The Last Beginning Read online

  “I won’t.”

  “I mean it. It’s really important.”

  “Clove, I promise. What’s going on?”

  Clove checked to make sure no one sitting near by was listening in. Everything Tom had said about how dangerous it could be if this got out was going through her mind, but this was Meg! Surely it was OK to tell her?

  Clove swallowed. She spoke quietly, but her words were strong, proud and resolute. “My parents are Matt Galloway and Kate Finchley. The … ones we used to play games about as kids. They’re my parents.”

  Meg let out a long exhale. “Well. I don’t even know where to start with that. You … really? That’s like finding out your parents are Hermione and Ron, or something.”

  Clove just nodded. “Yeah. I know. It’s … kind of crazy.”

  “How are you, uh, dealing with that?”

  Clove looked at her plate. “Fine.”

  Meg picked up her sandwich. “I don’t believe you. How can you be fine?”

  “I’m just— I don’t know. Reeling, a bit.”

  Meg snorted. “I don’t blame you.”

  “And my mum – the real one, Kate Finchley – she left me these letters.”

  “Letters? I thought she disappeared? I thought they both did.”

  “Yeah. She wrote them before I was born. She left very soon after giving birth to me to break Matt Galloway – my dad – out of prison. And she was so hopeful. She really thought she’d come back. She thought she and Matt would be the ones to raise me. She thought Tom would only ever be my uncle.”

  “That’s … I can’t even imagine. Where did they go? Where are they now? If she was so determined to come back for you…”

  Clove blinked once, twice, three times. “Exactly. Where the hell are they?” Clove knew there was a possibility that they were dead, killed by the English military, and yet she didn’t want to believe it. She felt sure, in her heart, that her parents – Kate and Matt – were still alive.

  The bell rang for class, and Clove started tidying up their plates. “Let’s talk about this later.”

  Meg pulled her into a hug. “It’s OK, Clove. We’ll sort it out. I’ll even help you track them down, if I have to.”

  Clove squeezed her best friend tightly. She could smell Meg’s perfume: the brand of a boy band she was obsessed with. Clove breathed it in deeply. She never wanted to let go.

  “Thanks,” Clove mumbled. She loved Meg’s unconditional belief, despite the odds against Matt and Kate being alive.

  Meg gave her a final squeeze and pulled away, looking over her face carefully. When Clove smiled tentatively at her, Meg seemed convinced that she was OK. She smiled back, her expression turning cheeky. “By the way, it’s totally unfair that you get the epic adoptive parents and the even more epic natural parents, while I’m stuck with one pair of boring, suburban accountants with a white-picket fence. Some people get all the luck.”

  * * *

  That evening Tom and Jen came up to Clove’s bedroom when they got home from work. They sat on her bed, holding cups of tea and a packet of rich tea biscuits and looking nervous.

  Clove closed the code she’d been trying and failing to focus on. She started reorganizing the apps on her homescreen so she didn’t have to watch Jen dipping biscuits in her tea, or Tom staring at his daughter like he was trying to solve a maths equation.

  They were waiting for her to start talking, so that they could counsel her through “Her Feelings about the Adoption”. They’d done the same thing when she’d told them she was gay. Usually it helped to talk through everything, but this time she couldn’t. She just … couldn’t. She didn’t even know how she felt yet.

  “How are you doing?” Jen asked finally with wide, unhappy eyes. She looked hurt, as if Clove was locking herself up in her room on purpose to make Jen feel bad.

  “Fine,” Clove replied shortly. She tried to smile, to put on a brave face to make them feel better, hating that she had to. This was her pain, not theirs. She shouldn’t have to worry about what they were thinking or feeling. She should be allowed to be alone if she wanted.

  “You can talk to us if you want,” Jen said. “It’s a lot to deal with, I know.”

  Clove shrugged. “They’re gone. What is there to discuss?” Looking for something to do with her hands, she picked up her knitting and began a new row. Knitting was another way her parents tried to help her to control her hyperactivity. Usually she knitted while she was waiting for code to compile. Right now she was making a scarf out of soft, emerald-green wool. She was going to give it to Meg when she’d finished it. It would look really pretty next to her blonde hair.

  “There’s so much to discuss, Clove. We don’t want you to ever, ever feel like you weren’t wanted. Your dad and I love you so much. So do your birth parents, even if they can’t be here for you.”

  “I know.” It would be impossible for Clove not to know that. Tom and Jen pushed so much love on her that it was almost stifling. “I just don’t … I don’t get it. Where are they?”

  “If they were still out there,” Jen said, hesitantly, “they would have come back for you. I promise.”

  Tom cleared his throat. “Your mother is right, darlin’. If they were alive—”

  “No!” Clove said, dropping her knitting in her lap. They were trying to make her feel less abandoned by telling her that the reason her parents had never come back for her was because they were dead. But she knew that wasn’t true. She didn’t know how, she just did. Kate and Matt were alive, somewhere out there.

  Abruptly, Clove realized what was bothering her the most. It wasn’t the adoption. It wasn’t even the thought that Kate and Matt had left her behind. Clove was upset because she didn’t know what had happened to them. Clove knew that she was never going to be able to focus on anything else until she found out – even if her search just led her to an unmarked gravestone somewhere. She had to know.

  “Is that why you gave up looking for them?” she asked Tom. “Because you thought they were dead? Did you even try at all?”

  Tom suddenly looked very tired. “Of course I tried. I told you. For years and years it was all I thought about. I did everything I could think of. I hacked into the prison security footage and the English military’s database. I nearly got myself arrested by the Scottish authorities. But I couldn’t find them. They disappeared completely! Eventually I ran out of things to try.”

  Clove didn’t know what to say. How did she know that whatever Tom had done was enough? How could she be sure that he’d tried everything? Surely if she looked, if she tried, she’d find something that he had missed?

  “I want to keep looking,” Clove said, determined. “I don’t want to give up on them. What if they are waiting for you to help them? What if they’ve been relying on you all this time, and you just gave up?”

  Tom rubbed his hands over his face. He looked sad but resigned. “If you think that’ll help you to work through this … then I can let you look at my old research. So you can see how much I tried. I never gave up on them, not even for a second. Matt was my brother as well as your father, Clove.”

  “I’m not sure about this…” Jen said, looking worried. “I don’t want you messing around in something illegal. It’s dangerous.”

  “I just want to look at Dad’s old research. I won’t try to find them, I promise,” Clove said, desperately.

  “She knows better than to get into trouble,” Tom said to Jen. “We should trust her. And if it helps her process everything…”

  “Fine,” Jen said after a moment.

  Clove tried to hide her smile.

  CHAPTER 4

  Nuts_Meg 19:34:12 CLOVE. If your real parents are M & K, does that make your adopted dad Tom Galloway? Like, THE Tom Galloway, the hacker? THE HACKER SPARTACUS?? ?? ???????????

  LuckyClover 19:37:48 yeah, it does. He had to change his name.

  LuckyClover 19:38:03 huh, i guess that’s why our AI is called Spart. That makes so much sense.

/>   Nuts_Meg 19:38:07 POWERFUL!

  Nuts_Meg 19:38:25 I AM SO HAPPY ABOUT THIS DEVELOPMENT

  LuckyClover 19:38:55 ? ? ?

  Nuts_Meg 19:39:13 CLOVE, THE INTERNET WAS ALL ABOUT SPARTACUS BACK IN THE DAY. HE HAD HIS OWN FANDOM.

  Nuts_Meg 19:39:45 THERE ARE FANBLOGS ABOUT HIM

  LuckyClover 19:40:02 no. no. please, no.

  Nuts_Meg 19:40:33 LOTS OF FANBLOGS. ABOUT YOUR DAD. I guess i’m not the only one who thinks he’s a silver fox??

  LuckyClover 19:40:47 noooooooooooooooooo

  Nuts_Meg 19:40:59 AND IT GETS BETTER

  LuckyClover 19:41:23 please don’t say it

  Nuts_Meg 19:41:46 i’m sorry, clove. I have to. There is fanfiction about your dad.

  LuckyClover 19:42:02 this isn’t happening. i wish i was dead.

  Nuts_Meg 19:42:12 I haven’t even sent you any links yet. Wait until you hear about the werewolf soulbonding erotica I found about him and Kate.

  LuckyClover 19:42:24 urghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

  Nuts_Meg 19:42:33 This is the best thing that has ever happened to me ever.

  LuckyClover 19:42:58 i’m going to vomit all over you

  File note: Chat log, dated 14 July 2056

  ST ANDREWS, SCOTLAND, 2056

  Clove clicked through Tom’s research greedily, like she’d been given a box of expensive chocolates. She was calmer now that she had something to focus on. She could feel in her heart that there was more to uncover about this mystery. She just knew that her parents were still out there, but more than that: she felt instinctively that they had been trying to get back to her, all this time.

  Tom’s search had mainly focused on hacking into high-security websites, like the English prison’s records. He had been pretty thorough, and Clove didn’t think that carrying on with his approach was likely to turn up anything new. The English military would have been careful not to leave any evidence where it could be found. It was unlikely that there would have been a paper trail at all. Clove needed to do something new, something that would never have occurred to Tom.

  Clove took up her knitting, adding a few rows to her scarf while she considered the problem. It was only when Spart reminded her to drink her tea before it got cold that she realized she did have one advantage. She had Spart.

  When Tom had been searching for Kate and Matt, Artificial Intelligences hadn’t been created. She could use Spart to do things Tom hadn’t been capable of trying, like telling the AI to run more vigorous, intensive searches than Tom had ever been able to manage.

  Spart had a huge processing power, and was much more intelligent than a human. She could leave him to run a search twenty-four hours a day, for as long as it took. There were satellites and CCTV cameras everywhere – surely one had caught a glimpse of Kate and Matt in the last sixteen years. It was a good place to start. And with Spart’s help, Clove could do so much better than Tom. She could fix his mistakes − as long as she could get Spart to agree to help her.

  “Spart?” Clove whispered to her watch. Her parents were downstairs, so she knew they couldn’t overhear, but she wanted to make sure they didn’t catch her. She’d promised Jen that she wouldn’t try to find Kate and Matt.

  The Artificial Intelligence’s reply popped up on the watch on her wrist. Spart could speak aloud or via text, depending on what setting he was on. If left to his own devices, he’d chatter away all day, so Clove usually left him in text mode.

  > Yes? Let me pause my show.

  “What are you watching? Wait, don’t tell me. It’s that robot sitcom, isn’t it? I know you’ve got a crush on the Doctor Watt robot.”

  There was an all too revealing silence.

  “It’s OK, I’ll keep your secret,” she said, grinning.

  > As Artificial Intelligences cannot experience emotions, I do not have – and am incapable of having – a “crush”.

  “You just think he’s amazingly intelligent, with a powerful personality and beautiful circuitry. I get it.”

  > How may I assist you this evening, CLOVE?

  She stifled a grin. He was avoiding the subject – and not very subtly.

  “I was wondering if you could help me out on a project I’m working on.”

  > My full processing power is at your disposal, providing, of course, that it doesn’t interfere with my show time.

  “You’re such a loyal servant, Spart. All right, here’s the plan. Do you know about my parents?”

  > THOMAS PHILLIP SUTCLIFFE, PhD, professor of computer science at the University of St Andrews, and JENNIFER GRACE SUTCLIFFE, PhD, professor of physics at—

  “No – not them. My birth parents. Matt Galloway and Kate Finchley?”

  Spart was quiet for a second.

  > MATTHEW GEORGE GALLOWAY and KATHERINE LOUISE FINCHLEY, missing since 2040, suspected dead, responsible for revealing the English government’s plans for biological warfare. Wanted by the English military. Both were reading chemistry at the University of Nottingham prior to their disappearance. School grades: AAA and AAB respectively. Birth dates, 14th—

  “Right! Good. That’s enough. Anyway, I’m trying to find them. I think they’re still alive, and I want to track them down. I was hoping you could help me.”

  > How do you presume to attempt to achieve that?

  “I was thinking of trying to track their images in worldwide media – social networks, satellites, that kind of thing.”

  Spart took a second to reply. Clove was starting to worry that she had stumped him, when a message popped up.

  > That will require an extremely large search parameter. I estimate that the processing time will require extra memory.

  “Yeah − I can get you more memory. And I was planning to copy you over to my computer. That way it won’t interfere with anything else you need to do.”

  > There will be two versions of me?

  Spart said it with suspicious perkiness, like he was already planning the kind of pranks he could pull with an evil twin.

  “Save us all,” Clove muttered. “Yes, there’ll be two of you. You’ll have to fight over who gets that robot doctor. And Spart? Keep this a secret from Tom and Jen, will you? This is just between us.”

  > I can confirm that this information will be treated as confidential.

  Invigorated by her small victory, Clove grabbed a chocolate bar and demolished it. Then she scanned the photos from Kate’s box into her computer and started combining them all to model 3D features of Kate and Matt’s faces. When she was done, Spart would be able to run a search for similar figures in the millions of hours of video data collected online from CCTV cameras and social media. She could leave the search open enough so that even if Kate and Matt looked older, it would still pick them up. It might help her find them, and it was something she could leave running, while she looked for them in medical records and other data.

  She worked for a long time. When she got to the familiar point where she couldn’t focus on the computer screen any longer, she shut down her facial-recognition model.

  There was an hours old message from Meg on her watch. She decided to ring her. She’d done enough for today, anyway – and it was Friday, so she had all weekend to work on the model. Kate and Matt had waited sixteen years. A few more hours couldn’t hurt.

  When she answered the video call, Clove began telling Meg what she was planning. “Meg, I’ve started—”

  Meg immediately interrupted her in a rush, beaming. “I talked to Alec again!”

  Clove closed her jaw with a snap. “Oh. Right.”

  “He’s so sweet, Clove! He keeps sending me snaps of himself pulling funny faces with his dog. It’s adorable.” Meg blushed a happy pink.

  Clove tried to tame her jealousy. “That’s … great.” It was stupid. Clove folded her arms.

  Meg was busy pulling up the photos to show her, and didn’t notice. “Here. Look at this one − he put three kisses at the end of the message!”

  Clove sighed, and let Meg talk until she r
an out of things to say. Then Clove said, “I’m going to use Spart to help me find my real parents.”

  “Oh, wow! You are?”

  “I want to find them. I’m having Spart run a facial-recognition search of them in satellites and CCTV camera footage using pictures Kate left me.”

  Clove was waiting for Meg to tell her how crazy she was, and that she was taking it all too far. Instead, Meg wrinkled her forehead in a frown, and said, “You’re going to get so many dud results from that.”

  Clove let out a relieved breath. “Yeah, I know. I’m hoping Spart will learn how to double-check the pictures for me, so I don’t have to go through all the ones of random strangers manually.”

  “It still sounds like a lot of work.”

  “It is. And my dad looked for them for years, and never found anything. But I need to try anyway.”

  “You can do it,” Meg said, voice tender and gentle.

  “Thank you,” Clove said, and then tried to sound more light-hearted. “If you have any ideas on other programming techniques I could try, I’m happy to hear them.”

  Meg let out a short laugh. She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “Sure, I’m brimful of ideas. Have you tried doing a search for ‘finding missing vigilante parents’ yet?”

  “I haven’t! I’ll try that later, along with ‘help! my best friend is too witty for her own good, should I take her to the vets?’”

  “Long search. Can your computer handle that much sass? You should probably hack into the FBI’s server to save it the strain.”

  Clove laughed and then said, “You’d tell me if I was being ridiculous, right? If I was going too far with this? It’s hard to get perspective when I want to find them so much.”

  “I’d tell you.”

  Clove couldn’t do anything but smile at her.

  “So, did you read any of the fic about your dad?” Meg asked.

  “I’m not going to be able to look him in the eye later,” Clove admitted. “If you ruin my relationship with my dad, I’m never speaking to you again.”