The Boy Who Fell from the Sky by Jule Owen (grave mercy .TXT) 📕

I am. It’s much creepier for a grown man to be staring at a fifteen-year-old from his bedroom window than it is for me to do it. So why did the guard confront me and not him?

Then he realises. The guard didn’t confront Lestrange because his surveillance gear didn’t detect him. 

Later, as he sits with his mother while she eats her late-night supper, she notices his faraway look. “Penny for them,” she says.

“Mr Lestrange.”

“Him again. What has prompted this?”

“We know nothing about him. Don’t you think it’s odd?”

His mother raises an eyebrow. “No. I don’t think it’s odd at all that you don’t know him.”

“Before the curfew, did he leave the house?”

“I don’t know, Mathew. I leave early in the morning and come back late at night. You’re more likely to have run into him than I am.”

“I don’t remember ever seeing him.”

“Do you remember noticing Gen walking down the street?”

Mathew frowns. “I’m sure I do.”

“Gen’s a bad example. You’ve known her since you were a baby. Do you know Mary in the house opposite?”

Mathew shakes his head. “I didn’t even know there was a Mary opposite.”

“Well, then.” 

“But you notice people. You must have spoken to Mr Lestrange at some point, over the garden fence or in the porch. Do you remember what he’s like?”

She searches her memory, “D’you know? I couldn’t tell you.”

“But you met him, didn’t you?”

“I think that was your father.”

“You’ve never met him?”

“Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever have.”

7 Eva Aslanova’s Virtual World

“Don’t let O’Malley out,” Hoshi says, shutting the door behind her. 

“I won’t!” he shouts after her. 

Mathew shoves off his bedclothes, goes to the window, and watches his mother’s car pull away and disappear around the end of the road. 

The sun is already beating down, melting the tarmac. The doors of the houses on Pickervance Road are all shut, and the street is deserted and still, as it has been each day of the All-Day Curfew. The silence is interrupted only by the black Aegis cars coming to take the few people who have city passes to and from work and the Hydroponic City and Techno Food delivery trucks bringing supplies to the housebound residents.

In the kitchen, Mathew allows Leibniz to make him breakfast, while he watches a report on the Canvas on the multinational Vulcan Energy and Power Services – VEPS, for short – mining Helium 3 on the moon for use in the still experimental nuclear fusion power stations on earth. 

The newsreader says, “VEPS has bought a 15 per cent stake in the part-privately financed NATO Battlestar Space Security System, or B3S, earth’s first line of defence against asteroid bombardment. VEPS’s board justified the investment to shareholders, saying the Battlestar would be used to displace incoming moon-bound asteroids, on course to hit the VEPS Moonbase, now permanently manned. A spokesperson representing both companies said the additional investment would partly fund the development of a further Battlestar.”  

Mathew laughs, remembering what Cadmus Silverwood had said in the Psychopomp report about rumours of a new Battlestar. He and everyone else on the face of the planet knows the main purpose of the Battlestars is to control satellite-based rocket launchers that are targeted at strategic locations on earth. 

They are there to keep everyone in his or her place.

Mathew vaguely thinks about what Silverwood said about the war.

Leibniz clears the dishes. 

Mathew has an appointment in the Darkroom. Nan Absolem has arranged a meeting with the Russian girl who builds virtual worlds.

Eva Aslanova is slightly younger than Mathew. She is so blonde her fine hair is almost white, as white as her skin. In the Darkroom she sits in an armchair made to seem enormous by her tiny frame. She frowns constantly, and doing so over many years has actually made creases in her forehead. He is unable to raise a smile from her, but he thinks he catches something sparkling in her eyes as she watches the dragons fly around the room. 

“Why did you make dragons?” she asks him. There’s only a tiny delay when speaking via simultaneous translation. Eva doesn’t speak a word of English, and Mathew certainly isn’t confident speaking Russian. “It strikes me as . . .” she begins.

“Frivolous?”

“I was going to say childish.” 

Shame the auto-translate function doesn’t work on manners and cultural differences, Mathew thinks. Eva is mercilessly direct. 

“I wanted to make them real. Dragons have a different meaning in my father and grandmother’s cultures. My mother is Japanese, my grandmother is Chinese. My father was Danish.”

“Was?”

“He’s dead.”

Eva doesn’t say “I’m sorry” or react in any way to this news. Mathew feels relieved and grateful because it means he doesn’t have to reply, “It’s okay,” as he normally does. Because it isn’t. It isn’t okay at all. 

“In my father’s culture dragons are evil creatures that kill and terrify people. They have to be defeated by a brave warrior. In my grandmother’s culture they are mystical and lucky: They protect us and save us. My grandmother is always trying to teach me Chinese culture because she thinks I will never learn to appreciate it living here. She thinks I’ll forget my roots.” 

“You are a foreigner in the country you live in.”

“No.” 

“You said your grandmother thinks you are forgetting who you are.”

“It may be what my grandmother thinks, but it’s not what I think. I’m British.”

Eva accepts this, or is too bored to pursue it. “I understand why you wanted to make the dragons now,” she says, and Mathew considers it strange she thinks he’d appreciate her approval, but in a way he does. She asks, “Why is your mother Japanese and your grandmother Chinese?”

“My grandfather, my mother’s father, was a Japanese businessman. He moved to China for a job and never left.”

“And how did your mother and grandmother come to England?”

“My mother came here on an internship. She works for Panacea’s biotechnology division. They have offices in China and in most major cities worldwide. She wanted to visit England, because her secondary subject at college was English. She only intended to come for a year, but she met my father, and they fell in love and got married. Her company helped with the visa arrangements, and so she stayed.”

“And why is your grandmother living in England?”

“She lives in Scotland now, but she came a few years after my mother, when my grandfather died, to get away from the trouble in China caused by drought and flooding. My mother invited her for a long holiday, and they managed to get her indefinite leave to remain on compassionate grounds.”

“Do you miss your father?”

“Of course I do! What kind of question is that?”

“It’s a valid question. Just because he was your father it doesn’t mean you liked him. I loathe mine. I wouldn’t care if he wasn’t here anymore. My brothers are all he cares about. They are all stupid and are still struggling to pass their foundation exams even though they are older than me. He’s a Neanderthal and thinks women don’t need to be educated and they’re only fit to be wives.” 

“So how come you are able to program and study?”

“I have a good teacher, and my mother isn’t as docile as my father thinks she is.” 

“Why are you building a virtual world?”

“Because I can, because it has all kinds of practical uses. It’s officially an environmental project. I’m building worlds and running climate models in them to test the impact of pollution on the world’s ecological systems. But I originally just wanted to build a world with no people in it.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Haven’t you ever wished you could have the world to yourself for a while? Haven’t you ever wished there were vast expanses of an unpopulated world for you to explore alone?” 

“Now you come to mention it, it is appealing.”

“Exactly.”

“But then, you won’t want my dragons wandering around in your world.” 

“It’s not an issue, is it? The whole point of my project is that I replicate my worlds for scenario testing. We’ll mirror my world, and you can have two or more, as many as you like, parallel versions of it. Versions to split off and do different things with. Whatever you imagine. I don’t mind if we clone one of my worlds for you to use. I think it might be interesting.” 

“What happens when you add new territories? Would they synch to my version?”

“Yes. Your dragons will have an ever-expanding world to live in, rather than being confined to your house. And you’ll be able to meet your dragons there – and me as well, if you like.”

“I’d like it very much, Eva Aslanova.”

“It appears we have a project, Mathew Erlang.”

Eva invites Mathew into her world. He gets the demigod tour rather than the human pedestrian perspective, to give him a sense of the scale of it. As he sits in the comfort of his Darkroom seat, his brain is stimulated by the skullcap, and his senses are assaulted and fooled by the complex coordinated technologies in the Darkroom. Eva takes his hand and flies him over fields, great empty plains, forests, deserts, seas, lakes, mountains, ancient dead snow-topped and active volcanoes. They dive under water and skim the colour-shock of coral reefs. Finally, she brings him to rest on a mountainside. They are staring across a valley, a deep gorge cut into the landscape, velveteen with green and studded with trees. Fluffy white clouds cast shadows moving ship-like across the land. 

He’s done this kind of thing before. Eva’s world isn’t unique, but there is something different, something pristine and innocent, plus, if he wants it, he’ll have a version all to himself

8 O’Malley Escapes

Number nineteen and number twenty-one Pickervance Road are houses nestling against one another. They are part of two rows of Victorian terraces with elaborate bay windows and tiled porches, set back from the road, with short redbrick paths, flower borders, and garden walls.

Their front doors are right next to one another, making it all the more surprising that Mathew’s parents had never got to know Mr Lestrange. It also means that when Mathew puts his acoustic amplifier to the party wall between his and Mr Lestrange’s house, he’s recording whatever is going on in the hallway of the house next door, which appears to be nothing very much at all. 

Mathew tries several places, upstairs and down, in the hope he might catch Mr Lestrange having an e-Pin conversation whilst wandering in his house, but he is greeted with nothing but silence. 

He sits on the staircase with his amplifier on his knees. It’s possible Lestrange has soundproofed the party walls. He goes upstairs. The corner of his bedroom is only a couple of feet away from Mr Lestrange’s bay window. What if he attaches his amplifier to the wall? Then he’d be able to listen directly into the room.

The window in Mathew’s bedroom hasn’t opened in years. Given the climate and the permanent need for either air conditioning or heating, hardly anyone opens their windows these days. Mathew climbs onto a chair he fetches from the kitchen and manages to force the window ajar. He has fashioned a kind of hook attached to the wire he wraps round the amplifier, intending this to fasten to the pipe clips on the drainpipe running between their two houses. Leaning precariously, he manages to fix the amplifier in place, but as he