Читать книгу Zones - Damien Broderick - Страница 3

PROLOGUE

It all seems so long ago. I was only fourteen. I was a bright girl, very bright, and did really well at school, but I was still mixed up, a bit of a mess to tell the truth. My parents had divorced recently, my boyfriend couldn’t keep his hands to himself, and I didn’t even have a computer. Can anyone who wasn’t there believe that? 1995 was a time when nice middle class households like ours usually still had only one phone, a landline of course, often in the hallway. No privacy. No texting. One phone!

But it turned out that our phone was special.

Cell phones—mobiles, we called them in Australia in those days—were just coming in. I remember the first one I saw: some guy was walking down the street talking to it. It was about the size of a small brick. And here was this guy in the street with a brick rammed up against his ear and he was talking to it, talking to a brick. He seemed only slightly embarrassed. I just stood and stared, trying not to laugh, as did most of the other pedestrians.

It was an innocent age. The Twin Towers in New York were as solid as concrete and steel could make them. If you wanted to find out a fact, you looked it up—in a book, unless you were a geek with a modem connection to an Internet that had hardly got started by today’s standards. I don’t think Google had even been launched back then, but I can’t be bothered googling it to make sure. It took a solid week for a letter to get from Melbourne to San Francisco and another week for the reply to reach you. Hell, you could exchange two letters a month with your American pen friend. I might have been bright, but I had no idea where Iraq or Afghanistan were. Why should I? I mean, the world’s greatest scientists didn’t even know that the universe is expanding faster and faster. They thought it was all doomed, billions and billions of years from now, to collapse into a Big Crunch. They didn’t know about dark matter and dark energy. They certainly didn’t know about time zone resonances. Hey, I was only the second person in all of history to know about that.

So in this innocent time I arrived home one afternoon from the supermarket on my bike. I could hear a phone ringing in the hall instead of vibrating in my pocket, because they didn’t do that yet....