Argleton, Chapter 14: Months later
Recovering from his time in hospital, Matt gets home to Charlie and they both discover just how much he's changed.
Read Chapter 13 first or start at the beginning.
Charlie sprang to her feet as she heard the sound of a key slipping into the front door and dashed to open it. Matt stood on the doorstep, pale and gaunt, but bright-eyed. Charlie didn’t even bother calling out his name — she suspected that if she tried, it would come out sounding strangled — and just threw her arms around his neck. He embraced her in a hug that she wanted to last forever, and kissed her hair.
“You’re back!” Charlie managed at last.
“Just about,” Matt said. He stepped into the flat, moving out of the way of his parents, who carried in his suitcase and bags.
“Hallo Charlie,” Mr Ingleston said. “Good to see you again!”
“Hallo Tom,” Charlie said. “Please, do come in!” She ushered them into the lounge, only reluctantly letting go of Matt in the process. “How are you feeling?” she asked him.
“Oh, I’m doing alright, I guess.”
“Can I get anyone a cup of tea?”
“Yes, yes, that’d be lovely!” Matt’s mother replied.
“Well, why don’t you go and help Charlie with the tea,” his father said, “whilst I help get Matt unpacked?”
“Really, Dad, I don’t need a hand,” Matt protested.
“Yes, you do,” his father said, ushering him into his room whilst Charlie headed towards the kitchen, Mrs Ingleston in tow. As she shut the kitchen door behind her, Mrs Ingleston pulled out a folder from her handbag.
“How is he, really, Barbara?” Charlie asked.
“He’s improving, day by day, but he’s not the same person. You need to be prepared for a big difference, dear.”
“But he’s going to be OK?”
“Well, they can’t find anything physically wrong with him, but he is still having memory problems. We’re just grateful that he remembers anything at all, but you’ll have to get used to him having gaps.” She handed Charlie the folder. “These are contact details for his specialist, as well as all our numbers and his brother’s numbers, just in case anything goes awry. We don’t think it will, but call us any time you get worried, dear. More than anything, he just needs to get back to his old life. He was going stir crazy at home, trapped in our house in the middle of nowhere!”
They made tea and by the time they were back in the lounge, so were the men. The four of them made small talk until the teapot was empty. Charlie sat across the room from Matt, unable to either take her eyes off him or go over and hug him. She itched for his parents to leave, but was far too polite to even drop a hint. They didn’t stay long, though, and soon Charlie and Matt were standing again at the door, waving them off, arms surreptitiously around each other.
“In all seriousness, Matt,” Charlie said as they went back to sit on the sofa together, “how are you feeling?”
“It’s… It’s hard to say, Charlie.”
“You don’t remember anything?”
“Nothing from a few days before until they brought me out of sedation.”
“You don’t remember the alternate reality app on your phone?”
“No.”
“You don’t remember the Visitor Centre or walking round the field looking for the golden hare?”
“Nothing. Where is my phone, by the way? Mum said you had it?”
“Yes, I do. Hang on.” She went to the mantelpiece where the phone had sat untouched since she’d returned from the hospital. She looked at Matt reluctantly. “Do you think it’s smart to turn it on? What if this phone is what caused your collapse?”
“How could a phone do that?”
“Good question, though I don’t know how the hell they rigged that AR in the field either, but they did.”
Matt recognised the concern in Charlie’s voice and said, “You think we should trash it?”
“I don’t know. I hate the idea of ruining a perfectly good phone, but…”
“Maybe it was something in the field. I had that phone for ages before that and nothing bad happened.”
“That’s a good point. OK, I’m going to turn it on, but if anything looks weird, you grab it off me, right?” Charlie wasn’t sure this was a smart idea, but her curiosity had kicked in.
“Right.”
“Three… Two… One…” She pressed the On button and waited. The backlight of the screen came on, but the screen itself remained black. She took it back over to Matt and sat down next to him.
“It’s bricked.”
“Yeah. It looks like it has been wiped.” She turned the inert thing over in her hands. “Wonder how you do a factory reset.”
Matt took the phone from her hands, his fingers perhaps brushing hers a little more than they needed to, and inspected it. “Back in a moment,” he said, heading off to his room. He returned moments later with his laptop and the cable for the phone.
“Oh, that reminds me, I’ve got our laptops back.”
“Really? How the hell did that happen?”
“They were delivered by courier the week after you collapsed. Weird.”
“Did the police catch the thieves?”
“No, no, they didn’t. In fact, I haven’t heard anything more from them. But it doesn’t matter now we have our stuff back.”
“I suppose… I never thought I’d say it, but I’ve missed having a laptop. Mum wouldn’t let me use one, said I needed to recuperate without addling my brain on the internet.”
“Well, the connection at your parents’ place is rubbish anyway, so it would only have driven you nuts with frustration.”
Matt laughed. He connected the phone to his computer and opened a c: prompt window. He paused a moment, his eyes unfocused, and started typing. Charlie sat close to him, watching the screen.
“Matt? What are you doing?” He was typing quite quickly, but once he was past standard log-in commands, Charlie couldn’t recognise any of the code he was executing on the phone. “Matt?” She shook his shoulder and he snapped out of his reverie.
“What? Sorry!”
Charlie lifted the laptop on to her own lap and scrolled back through log of commands and responses from the phone. Nothing looked familiar.
“Matt, what is this?”
“What is what?”
“This!” She pointed at the green text in the black window.
“Erm, I don’t know.”
“But you were typing this.”
“Yeeaaaahhh. Yeah, I’m not quite sure, if I’m honest.”
“Matt, I’m doing a PhD in computer science. My thesis is on specialised and obscure programming languages. This is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Where did you learn it?”
“I don’t know, Charlie. I just, when I… When I woke up in hospital, it was like finding my way out of this infinite white maze. I’d been stuck in my own virtual reality in my own head for what felt like forever. When they brought me back to consciousness it was like someone just opened a door in that maze and let me out. Since then, I’ve been dying to get my hands on a computer, but Mum wouldn’t let me. And when I plugged that phone in, well, something in my head took over.” He looked up at her, caught her eye. “It was like I could see inside of it, Charlie. Like it was part of me and I could just make it do what I want.”
“What’s a regex?”
“A what? I have no idea.”
Charlie opened a text editor and typed. “Look at this and tell me if it’s right.”
Matt glanced at it and shook his head. He took the laptop back and made some corrections.
“How did you know what to correct, Matt? You’re crap at coding. You can barely program the TV recorder.”
“I don’t know, Charlie. It just didn’t look right.”
He flipped back to the Terminal window and looked at what he’d typed.
“Can you finish it?” Charlie asked.
Matt started typing again, his expression focused and concentrated. Suddenly, the phone chimed, the screen lighting up white. “Well, it’s not dead anymore,” Matt said, “But it doesn’t have an operating system. They wiped everything when it disconnected from the hotspot at The Centre.”
“You remember!”
Matt stopped, and looked at her. “I guess I remember that much, yes. And maybe there’s more buried somewhere. But this phone still won’t work without an operating system. I think I can write one, though.”
“Write one?”
“Yeah, given a bit of time, I think I can.”
“Holy crap, Matt.”
He looked up at her, surprised. “I suppose that is a little odd,” he said. “Yes, yes it is odd. They definitely did something to me.”
Charlie stared back at him, noting the lines in his face that hadn’t been there before, the shadows in his eyes, the skin taut over his cheekbones. He looked exhausted. She took the laptop and closed it.
“I think you need to take this in stages,” she said. “You’re not fully recovered yet, and right now, I think you need a nap.”
“Maybe you’re right. It was a long drive over.”
“Come on, off to bed with you.” She stood, took his hand, and pulled as if to pull him to his feet. He laughed as he stood.
“OK, Charlie, OK. Just one thing, though.”
“What?”
“Will you come with me?”
If you want to read Argleton all in one go, download the free ebook now. And why not try The Gates of Balawat or The Lacemaker as well!
Acknowledgements
With massive thanks to everyone who helped to make this project such a success. Without the help and support of everyone involved, this work and my life would have been lesser.
Thanks to Kevin Charman-Anderson for invaluable discussions that shaped the story and helped me to understand Matt and Charlie a little better.
Thanks to the members of my editorial board for their feedback and essential moral support: Stephanie Booth, Sydney Padua, Kevin Marks, Stephanie Troeth, Vincent Holland-Keen, Steve Mosby and Owen Blacker.
The title page illustration was drawn by the fabulous Sydney Padua, whose comic, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace & Baggage, you can read at 2dgoggles.com.
Thanks to Matt Patterson for being my Design Overlord and helping me to iron out considerable visual wrinkles. And thanks to Thomas James for designing the new cover and endpapers for the second edition.
And finally, very special thanks to my Kickstarter supporters, without whom this story would remain just a collection of bits on my hard drive: Aaron Davies, Beth Dunn, Eric Wayne Norlander, Gary Turner, Irish Viking, Jason Lee, John Rochester, Kate Trgovac, Noirin Shirley, Stefan Schmiedl, Stephanie Booth, Steve Walker, steve mosby, Zach Greenberger, Alison B, Allan Jenkins, Dan Dickinson, David Miller, David Shane, DivNull Productions, Fred DeJarlais, Gavin Bell, Gia Milinovich, Iain Baker, Jessica Spengler, Karin H, Kathryn Service, Kevin Marks, Lucy Gunther, Matt Zimmerman, Michael Weiss, Mike Little, Paul J Dickinson, Pierre L’allier, Richard Kempter, Scott VanGerpen, Shedworking, Steph Troeth, Susan Ator, TScheffner, Vicki O’Shea, Adam Milner, Amanda Hepburn, Andrew Blake, Andy Markowitz , Andy Sturdevant, Belle, benmason, Bill Allen, Blair Frank, C Ferguson, Cathy Cooper, Christina Svendsen, Christy Dena, Cliff Fuller, David Clay, Delia Stearnes, Diane Brewster, Dmitry Kohmanyuk, Donia Conn, Gretchen Stelter, J. Moore, Jennifer DeMarrais, Jesse Bowline, Joe Milazzo, Joey Coleman, John Clark, Jon Wilkie, Keith Kunkel, Kevin Jackson, Kevin Makice, Lorin O’Brien, Melissa Anderson Sweazy, Mildred Kennedy-Stirling, nancy may, Nigel Shardlow, paul d mcnair, Perrin Randlette, Ralph Brandi, Rebecca, Stephen Weston, SusanWalther, vlaskovits, Wil Scott, Joel, Pixie359.