind the attack had put a firewall in place to prevent anyone seeing exactly which files they were after.

  Focus, he shouted to himself. Trace the connection. He raised the command prompt, scouring the established connections for those that shouldn’t have been there. One name popped out amongst all the rest: VC-Host. He double tapped for additional detail.

  A sequence of little white words appeared against the black background. The location of the intruder. His heart fluttered, and all thoughts in his mind ground to a halt. The information before him couldn’t possibly be correct.

  Process Location: VCVW-0000000002

  Common Name: Extropia

  ‘That’s impossible!’ He leapt to his feet, toppling the chair over behind him.

  ‘What is?’

  He jumped to see Mr Hound standing inside the doorway with the headmaster. The sound of interference went quiet. ‘I… I think I left some homework on the hard drive yesterday,’ he said, trying to retain some semblance of innocence. He couldn’t let them discover what
he’d been doing.

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Holloughby,’ snapped the headmaster. ‘Why aren’t you in your classroom?’

  ‘Who were you communicating with?’ Mr Hound asked.

  ‘What? No, I wasn’t communicating with anyone!’ He glanced back to the DeskTop, needing to see the location again, needing affirmation that he’d really seen what his eyes were telling him. But the DeskTop was blank.

  ‘He’s looking for you, isn’t he? Tell me, for the love of God, that you did not reply.’

  ‘That’s quite enough, Mr Hound!’ barked the headmaster. ‘Go back to your class and inform your students we’re calling an early end to school for the day.’ He glared at Edward. ‘Holloughby, my office, first thing tomorrow morning!’

  2

  Contact

  Extropia.

  The name bounded around his head. But not just the name. Images of his brother and father, suspended, drowned in glowing blue. The breathless panic. The surreal feeling that lasted for days: they couldn’t really be dead.

  And newspaper headlines, claiming Edward himself had somehow been involved. Innocent Orphan or Child Murderer? Founder’s son implicated in accident.

  The moment Edward had tried to bring Vanderboom to justice, Vanderboom had claimed he’d never even been at the Founders’ house that night. That he hadn’t been made aware of any test. The fact that the man could tell such a barefaced set of lies still made Edward’s blood boil. And even more frustrating was the fact that in denying being there, Vanderboom was as good as proving he was behind the accident.

  But it had been Edward’s word against Vanderboom’s. Vanderboom used the media to assassinate Edward’s character. The row with Dad on the night of the accident was all the inspiration Vanderboom had needed. Edward had declared that he hated Extropia, and Vanderboom had used that to suggest he was behind the accident.

  His friends corroborated the story. It was no secret that his relationship with his family had been terrible since Mum died. The police began to treat him as much as a suspect as Vanderboom, questioning everything he said and digging into his past. On one side was Vanderboom, viciously attacking him at every opportunity. On the other was the police, twisting his words into outrageous theories, over and over, until he wasn’t even sure himself what was real and what wasn’t any more.

  Then one day, about eight weeks after the accident, the police strangely seemed to lose interest, in Edward at least. He continued trying to push a court case against Vanderboom, but his lawyer had as good as declared they didn’t stand a chance. All the while, life at school had become unbearable; all his friends had turned against him. Even the people in his temporary foster home saw him as nothing but trouble. Finally, after months of harassment and bullying, and with no one to turn to, he ran away.

  One morning he woke up as Edward Founder of Harrogate, by the evening he was Edward Winton, orphan to the recently deceased Mr and Mrs Winton and registered to a care centre in Hampshire called Familiar Home, two hundred miles south. It turned out social services had far tougher IT security than he’d expected, but not that tough. He showed up as a new transfer one afternoon, and despite a few uncertain and worried looks from the head carer, his unexpected arrival was glossed over – the head carer wouldn’t have wanted to appear incompetent, he figured; Edward was on the system, therefore he was her responsibility. In a matter of weeks, the Holloughbys and he had been allocated to one another.

  None of this would have been possible if he hadn’t been a minor; the media had never broadcast his face, and so no one recognised him. He’d successfully cut all ties with his previous life. Or so he had thought.

  Part of him wished he was losing his mind. But there was no denying what he’d seen. Common Name: Extropia. He squirmed at the memory of Mr Hound and the headmaster standing in the doorway, catching him at the DeskTop. He never should have exposed himself like that. None of the teachers knew how good he was with computers. No one did.

  * * *

  He reached the front door of 45 Weston Park Road. On the other side, Ingrid, his foster mother, would be slumped in her chair facing her VirtuaCorp TeleWall, a wall-sized screen that could display anything from TV broadcasts to a roaring fire or wallpaper.

  He put the key in the door and swung it open, closing it gently behind him. As expected, Ingrid’s eyes were fixed on the TeleWall. He snuck past the back of her chair and placed his foot on the first step of the stairwell. Then, he froze.

  ‘This cyber-attack is the latest in a string of incidents related to VirtuaCorp’s VirtuaWorld technology. A year ago, Edward Founder was accused of killing his father in an attempt to destroy VirtuaCorp’s groundbreaking research.’

  He lifted his foot from the step and turned to face the TeleWall. A news reporter was standing outside the gate of a deserted school. But it wasn’t Greywell School.

  ‘Only yesterday we heard the bizarre rumours suggesting one of VirtuaCorp’s test engineers suffered a heart attack while still inside her VirtuaPort. Despite being legally dead, witnesses report seeing her projection inside VirtuaWorld for a further ten minutes after the time she supposedly died. They’re calling her “the ghost of cyberspace”.

  ‘And today, it’s our schools that are under attack. Initial reports suggest a virus was planted somewhere within VirtuaWorld’s software, although we can’t be sure what the perpetrators were trying to accomplish. So far, a total of 357 schools are known to have been affected, and the number continues to rise.’

  ‘I suppose this is why you’re home early, is it?’ asked Ingrid.

  For a moment the world seemed to stop. How could she know he was personally involved? But then, as she continued to gaze indifferently at the screen, he understood. ‘Yeah, they closed school for the day,’ he replied.

  The picture flipped from the reporter to the lobby of a large office building. Filling the screen was the aging, reddened face of a man that Edward recognised all too well. Werner Vanderboom, CEO, VirtuaCorp.

  ‘While all of us at VirtuaCorp are filled with regret, I can assure people that the situation is now completely under control. We believe the incident to be industrial sabotage – there will always be those afraid or jealous of technological progress. But we will, indeed we must, overcome them.’

  ‘And what about the reports of a stolen VirtuaPort?’

  ‘More lies!’ Vanderboom was visibly flustered. ‘Just like this fanciful story of a ghost – all planted by the naysayers who would see this technology fail!’

  ‘Mr Vanderboom, what about suggestions that VirtuaWorld technology is dangerous, that VirtuaPorts can deliberately harm their users?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s all I have time for.’

  ‘Mr Vanderboom?’ The reporter raised her voice as Vanderboom disappeared from camera. ‘Mr Vanderboom?’

  ‘VirtuaPorts can harm their users? Unbelievable!’ Edward shouted at the screen. ‘Who the hell does he think he is?’

  ‘Oh, do shut up, Edward.’ Ingrid scowled. ‘What’s he ever done to you?’

  It was his cue to leave the room. She wouldn’t understand, couldn’t understand. He raced upstairs and slammed his door.

  Sitting on his bed, he reached behind his bedside table and pulled out a framed photo. Except for some of his clothes, it was the only possession he’d kept from his previous life. A thin crack ran down one side, skewing Mum’s face. They were outside the front of their old terraced house in North London where they’d lived before Dad had dragged Mum up north, as she’d always put it. James and Dad had hoisted Edward onto their shoulders, after he’d won Junior Coder earlier that day. Dad had been so proud, his son following in his footsteps.

  And now they’re all dead, he thought, giving way to a wave of self-pity. And to top it all, Extropia and Vanderboom, the things that had killed Dad and James, were back. He’d always known today was g
oing to be tough, but nothing could have prepared him for that.

  He got up and paced the room. He needed to make sense of all the unanswered questions circling his mind. Who had caused the attacks on the schools, and what did it have to do with Extropia? He was as good as certain the attack couldn’t have been a virus as the news had suggested, at least not one intending to damage VirtuaWorld’s reputation. The return of Extropia and a voice calling his name were testament to that. Whatever it was, it had targeted Edward himself.

  He flicked on his outdated flat-screen TV, pulled a keyboard from under his bed and navigated back to the school’s servers, hoping to search for Extropia with the same location code he’d found that morning. Unsurprisingly, the process he’d spotted before, VC-Host, was long gone. He’d have to try a different route, one he wasn’t sure he was capable of. Straight to the heart of VirtuaCorp’s servers.

  A thump on the front door startled him. Ingrid’s muffled voice said, ‘Coming,’ but whoever it was didn’t wait. More thumps, just as loud.

  Seconds later, Ingrid’s voice bellowed up the stairs. ‘Edward, someone’s here for you. Says you need to go to school to speak to the police!’

  Blood rushed to his head. The room seemed to blur, its walls and ceiling merging to a seamless, throbbing white. The police meant questions. Questions meant answers and most likely being forced to reveal who he really was. If he’d just stayed at his DeskTop then none of this would be happening. He ran to the window. Outside was one unmarked estate. A detective then, not just any old police officer.

  ‘Edward! Hurry up!’

  He edged down the stairs, certain that each step was a step closer to being thrown back into his old life. To being exposed as the crazy kid who tried to destroy the world’s greatest piece of technology. Part of him wondered if he could run the other way, head out the back and hide until the whole thing had blown over.