The Boy Who Fell from the Sky, Jule Owen [classic romance novels txt] 📗

the red clay top of the chimney, peering into the darkness. 

The beebot isn’t fitted with lights or infrared vision. As he starts to descend, he’s blind, but he’s able to use the intelligent software bundled with the package he’s downloaded to auto-drive the beebot by bouncing radar off the brickwork. If he’d tried to drive himself, he would have become disorientated and likely crashed the little robot into the side of the chimney. 

As it happens, Mr Lestrange hasn’t blocked off his chimney, and the beebot comes into the light, flying around a room in number 21. He loops around the light fitting and lowers the beebot onto the uncarpeted floor, then turns it slowly on its feet to get a 360° view of the room. 

It’s a bedroom. There’s a double bed with tree-trunk-sized wooden legs, a wardrobe, and a sideboard the height of the Shard in relation to the beebot. It’s a normal bedroom, except it’s meticulously clean and tidy, as though no one uses it. 

Flying the beebot around the room, he notices that the wardrobe door is slightly ajar, and he squeezes into it. It’s full of clothes, neatly hung, unworn, and like new. Carefully, he edges free again, flies to the door, and walks under it. 

The floorboards on the landing shine, cleaner than those in Mathew’s own house and surgically spotless. Perhaps Mr Lestrange has a newer model HomeAngel. 

He scutters along the hallway with tiny, quick bee feet and under the door of the bedroom at the front of the house, the one with the bay window, where Lestrange watches Clara. 

This is much like the back bedroom, the checklist of normality all present in terms of bedroom furniture, but also immaculate and unlived in. There are no personal possessions lying around, no worn clothes lying across chairs, no hairbrushes, Papers, ePinz, or spare Lenzes. 

But these must be spare rooms. Mr Lestrange lives alone, and this is a big house for a single person. He walks back under the door and takes a quick tour of the bathroom, buzzing through the open door, noting the absence of any cleaning robots and the pristine state of the sink, the toilet, and the shower. 

There’s another bedroom, the third and last. This room is empty but for an upholstered armchair and a telescope on a stand pointing towards an unadorned up-and-down sash fenestration, the size of a cathedral window from the perspective of the beebot. It has a view across the back garden. 

The house is a mirror image of his own, with the kitchen at the back, a front room, and a dining room. The kitchen extends into a conservatory containing some plants, orange and lemon trees, and a number of orchids on a small, low table. The kitchen is modern, containing the usual SuperChef Replicator food maker, sink, waste disposal unit, cupboards for storage, dining table and chairs, and fridge. 

Winging to where the old dining room is in his house, he crawls under the door into blackness. It’s a Darkroom, like his, with a couple of chairs. There are small boxes in the top corners of the room and at various points around the sides, containing cameras; standard equipment. 

There’s only one room left. He crawls under the door to the front room. In its dimensions, it’s exactly like the room in Gen Lacey’s house and the mirror image of his own front room, with large, light bay windows at the front. But this room doesn’t have a sofa, armchairs, or a Canvas like most lounges. 

It’s a library. The walls are fitted from floor to ceiling with bookshelves filled to bursting with old paper books of the type people rarely keep in their houses anymore, unless they are special presents, like the Chinese books Ju Chen bought Mathew for his last birthday. It’s a lot like his grandmother’s library in Elgol.

The beebot flies alongside the shelves, its eyes combing decorative book spines, some colourful, some with elaborate bindings and gold-leaf lettering. From their titles, they are history books, ordered by chronology from the farthest bottom right corner of the room, climbing through the centuries along each shelf section. He flies past strange words: Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Mesopotamia, Harappan, Egypt, Kingdom of Kush, Indus Valley, Vedic, Xia, Shang, Sassanid, Delian League, Maurya, Gupta, Dravidian, Aksumite. The letters are huge compared to the beebot. 

Then there are more familiar words, like Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Ottoman, Mayan, Aztecs. From things his grandmother has told him, he recognises the Qin and the Han. The book’s subjects become more familiar: the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Empire, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the French and Russian Revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War, Information Age, Globalisation, the World Council. It’s like he is flying along human history itself. Then he notices something that stops him in his tracks. 

Launching from the shelf, he circles the beebot around the room to go back and survey it again. 

But he hasn’t imagined it. 

There on the shelf is a book with the title “World War III.” 

Landing the beebot, he stops for a moment to make sure he’s recording. As he does so, the door to the room swings open and Mr Lestrange hurries to the table standing in the bay window. There’s a book lying there. He opens the cover and bends over it. Carefully, Mathew takes off from the shelf and flies to the table, hovering above Mr Lestrange’s head. From here he is able to take in the book, adjusting the focus of the beebot’s eyes and zooming in on the page.

Lestrange’s eyes are staring at the words on the left page. The beebot follows his gaze. 

The words are rewriting themselves as Lestrange reads. The old words turn red, a line runs through them, the letters waver for a moment and then disappear as new letters and words appear. The beebot focuses in further. 

Mathew reads:

Mathew Erlang focuses the beebot cameras on the words in the book and starts to read what is written, profoundly shaken to realise he is reading about himself.

Mr Lestrange’s gaze peels from the book as he turns around. Mathew watches as Lestrange’s hand reaches towards the beebot, blocking his view of the room. He doesn’t have time to react. In the Darkroom, his video feed suddenly goes dark. 

Mathew sits in his chair for several moments. What he has witnessed is impossible, and he’s stunned, not trusting his own eyes. Then he remembers he recorded it all, and he reboots the system to recover the file, and sets it to play. 

There’s nothing but static. 

Thinking he may have loaded the file incorrectly, he tries again. Still receiving static, he initiates a routine to check for errors on the file. The file appears to be fine. He keeps trying, unable to process the fact that he has no way of knowing whether he saw something irrational or is losing his mind. As he sits there, trying the same things over and over in different order, something small comes into the room. It takes a circuit and then lands on the back of his hand. 

It’s the beebot. 

Someone else has taken control of it. Text flashes fleetingly in front of Mathew, one word at a time. It says: 

I think this is yours. It’s a nice little robot, Mathew. Why don’t you use it to talk to Clara? She’ll like it, I’ll bet. 

Best regards, 

Your neighbour.

In the Darkroom, Mathew’s head is spinning, his brain struggling to process the words that just floated in front of him. 

Then he’s interrupted by a Consort message from Clara.

“Hi. It’s me.”

“Hey, there!”

“What are you up to?”

“I’ve just been visiting my neighbour.”

“What?!”

“Not in person.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I can’t explain here. I’ll tell you when you come round again.”

No sooner has he hung up from talking to Clara than he’s pinged again, this time via Charybdis.

“Mathew. It is me: the girl building you a world. I will ring your holophone on the Blackweb via a scrambled line in half a minute. Please accept my call.”

Mathew waits for thirty long seconds, and then the request comes through. Household security systems kick in: “Unverifiable call. Maybe a virus or a spam call. Warning. Advise not to accept.”

Mathew accepts the call. 

Eva appears before him. She is in her armchair but sitting on the edge of the seat and appears nervous.

“I can’t speak long,” she says. “My father is at home, and he will kill me if he discovers I am calling you. 

“We live on Tverskaya Street in Moscow, and yesterday there was a huge military parade. The usual thing with tanks and missiles, but there were also soldiers in exoskeletons and proper robot soldiers, seven or eight feet tall. They congregated in Red Square by the Kremlin. There were a lot of politicians and endless boring speeches; it was all over the TV. It was ridiculous. 

“Anyway, the Kremlin is closing shared services with enemy states. They haven’t shut ordinary Nexus connections yet, but I think that will happen within a day or so. They have shut down the servers I have with you, and I was issued with a warning. The whole country has gone insane.”

“Eva, I am so sorry. The last thing I want to do is get you into trouble,” Mathew says.

“Not at all. You are not the problem. Anyway, I wanted to ask you, given your government is probably as mad in its own way, if you still wanted to continue. It will take me a day or so, but I’m pretty sure I will be able to build the world on servers on the Blackweb. I have all the code copied to offline storage. I’ll understand if you think it’s too dangerous, but I suddenly feel more like doing this than ever. Do you think I’m a lunatic?”

“Yes.”

Eva looks crestfallen. 

Mathew says, “But so am I. Let’s do it anyway.”

Eva and her armchair have gone. The room is dark and then . . .

“Offer extended. Unbelievable value. Absolutely free technical stuff. Say ‘Yes’ to accept. Why wouldn’t you?”  

“Accept,” Mathew says. “Hello, Wooden Soldier.”

“Please call me No Right Turn. You’re Hard Shoulder.”

“Okay, No Right Turn.”

“Greetings, Hard Shoulder. I have news.”

“Great. I hope it wasn’t risky.”

“No! A little bit of hacking. So many organisations claim to have quantum security, but opening government and corporate records is as easy as opening the fridge. As it happens, you were right. Mr Lestrange of 21 Pickervance Road doesn’t exist or, at least, not in a normal way.”

“I’m listening.”

“He does have a social security number.”

Mathew is disappointed. “How is that not existing?”

“Wait a minute. Patience. There are also medibot records, an ID card, a bank account, and a passport. 

“Well, it sounds to me like he does exist.”

“All of his records are registered as current, but none were updated in the last sixteen years. His bank account hasn’t been touched; it’s accumulated interest, though. He’s wealthy. It’s amazing what compound interest does with time. There are no deposits or withdrawals registered; he’s not left the country, although his passport was auto-renewed, as was his ID card, the usual in-person interview waived. The weirdest thing is his medibot data. It’s absolutely normal.”

“Why is that weird?”

“No one’s medibot information is absolutely normal, unless the data is fabricated. Your man truly doesn’t exist, Hard Shoulder.