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

waking. Dissolving sequences of images he experienced as concrete reality seem bizarre on reflection, when he can remember them, leaving behind a strong residue of feeling – but most of it is maddeningly just out of reach. He knows some of the fragments are real. What else has he forgotten?

As he sits, a message comes in directly via Charybdis.  He opens it and reads:

This message responds to signals in your Lenz registering as you read and eating the words as you go.

These words immediately fracture and disappear.

This comes to you from your friend in technical support. Further investigation finds your virtual reality experience unique given current state of technical capability. No known project in existence that could do what you described, but will keep looking. Could be something highly classified. 

On the other matter, my friends say Ithaca’s network is impenetrable. This is extraordinary. 

Simultaneously had a slow, deep MUUT search running. Found this in the British Library archives, of all places. Seems to have been judiciously wiped from all other locations. It regards Ithaca. Enjoy.

The Times, London, Monday, April 11, 2038

Soho Easter Miracle As Stabbed Man Comes Back from the Dead

Paramedics are claiming it as an Easter miracle. A man they found slumped in a doorway in Kemps Court in Soho last night “came back from the dead.” London Ambulance Service veteran Martin McInnery told reporters that when they arrived at the scene, they found forty-five-year-old August Lestrange, a Reader in History at King’s College London, lying in a large pool of his own blood, after a vicious knife attack by an unknown assailant. 

“There was no pulse,” McInnery, who has served as a paramedic for fourteen years, told us. “It was clear from what he was lying in that he had bled out, and we concluded he was beyond resuscitation. We put him in a body bag, zipped him up, loaded him into the ambulance, and called through to the morgue to expect us. 

“He was such a certain gonner that we shut him in the back and went into the front part of the vehicle. Neither of us like riding with the dead. I was the one to open the back of the truck to take the trolley out when we arrived. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw him sitting up on the stretcher.” 

Mr Lestrange is said to be recovering at home. He declined to be interviewed. 

“Mathew, are you okay?” It’s Gen’s voice. She is bending over him, her hand on his back. 

He realises that as he was reading, the music stopped. Clara is standing. She has her jacket over her arm, ready to leave. Mathew scrambles to his feet.

“Yes! Yes, sorry.”

“You were miles away,” Gen says.

“Must have been my sublime playing,” says Clara.

“It was lovely.”

She raises an eyebrow. “My car is here. Do you want to walk me out?”

“Sure.”

They leave Gen on her step. Clara’s guard stands stiffly by the open car door, eyeing Mathew. 

Clara says, “You’re really not okay, are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“You seemed fine when you arrived. Did something happen while I was playing?”

Mathew smiles to reassure her. “No. Nothing. Everything’s fine.”

She squints at him sceptically but gets into the car. “Speak later?” she says.

He nods. The guard slams her door shut, gets in himself, and they drive away. 

Mathew turns to his own house. Instinctively, he glances at the bay window of number 21 as he passes through the gate and walks along the short path. The message has been deleted, but the date is burnt into his memory. 

Monday, April 11, 2038. The year before I was born.

No one is at the bay window, but Mathew knows for sure now. He’s being watched.

THE END

Mathew’s adventures continue in…

SILVERWOOD

Book Two of the

House Next Door 

trilogy

By

Jule Owen

When Mathew’s mother, Hoshi, becomes seriously ill, he’ll do anything he can to save her and he knows his future self would too. Breaking into the house next door, the one belonging to his peculiar neighbour, August Lestrange, he activates his holographic games room, which doubles as a time machine, to hack into his own future. Alone in an England afflicted by extreme weather, biological warfare and civil war, Mathew needs to find his older self before Lestrange catches up with him and takes him back to his own time.

Silverwood is available to purchase on Amazon as an e-book and as a paperback. 

Visit my website www.juleowen.com to find out more about Silverwood, for offers, news and giveaways.

Read the first chapter of Silverwood

1 The Best and Brightest Scientists

DAY ELEVEN:  Thursday, 1 December 2055, London, England

“Eva Aslanova!” he shouts. “Eva, if you can hear me, I badly need a door!”

A roaring column of furnace-hot flame blasts the tree for five, ten, fifteen, twenty seconds – leaves, bark, branches, and trunk all igniting and burning ferociously. Mathew, scrabbling and clinging precariously to the higher branches, feels the heat blast towards him, toasting the soles of his dangling feet. The tree slumps and gives beneath him. He’s falling. Then somehow he’s on his feet. Yet another in a series of near-death experiences survived, he knows, only due to the fact that in this world his body is an avatar. Presumably, Eva doesn’t see the need to programme into his virtual self the means to die a hundred horrible different ways, mostly by fire. She thinks his project childish. She wouldn’t have put that much effort into it. 

Or so he hopes. 

He gets up from the scorched and smouldering earth beside the tree and gives himself a moment to glance back. 

Two dragons, as tall as London double-decker buses, shift on their feet, flex their claws, flick their long, serpent-like tails ridged with spikes and plates. The power of a tail-swipe brings another tree crashing to the ground. It gets skewered by a cluster of spines, and the dragon thrashes its tail around until the tree, now uprooted and spraying earth and rocks and bird’s nests, is pulled loose.

They are trashing Eva’s world. 

The larger dragon belches, and smoke billows out of her enormous nostrils. The male yawns, displaying a mouth full of splinter-sharp white teeth the size of large bottles and the blue tongue Mathew had been particularly proud of when he’d designed them. 

They have grown enormously. They are huge. And now, completely oblivious to the fact that he created them in the first place, they think he is dinner, and they are very hungry.

He is fairly sure that he can’t die in Eva’s world, but just in case, he runs. 

He is dodging trees as he goes, stumbling over tree roots. A hot blast of air funnels past him with such force that it blows him sideways. He dares not stop to look, but as he steadies himself, the rough bark of a redwood scraping the skin on the palm of his hand, out of his peripheral vision he catches the image of a red glowing cindered tree crumbling into a pile of charcoal and ash. 

Up ahead, on the crest of a small bank, is an unusually large trunk, the width of several men standing shoulder to shoulder. In front of the tree he sees a young woman with very straight, thin, white-blonde hair and paper-white skin. She’s small anyway, but she seems tiny, dwarfed by the giant conifer. Behind her is a door. 

“Eva!” he gasps, lurching forward. 

He scrambles up the bank, yanking at saplings to pull himself up, his feet slipping on the loose earth and stones. His leg muscles are burning. 

“Thank god!” he wheezes, bent over double before her, grasping his knees. 

She grabs him, pulls him inside the tree, and shuts the door. 

He’s back in his Darkroom. The blackened bare walls and floor seem less real than the forest. He sits down heavily in the chair behind him, still catching his breath. In a large armchair in front of him, Eva is curled up in her pyjamas. 

“You do realise it’s four hours ahead here?” she says. “Bedtime. You were lucky you caught me. I was just brushing my teeth. Fifteen minutes later, I’d have been asleep.”

“I hope I didn’t get you into trouble with your dad?”

“No, no, don’t worry. He’s not here. Off again on his travels, immortalising the story of our great and glorious army to anyone who will listen.”

“St Petersburg again?”

“St Petersburg is done and dusted. Not sure where this time. He wouldn’t say. No doubt, we’ll see it all on the news soon enough.”  

“You’re sure you’re safe talking to me like this?”

“As safe as anyone is these days.”

“That’s not very reassuring.”

“Best I can do. Look, Mathew, I think we need to talk about these dragons.”

“It’s not turning out quite as I’d planned.” 

“Yes, well, that’s what’s confusing me. How did you plan it, exactly?”

“I’m not sure I did that much, to be honest. Beyond getting them into a world where they could evolve.”

“But in your programming, what did evolution consist of exactly? Growing endlessly larger?”

“They are quite big, aren’t they? They should stop, though. I made them what I thought was dragon size.”

“Which is? Forgive me, I’ve never seen a dragon.”

“Oh, you must have, in films.”

“I don’t watch those kinds of films.”

“About twice the size of a large dinosaur.”

“Right. Why did you do that?”

“Because I could?”

“What I mean is, what are you trying to achieve with this project?”

“I was just trying to make dragons, using the new genetic coding programme I had. And I wanted them to be able to interact with their environment and evolve their behaviour over time.”

“You succeeded. Congratulations. So we can close the server down then?”

“No. They were meant to breed.”

“They can breed?”

“Yes.”

“You want more of those things crawling about in that virtual earth of yours?”

“Obviously, I don’t now, but when I coded them, I did.” 

“Wow. I don’t wish to put a downer on things, but a few more of those things and you won’t have much virtual earth left.”

“Yes, I know.” 

“It seems a bit . . .” 

“What?”

“Pointless . . .” 

“I know.”

“You can still code them, can’t you?” 

“I’m not sure. I packaged them. Doesn’t that seal off the creation?”

“Just go back to the source code, amend, repackage, and then redeploy.”

“Won’t that overwrite them?”

“Yes.”

“It will kill them.”

“They’re not alive, Mathew. Besides, they are fairly unpleasant, destructive creatures the way they are.” 

“I suppose.”

“Why don’t you have a think about how you might make their behaviour a bit more interesting, rather than just predatory and destructive?” 

“Such as?”

“For instance, if I was interested in creating fauna-type programmes rather than creating worlds, I wouldn’t be interested in making stupid animals. I would see if I could make a mind more interesting and better than a human mind.”

“But the best and brightest scientists alive aren’t able to do that.”

“So?”

“So how on earth am I meant to do it?”

“Mathew, I thought you and I were training to be the next generation of the best and brightest scientists.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Shouldn’t we be cleverer than the last generation? Shouldn’t we be able to do things they can’t? Shouldn’t we at least be