45. Truth
Truth
Isaak
Having received the photograms they sent from Jeff’s place, Elodie instructed them to deal with any unfinished business. She would trace Cardinal Row’s exact location in the Docklands as soon as she could and would be in contact again.
He didn’t know what that meant for him. He barely had any business, and it all felt irreparably unfinished.
Five years without hearing from his dad.
Twenty since his mother had disappeared – and it turned out Astrid was the person most likely to be able to answer questions about that anyway.
Sacha was his only remaining link to the London Lazarus.
Nobody else ever bothered to check in on him.
When Dylan invited him to come meet her parents, his heart jumped with a mixture of joy and apprehension. He was excited to learn more about where she came from. But would he be judged for his looks, for the way he walked, for his lack of parents that gave a fuck about him?
He was about to find out.
He rang the doorbell, Dylan at his side. Her woollen coat wrapped around her gave her a fairy goth look that really suited her. He was just in his usual clothes, the fake leather jacket and dark-wash jeans.
The door opened. “Come on in! I’m Wesley, nice to meet you.”
“Isaak.”
Her father looked friendly, warm. The opposite of his own. No coldness to his eyes, no calculating skew to his movements. He was in decent shape for a man his age.
The house was a classic English home, the kind he never got to live in.
Two floors, with a kitchen and living room on the ground floor separated by a moveable thin glass triptych door, added after the fact, and bedrooms upstairs.
Home ownership was a world he knew little about, and living in a house much less.
His family – and “family” was a strong word – used to live in a flat, and he went on to live in his rented studio.
“Hi, you two! I’m Constance.” Dylan’s mum stretched her hand out. There was an undeniable resemblance between her and her daughter. Same mischievous smile, height, build. But her mum’s hair was black going grey. “Come in, come in…”
They sat at the dining table, all mahogany and polished wood. Old, well taken care of. Wes sat at the head of the table nearest to where the room became the kitchen. Constance was on one side of the table close to him, and Dylan and Isaak sat on the opposite side, with Isaak the furthest from Wes.
“Tea?” Constance asked, warm and friendly and kind.
The gesture jolted him. Kindness got under his skin.
He hadn’t been mothered in years, hadn’t felt that kind of warmth and joy since his mum left his dad.
Other than the company of Dylan, which was a different kind of thing, he hadn’t felt anything like this in a while.
He didn’t think he deserved it, and his first reaction was to be repelled.
Dylan looked at him with quiet, pleading eyes, and he acquiesced. He was getting used to fitting in. “Yes, please,” he said politely. His mum had taught him manners and the importance of respect before she left…
“I’ll get on it! Soy, almond, potato milk?”
“Er… soy, thanks! Potato milk always makes my belly full,” he said, prompting a chuckle from everyone else.
“I still find it weird myself,” Wes said, a sense of sombreness taking over his voice. While Constance busied herself in the kitchen, Wes seemed intent on getting to the more serious part of the conversation. “So what have you two been up to?”
“Dad!” Dylan was on the defensive. Isaak liked that. “Let’s just have a good time. Yes, me and Isaak are dating. He’s a great find… aren’t you, darling?” She enlaced her arm through his and looked him in the eyes. She spoke with an overly sweet voice, putting on a show for her parents.
“Uh… yes! I mean, sure!” he said, with a smile.
Talia came to his mind then. It must be hard for Dylan to act like this, with their friend in danger. But she told him beforehand that she didn’t want them to know. About the Tapeworld, or about Talia.
Dylan grinned and turned to her dad. “See? He’s fine!” There was a sarcastic note to her voice and she raised her eyebrows at her dad, like she was making a point of it. Isaak tried to make sense of it. Did her previous boyfriends all suck horribly, or…?
After half an hour drinking tea, eating soy cake, and making polite conversation, Dylan and her mother went upstairs with a flimsy excuse to leave the boys to talk for a bit.
Isaak and Wes were alone at the dining table.
Dylan’s father’s smile dropped, and his face turned serious, almost upset. “So… you’re the man seeing my daughter.”
Isaak dry-swallowed, unsure what he meant. Did he disapprove? Worry gnawed at his gut, slowly at first, but rising. Isaak was ready to defend himself and their relationship.
“Yes. Is that a—”
“A problem?” Wes said, completing the sentence. “No. Of course not. She’s an adult. I don’t mind who she sees. As long as they have good intentions.” Wes looked Isaak up and down. “Do you?”
Feeling judged, Isaak was quick to reply, “Sure. Who would be foolish enough to say ‘no’ when their girlfriend’s dad asks a question like that?” He smiled tentatively. “What are you really asking for?”
“I mean, son” – Wes was close enough to place his hand on Isaak’s shoulder – “is your mind in the right place? And will you protect her from harm? I know she’s up to something.”
Isaak squirmed his shoulder out from under Wes’s hand and tried to play it cool. “I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“She’s been asking me more and more about our time before…
before this world we’re in now. Before the Dark Year.
” Wes turned deadly serious, his body rigid.
He didn’t look like the harmless family man who cooked curry every Sunday, like Dylan had told him he was.
A side of him was coming out that perhaps not even his daughter had access to.
“Whatever it is you two are doing, I know it’s important.
Her probing like this… She needs something from us.
Approval, maybe. I won’t ask what you’re planning.
I wouldn’t have answered that myself, if my parents had asked me back then. ”
“What did happen back then? What did you and Mrs Colt do?”
“You know about us?”
Isaak crossed his arms. “It was one of the first things she told me. Can you imagine the weight on her shoulders, the pressure of being your kid?”
Wes put his hands on his belt, gripping it as if to keep himself stable. His eyes, permanently fixed to Isaak’s until now, moved to the window, to the horizon and the blue sky outside.
“We did what we had to do.”
“Mr Colt, I’m not judging you.”
Wes’s gaze snapped back to Isaak. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
Everything about his gestures said this was a man holding on to order, keeping chaos tight inside him, under a leash.
“There was an attempt, in 2030, at—” He coughed, hand to his mouth.
His voice failed for a moment. After a short pause, Wes stomped down on the emotion stopping him from speaking.
“There was an attempt to virtualise every aspect of our existence, eliminate everything physical, everything that makes us human. A thin jarhead, feverish with his newfound power, sought to interpose himself at the centre of every mode of communication, to stand in between every person in the world, to become the receptacle of every word, every thought, of every person in the world.”
“What happened?” Isaak asked. “You stopped him, but how?”
Wes sighed. “Laws, son. Laws were passed to ban his ideas.” His body language betrayed no emotion, only calm assuredness, but his eyes were darting between Isaak and the window. There was something he was leaving unsaid. Something left out of the history books.
But, wanting to preserve the intimacy of the moment, Isaak relented. “Of course, sir.”
The man looked him in the eyes again, and gave an ever-so-subtle knowing wink. “Call me Wes.” A smile across his lips.
“Wes,” Isaak said with a nod.
“You seem to be getting on well with my daughter. What do you make of her?”
“I like her,” he said, breaking through the thick vines of pride around his insides. “A lot. I mean, I love her.”
Dylan’s dad put his hand on Isaak’s shoulder again. “Take care of each other. We may have won the battle in our time, but the war never ended.”
Furrowing his brow, Isaak once again tried his luck. “What really happened? Tell me, Wes. If it’s important to you that Dylan doesn’t know, I promise to protect her from it like you have.”
Wes took a deep breath. “How can I trust you? You just confessed that you love her. You’ll run straight to her and tell her.”
Isaak looked around, unsure of himself. “Look, I can’t tell you what we’re up to. I told Dylan I wouldn’t. But if you don’t hear from us in a few days, go to the Royal Car Wash in Shoreditch. Don’t leave until you talk to a woman named Elodie.”
Perhaps he’d said too much. But it was the only way. Let her father in on something. Gain his trust.
Wes nodded. “You’re acting like a deer trying to escape the shots of a hunter perched on a viewing platform, but I get it.
I was like you once. Fine. Where to start…
Truth is, a truce with the Kings was the only way our world could survive.
That man’s attempt at making everything virtual, replacing our existence with something digital, it sparked something in people.
They were no longer content to be citizen consumers. ”
The light of the sunset filtered through the window, dull-gold and beautiful. There was a peace to Wes, a sense of a duty accomplished. The sunset was a given, something always there, but thirty years ago, humanity could have seen its last.
“The Tech Kings only live now because we needed them. And Earth only survives because of them. Without their networks, their tech, we would have perished. Nuclear fusion, starch synthesis from carbon dioxide, the mandatory decrease in meat consumption, the million cow march, switching to renewable energy everywhere regardless of the fucking aesthetics… All of these things gave us time to start solving the hard science problems. We weren’t even that far away in the first place. We just needed that starting shot.”
Isaak took note of the word Wes had used. Shot. The start of the Dark Year was marked by blood.
Wes’s eyes flashed with anger and memory. “There was a time when our sword was at their neck. In one night, presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, they were cut down or made to join our cause. I’m not going to lie, son,” he said. “The path will be hard.”
It was already hell.
“But keep Dylan close to you, and you’ll turn out alright,” Wes said. “She’s been waiting for a fight all her life. This thing you’re doing, this is it, I’m sure. Her fight. Your fight.”
“Were you like her back then?”
“Yes. Both me and Constance. Sure, at first people hated us. Blocking traffic on their way to work, destroying their precious paintings. But our point pushed through. Eventually, the masses who hated us, who made fun of us on social media, they joined us.” The sunlight hit his face, his eyes half shut.
In that moment, Isaak wasn’t next to an older man nearing retirement, but a soldier of the Apocalypse Revolt.
Isaak dared to ask one last question.
“What happened to the thin jarhead?”
Wes looked him in the eye, a curl at the edge of his lips turning into the faintest of smiles.