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

against the trunk of a tree, managing to build a makeshift shelter, like a half-tepee. He just fits inside if he crouches into a ball, his knees drawn to his chin. It is not totally dry, but at least it keeps the pounding off his skull. Then he sits and waits, staring at his boots, worrying about his feet and grateful for the opportunity to rest. When he’s still, they don’t hurt as much. 

In his peripheral vision, he catches something moving on a leaf, near his face. Something slow. The hair on the back of his neck stands. Without moving his head, he turns his eyes. 

There is a spider, the size of his hand, walking across a leaf hanging beside him. It stops. It is waiting, watching, smelling, or whatever deadly jungle spiders do. He doesn’t dare move. He doesn’t dare breathe. Then, as silently as it arrived, it moves off into the undergrowth. He lets go of the breath he was holding. 

The rain eases, then stops, and he crawls from his shelter. It’s getting dark. The forest is dripping. 

Even if I knew how, he thinks, I’ll never make a fire in this dampness. 

Less exuberantly, he starts to walk again, thinking it’s best to keep moving. The stream becomes a river. 

Then he hears the noise from his dream. He remembers it now: a primal, horrifying sound, a deep, guttural growl. Angry. No – beyond angry – amoral. . . . More than anything it sounds hungry. 

Stopping dead in his tracks, he surveys around. Nothing. But he knows now for sure, something in the forest is watching him. He strains to detect movement, the crack of a twig, the sound of branches or leaves brushing against a body. His ears pulse with the sound of his treacherous heart, louder than the birds and the insects. Sweat drips off his nose as he stares into the forest. Leaves bob as rainwater drips from higher branches. 

It’s getting dark, and he doesn’t want to be walking in the forest when this growling creature might come at him from anywhere. 

He is standing beside a tall tree. Long, thick, sinuous vines hang from its branches. He grabs one and uses it to pull himself up, his feet walking up the side of the trunk, wincing with pain. The vine rope slips in his hand, the muscles in his shoulders and arms burn, his arms aren’t strong enough. 

Why didn’t he spend more time playing in the holovision gym? 

He loses his grip and falls. Trying again, he finds footholds between branches and in knotholes, grits his teeth, and wraps the vine partially around his arm to gain leverage. After a few falls, he climbs the tree, swearing all the way. Twenty feet up, there’s a gap between the branches big enough for him to fit in if he scrunches into a ball. 

He’s breathing heavily; the dripping forest pelts him with drops of rain still running off leaves and branches. At first he ignores it. He rests his head on his hands, his knees drawn up to his chest, and closes his eyes. The drips are less frequent but they are large and hard. Every time he starts to feel himself drifting off to sleep, one breaks on his head or his face. After a long hour, he is wide awake staring at the sodden wood of the tree. He doesn’t want to have to climb down from the tree again.

I’ll never sleep like this. I have to find a way to cover myself. 

Grabbing the vines, he lowers himself from the tree and collects the same kind of leaves he used earlier to shelter himself from the rain. 

He finds some long strips of supple bark to tie the leaves into a bundle and climbs again, slightly more adept this time. Once he arrives and secures his seat by wedging a leg to push his body back against the trunk, he hauls his parcel after him and unties it. He lays half of the long leaves in the fork of the trunk that is acting as his bed. The rest he wedges between branches above him, making a rough kind of roof.

It's pitch dark now, and he tries to get comfortable. All around, plants and animals slither and move. He listens for a long time, his eyes open, staring into the creeping blackness. 

What is this place? It can’t be real, can it?

The same question churns over and over in his mind. It muddles and twists and blurs. 

Finally, miraculously, he falls asleep. 

2 Dragons in the Bedroom

DAY ONE: Monday, 22 November 2055, London, England

Mathew Erlang is sitting in his bedroom watching his two dragons fighting.

They roll around one another in mid-air, tumbling over and over, their tails intertwined, writhing like snakes. The larger dragon breaks away, flies until she is almost touching the ceiling, pulls back her long neck and breathes an impressive stream of fire. Her mate is blasted with golden light, but the fire deflects off his body to an old book on the floor. Mathew half expects the paper pages to catch fire. 

The dragons are two feet long, nose to tail tip, steel blue shading to black. He had stolen the design mostly from a picture by a thirteenth-century Chinese artist called Chen Rong. They are holograms, made using Gencode, a programming language he’s learning for his virtual robotics course. 

The male is now on the floor, examining the book pages, picking at them with his claws, puzzled because the paper doesn’t move. The creature has no idea that it isn’t real and that nothing it does has any effect on this world.

 

There's a knock at the door. It opens, and his mother, Hoshi Mori, pokes her head in. The dragons scatter, taking refuge under the bed, and then peer out, nervous but curious. 

“I'm off. The car's here,” she says.

The female dragon edges towards the open door, poised to retreat at the first sign of danger. Hoshi sees the dragon because Mathew has made them visible on her personal Lenz channel. Lenzes are special contact lenses everyone wears, with embedded nanoscale circuitry and processors, essential to access the ubiquitous augmented reality available through the Nexus, “the next generation of the Internet,” or so it’s been called for the past twenty years. 

“Did you create it with your new program?” his mother asks. 

“That’s right,” Mathew says. “There are two of them. The other one's still under the bed. I gave her more curiosity and him greater threat responses.” 

“Do they have names?”

He nods. “She’s Yinglong. He’s Shen.”

“Don't spend all day playing with them, will you? The All-Day Curfew is not the same thing as a school holiday.”

“I couldn't if I wanted to. I have a supervisory meeting with Professor Absolem at eleven a.m. Go. You don't want to piss off your guard.”

Hoshi gives him a look, which he knows means she disapproves of his language. 

“Sorry,” he says. “But he is scary.”

“He's there to protect me.” 

“Protect you or keep you prisoner?”

She rolls her eyes. “Okay, I'm going.”

She starts to shut the door and then immediately opens it again.

“There's plenty of food. Don't forget to eat.”

“I won't.”

She leaves. Then through the door comes, “Don't let O'Malley out.”

“I won't!”

The front door slams shut. He goes to the window and draws back the curtain. 

There's a driverless Aegis car parked at the kerb. It’s low and long, slightly taller at the boot than the pointed bonnet, the wheels jacked at the back, giving the impression of an animal ready to pounce. Its matte black body paint is exactly the same colour as the opaque windows, designed to preserve the privacy of the occupants. 

Like all cars, it’s self-driving, controlled by an on-board computer and a remote centralised system that manages the flow of traffic in London. It’s illegal to drive unless on private land. Groups of vintage car collectors gather to manually drive, but they are a dwindling breed. The huge reduction in accidents, as well as the fact that cars can drive faster and more efficiently and passengers are free to work or watch holofilms, means most people are happy to let their cars be driven for them. Few people own their own cars anymore. They are hired on a need-to-use basis from companies like Aegis Shield. 

Mathew’s mother’s guard stands beside the car in a dark suit, his jacket buttoned, a machine gun in his hands, passive but at the ready, calmly scanning the street. The large sunglasses are not vanity or even cliché. Mathew knows they are feeding him real-time information, allowing him to assess potential threats, data beamed from the hundreds of cameras and sensors on the road, all the publicly broadcast material from residents, and the latest intelligence from the local military police. 

Visible through Mathew’s Lenz, floating in the air space around the thickset man, is his profile, freely available on the Nexus. 

So Mathew knows this man is called Fergus Johnson. He’s thirty-eight and a senior guard with ten years’ experience in domestic security, originally trained in the army. His unique security number is SD29106X, and he works for Aegis Domestic Security Services, an arm of Aegis Shield, the largest security firm in the country and the one with the government contract to police London. 

Aegis’s logo and its motto, “Protecting You,” are floating around under the company name. 

Fergus Johnson hasn’t published any personal information, such as whether he is single or divorced and searching for a new partner, as people often do. 

Mathew watches his mother greeting the guard. As she gets into the car, the door automatically shuts behind her. The guard surveys the road once more, slides into the front passenger seat, and the car drives away at precisely the speed limit. 

O’Malley the cat, an expert at sliding in unnoticed, past legs, through open doors, is in the room. Not having Lenzes, he can’t see the dragons, but they can see him. They start to stalk him. Oblivious, O’Malley saunters across the floorboards and rubs against Mathew’s trousers. Mathew bends and picks him up. The cat immediately starts to purr loudly. Mathew pauses the Gencode program using verbal commands, and the dragons disappear. With O’Malley in his arms, he goes in search of breakfast. 

Leibniz, their HomeAngel, is vacuuming the stairs. It senses him and stops.

“Good morning, Mathew.” 

“Good morning, Leibniz,” he says. 

Leibniz is four feet high, matte white, with a HomeAngel logo, a faux virtual badge, on its chest and a blue light where its heart should be, indicating it’s on and working. When it malfunctions, the light goes red. Its face is digital, flat and simplistic, with large childlike eyes, eyebrows, and a mouth programmed to do context-sensitive expressions. It does happy, laughing, confused, and surprised. It doesn’t do angry or sad. 

There are many robots available for consumers to buy with much more sophisticated emotional repertoires, but most people prefer domestic robots to be functional. Besides, Leibniz is a fairly basic model. Its legs bend slightly too much at the knees, making it look odd, but it climbs stairs with surprising agility. 

It has four arms that extend and retract as needed, two of which have uncannily human hands and fingers. It cooks, cleans, tidies things away, makes beds, feeds the cat, disposes of rubbish, reminds people of appointments, automatically