‘ Please God, wherever he is, let him be alive and offline’
“Belinda, don’t try to follow me.” Her father glanced uneasily at his study door. Then he took her by the shoulders. “Stay here, inside. Stay safe. Don’t be foolish. You won’t be hungry in here. I won’t be gone long. Don’t try to come after me.” His eyes were so close. She could have been looking into a mirror. They were her own eyes, or hers were his. Except the skin around her eyes wasn’t creased with years of stress, worry, and sadness. “And never open the door.” He told her. “Not for anyone. There’ll be looters out there soon. Do you understand?”
Belinda nodded. She couldn’t speak.
Slowly, her father let her go. She could tell he didn’t want to. She wanted it even less. There was an awful emptiness where his touch had been. Fear and anxiety, cold and leaden, clutched tightly at her from her throat to the pit of her stomach.
“I love you Belly.” He told her. Then he turned around. He raised his hand to open the front door. It trembled. Belinda began crying, silently. When he closed the door behind him, she rushed forward, and turned on the viewer. The dark, silent street three floors below came onto the screen. The round river stones that cobbled Vicolo Scaldasole barely emerged from the gloom. She waited. After a minute or two, her father appeared, stepping away from the building. He paused. Perhaps he knew she was watching her. He turned to the viewer. He waved at her, smiling through his own tears, then he spoke to the broad black bracelet at his wrist. “…sixty-one…” was all she heard. And then his image seemed to waver. For a moment it looked like a technical glitch in the viewer. She gasped. It was no glitch. He was gone. One moment he’d been standing there, the next there was nothing.
“Dad!” Belinda wailed for a moment, involuntarily.
A part of her hadn’t believed his stories. A part of her had thought he was spinning tall stories to keep her distracted, to keep her morale high. Now she knew better. She stared at the empty street in the viewer. She realised that, if everything he’d told her was true, his next actions were somehow written in stone, hiding somewhere in the history books the children of the Anabranch studied at school. And in the history books kids would study in her own future. If, that is, he had succeeded.
Belinda turned away. Mechanically, she went to the kitchen and put the water on to boil for some pasta. She wasn’t hungry, but it was supposedly midday. She’d better try to hold on to reality until father came back. She glanced again at the dark street in the viewer.
Well, reality as it should be, not as it was.
Time passed, and the dawn-less night grew colder. Belinda, like the rest of humanity, lost track of what time of day it was supposed to be. Morning, afternoon, evening, deepest night. The darkness didn’t care, and neither did she, after a while. The city grew more and more silent around her. The news from the web grew more and more desperate. If there weren’t any looters yet, in their sleepy old suburb of Milan, they were certainly busy in the big cities. From San Francisco to Sydney, the reports grew shocking. Only Kinshasa seemed not to succumb. There, the teeming millions seemed to have gathered around the Dreamteam, and the hope it represented. No riots, no looting, just cooperation. The whole population was getting involved. Or at least, that’s what the reports said. She wished she knew if her father was right or wrong about the Kinshasa Dreamteam. At the very least, she reasoned, if he did bring his own Dreamteam back from the Anabranch, it could work together with Kinshasa, and the result might just save them all.
During the long, empty hours of waiting, Belinda thought again and again of her father’s farewell. Something deep in her mind must have been hard at work, trying to alert her. The scene came to be planted in her mind, incessantly replaying, no matter what she did to distract herself. She knew that a game of tetris was ideal for this sort of trauma, but no number of games would block the scene from replaying. And it was strange. The more it came back to her, the shorter it became, and more focused, just on the first few words he’d said to her. Don’t try to follow me. And that uneasy glance toward his study door. Again and again.
Belinda got up, and went to the study. The door was locked. It was her father’s hideaway, his own little realm, full of books and papers in disarray. He didn’t use it much, and literally months could pass without anything ever happening in there. And he’d never locked it before.
Don’t try to follow… Suddenly she knew. There was another bracelet in there. And she didn’t even hesitate. She was going to try and follow him.
She spoke to her watch.
“Open.”
“This door is protected by a password.” Came the reply.
Belinda rolled her eyes. Dad, she thought, you’re so old fashioned!
It was painful, but she knew what the password must be.
“Margherita.”
“That is not correct.”
“Daisy.”
“That is not correct.”
Belinda thought carefully. She probably only had one more try.
“Internet, show me about the name ‘Margherita’.”
Holographic writing leapt up from her watch. She studied it a bit.
“Follow the link to ‘daisy’.” The hologram changed. She read some more. Damn. What would dad go for, the ‘pearl’ meaning of ‘Margaret’, or ‘daisy’ meaning ‘day’s eye’? Damn.
“Day’s pearl.”
“That is not correct. The door is now sealed until the owner returns.”
Belinda raised her fists, and beat on the door in frustration.
“Open!”
“This door is sealed until the owner returns.”
Belinda leaned forward, her forehead against the door, tears welling. To make matters worse, she was thinking of her mother now, too. And then a thought occured to her.
“Internet, my father is… My father is dead. Verify.” Please God, wherever he is, let him be alive and offline.
“Verifying.”
There was a pause. Then the cool, feminine voice returned.
“That is correct, your father is offline. His physical presence cannot be discerned anywhere. My condolences.”
“I am now the owner of this house, correct?”
After another, longer pause: “That is correct.”
“Open this door.”
The door opened with a soft click. Belinda pushed through, and switched on the light. It was chaos as usual in her father’s study. Where would the bracelet be?
There were four drawers in the desk. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Locked. Damn, with a key! Where could he have hidden it…?
No matter. Belinda was no longer in any mood for guessing games. She went to the store room, and got a hammer. Now she vented her anger, her frustration, her grief, her fear. And the best part of it was, the old fashioned lock wasn’t wired to Internet. She could smash it up as much as she liked, and nothing would happen. She was glad when it took about twenty blows with all of her strength before she smashed the thing open. It felt good to smash away like that.
Inside, among a set of triangular and curved and spiky geometry tools she couldn’t even name, there it was. A broad, matt black bracelet, just like the one her father had worn, and spoken into, at their parting. She took it, and snapped it onto the opposite wrist to her netwatch. Hesitantly, she spoke to it.
“Bracelet, on.”
“State a date.” It had a male voice.
Thoughtfully, Belinda spoke to her watch.
“Internet, what devices am I interacting with right now?”
It was a strange question. One should know, shouldn’t one?
“Only with your netwatch.”
Belinda smiled for the first time since her father had left. It was grim, but it was a smile. The bracelet was offline. Internet couldn’t sense it.
Why would the Time Park keep its bracelets offline?
No matter. She strode from the study toward the front door, and then hesitated. How could she find her father? And then she remembered how this had all started. She herself had started her father thinking that he could go off into the Time Park, into the Anabranch, to fetch a Dreamteam that was even better than the one in Kinshasa. After the visit to the museum, where that amazing curator had smitten her and all the other kids in class with her amazing stories.
“Internet, who is the curator of the museum of the University History Museum?”
“Professor Luisa Faraq.”
“And where does she live?”
Yarnspinning and Storyweaving 