COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1997 by Damien Broderick & Rory Barnes
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
PROLOGUE
It all seems so long ago. I was only fourteen. I was a bright girl, very bright, and did really well at school, but I was still mixed up, a bit of a mess to tell the truth. My parents had divorced recently, my boyfriend couldn’t keep his hands to himself, and I didn’t even have a computer. Can anyone who wasn’t there believe that? 1995 was a time when nice middle class households like ours usually still had only one phone, a landline of course, often in the hallway. No privacy. No texting. One phone!
But it turned out that our phone was special.
Cell phones—mobiles, we called them in Australia in those days—were just coming in. I remember the first one I saw: some guy was walking down the street talking to it. It was about the size of a small brick. And here was this guy in the street with a brick rammed up against his ear and he was talking to it, talking to a brick. He seemed only slightly embarrassed. I just stood and stared, trying not to laugh, as did most of the other pedestrians.
It was an innocent age. The Twin Towers in New York were as solid as concrete and steel could make them. If you wanted to find out a fact, you looked it up—in a book, unless you were a geek with a modem connection to an Internet that had hardly got started by today’s standards. I don’t think Google had even been launched back then, but I can’t be bothered googling it to make sure. It took a solid week for a letter to get from Melbourne to San Francisco and another week for the reply to reach you. Hell, you could exchange two letters a month with your American pen friend. I might have been bright, but I had no idea where Iraq or Afghanistan were. Why should I? I mean, the world’s greatest scientists didn’t even know that the universe is expanding faster and faster. They thought it was all doomed, billions and billions of years from now, to collapse into a Big Crunch. They didn’t know about dark matter and dark energy. They certainly didn’t know about time zone resonances. Hey, I was only the second person in all of history to know about that.
So in this innocent time I arrived home one afternoon from the supermarket on my bike. I could hear a phone ringing in the hall instead of vibrating in my pocket, because they didn’t do that yet....
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: SATURDAY, 8 APRIL 1995, MIDDAY
The phone is ringing in the hallway. I drop my new mountain bike at the front gate, shove in the key, run inside balancing my bag of groceries, kick the door shut.
It keeps ringing.
Usually I’m there three seconds late so all I hear is David putting the phone down at his end. Maddy says I should call him back but I don’t like to push. I have trouble imagining why he goes out with me.
“Hello?”
“Don’t hang up,” a man says urgently.
“I’m sorry?”
“You sound as if you’ve been running.”
“Who did you wish to speak to? Whom.” Youngish, but I don’t recognize the voice.
“Sorry, I’ll explain all that, just promise me you won’t hang up until you’ve heard what I’ve got to say.”
A charity drive. Or some slick scammer selling a set of Kitchen-ware made from a miracle space-age substance you can safely drop from a great height.
“Look, I nearly busted a carton of eggs getting to this phone. Can you please just tell me who you’re trying to reach so I can go and unpack? Do you want my father?”
“Oh. Is that a child I’m speaking to?”
I fume. I’m fourteen, halfway to fifteen.
“Yes, this is a child you’re talking to. Could I ask the name of the ill-mannered adult who’s asking?”
After a long moment of silence I start to move the handset away from my ear.
“Don’t hang up!” he yelps, guessing. “Look, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, whatever it was I said. You’re a teenager, is that right?”
“Dynamite.”
“Oh hell, I truly do apologize, the last thing I want to do is upset you. Listen, what’s your name?”
“Why should I tell you what my name is? I think you must have the wrong number.”
“No,” he says fiercely. “No, I have the only number this machine can access. It’s not like I can just dial any old number I want.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Sorry, look, this isn’t just an ordinary phone—I’m using resonant circuits. The whole thing’s touch and go. It’s a miracle I reached anyone at all.”
I’m starting to get the message. This guy is some sort of mobile phone freak. All this hot digital technology: it’s breeding a race of try-hards and loonies. Any moment now he’s going to tell me he’s got his own uplink dish. Maybe his own personal satellite.
But all he adds is, “For God’s sake don’t hang up. Hear me out. If you like, go and put your carton away safely and then come back, but make sure no one hangs up this phone. I beg you. This is a matter of—”
I grunt, half laughing, and he breaks off. He’s had me going, this jerk has actually started to reel me in.
I finish for him, snidely: “—of life and death, I suppose?”
He makes a coughing sound and I can’t tell if he is laughing too or just embarrassed by his overstatement.
“Well, maybe not that important, but pretty damn important, believe me. Do you believe me? Have I convinced you, O nameless teenager?”
“Why should I believe you, O nameless telephone mugger? I don’t know your name and you have a definite advantage, because obviously you already have this number, even if it is the only number your precious little toy can ring up. So you either know my parents’ surname from the phone book, or you’re calling at random and I really should hang up. What’s it to be?”
“This is a miracle. It’s more than a miracle. You’ve got a mind like a steel trap. What a stroke of incredible luck. I thought I’d have to try explaining all this to some thick-witted office clerk. What time is it at your end?”
I glance automatically at my digital watch. 12:27 in the afternoon. Then I do a double-take.
“At my end? You’re telling me this is an international call?”
It can’t be, I realize the moment I’ve spoken. Firstly, there’d been no International Subscriber Dialing bips or operator’s instructions. Is it true that they bip at you with ISD calls? I can’t remember. Certainly they do with interstate subscriber trunk calls. Second, I’m hearing his reactions too quickly. Speed of light. New York, say, or London, half the time you spend most of your buck garbling over the top of each other’s sentences.
That isn’t happening. So my invisible caller is not from outside Australia.
Even so, there are time zone differences between Western Australia, say, and Melbourne, over here on the East Coast, and then there’s daylight saving which some States don’t use though we do, so I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“Half past twelve.”
“In the afternoon?”
I start to say, “Of course in the afternoon,” when he cuts back in, “Oh, sorry, yes, you’d hardly be able to go out at half past twelve at night and pick up a dozen eggs,” and I say, “Well I could, of course, if I went to a 7-Eleven,” and he falls silent.
I think about what we’ve just told each other and realize there is something majorly fishy afoot. I mean, he is saying he didn’t know if he’d called someone in the day or night but the lack of lag in our conversation means he has to be within a few thousand kays of me. None of it adds up.
“My father