The Tomorrow Code Read online

  She came down just like any other mother and wished them well on their boat trip.

  “Thanks, Mum,” Rebecca said. “I’ve made you a casserole. Enough for two or three days. It’s in the fridge, and there’s leftover pizza in the freezer if you get hungry.”

  “Oh, you didn’t need to fuss around like that,” her mum said. “I’m quite capable of looking after myself.”

  Tane caught a small glance from Rebecca and knew that being capable of looking after yourself and actually doing it were two different things.

  Rebecca gave her mum a kiss and said, “See you in a couple of days, Mum. Love you.”

  “Love you too,” her mum said absently. “Take care, now.” Then she disappeared back into her room and they heard the theme tune start from Survivor: New York.

  The Möbius made better speed underwater, but the air quickly got dry and tinny, so when they were well clear of any other boats, and far enough away from land not to be seen, they surfaced and opened the twin hatches to let the fresh cool sea air wash through the boat.

  It was a sunny day, and there was a small flat area in between the two glass domes of the cockpit where you could just about lie down comfortably. Rebecca changed into her bikini and did some sunbathing, while Fatboy steered and Tane lounged half in and half out of the hatch, playing a happy bluesy tune on his harmonica.

  The Möbius might have been cool, and she was very discreet, but she wasn’t fast, and it seemed to take an eternity even to get out to the tip of the Whangaparaoa Peninsula, at the northern end of the Hauraki Gulf.

  “Don’t spend too long out there; you’ll burn,” Tane said. He had put sunblock on his face and arms half an hour ago and had put on a hat. Rebecca was still soaking up the sunshine, swaying gently with the movement of the boat in the water and squealing occasionally when a rough wave splashed spray over the front fins.

  “Yes, Mother,” Rebecca laughed, and it would have been funny, except that Fatboy had said the same thing the day before.

  “Seriously. They reckon the ozone hole is extra large this year. You’ll burn fast.”

  She craned her neck up past the right-hand dome and squinted at him. “I know, you’re right,” she said. “But it’s luvverly! Nice to know you care, though.”

  Tane shrugged. The sun was nice and warm on his skin; that was true. And the occasional splash of seawater provided a pleasant, refreshing spray.

  He felt, rather than saw, Rebecca looking at him out of the corner of her eye and knew she had something on her mind. He shut his eyes and let the sun warm his eyelids while he waited for her to come out with it.

  Rebecca said after a while, “Why do you care? Why are we such good friends? Why do you like me? Some of the kids at school won’t even talk to me.”

  Tane thought about it for a while and played a few more bars before answering. “I guess they haven’t known you as long as I have.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” she asked, then said, “Chuck us the sunblock.”

  Tane carefully slid the plastic bottle down the rounded yellow side of the Möbius into her outstretched hand. He said, “Think of it like this. Other people see you and they only see you as you are right at that moment. And they make up their minds about you based on that one tiny instant in time.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But I’ve known you all my life. I look at you and I see the little girl who wet her pants in the sandbox at kindy and blamed Mary Mackey. I see you at your tenth birthday and at your dad’s funeral. I look at you and I see all the different yous, and…” He paused. “I wonder about the ones still to come.”

  Rebecca laughed, a slightly embarrassed sound. “Jeez, you talk a load of crap. I’m not sure if you’re being nice or being rude!”

  “So why do you like me?” Tane asked.

  Rebecca said immediately, “What on earth makes you think I like you?”

  She kept a straight face long enough to make Tane think she was serious, before dissolving into another fit of laughter.

  Tane thought that, despite what she said, she was secretly quite pleased with his answer. It felt good. Like the old days, before Fatboy stuck his nose in.

  “Of course, some days,” he said, “you can be a real pain in the ass.”

  “What do you mean…” She looked around and saw his smile and threw the bottle of sunblock at him. It bounced off the hatch and disappeared into the ocean.

  “Oops,” she said.

  They stopped for a while in the evening, and Rebecca, who was the most experienced cook, made a quick fry-up on the gimbal-mounted electric stove. Electric, not gas, Arthur had pointed out, because it was easier to replace electricity than oxygen.

  They ate on board and continued for another hour after dinner into a sheltered cove on the lee side of Little Barrier Island. There was no point in continuing farther, as the light was fading, and running with the lights on used up the batteries twice as fast.

  “It’s deserted,” Tane said, scanning the cove with binoculars. “Let’s park the sub up on the beach for a while and go for a swim.”

  “Hauturu.” Fatboy shook his head, giving the island its Maori name. “We’re not allowed to land there. It’s a wildlife sanctuary.”

  “We’re not allowed to break into science labs either,” Tane pointed out, “but that’s not stopping us. And what do the wild lives need sanctuary from anyway?”

  Rebecca smiled but said softly, “Us.”

  They did go for a swim eventually, after Fatboy jury-rigged an anchor by tying a nylon rope to the bow and diving down to secure it around a heavy rock in shallow water near the northern tip of the small cove. It seemed strange that the Möbius did not have an anchor of her own, but maybe, as Rebecca surmised, nobody ever thought she would need one.

  Once the boat was secure against the gradual draw of the tide, and with the sun a dusky memory on the horizon, they fooled around for a while, dive-bombing each other off the end of the boat, dunking each other, and generally acting like a bunch of lunatics until the light faded a little too far, and the water darkened a little too much, and they climbed back on board for the night.

  They sealed the hatches, released the buoy, and with a whisper of bubbles, slowly sank to the bottom of the cove, landing gently in soft sand between a small underwater ridge and a few scattered boulders.

  And there, in the tranquility of Little Barrier Island, they slept, serenaded only by the gentle sounds of the sea and the hum of the air hose from the buoy.

  BUTT MOP

  Rebecca downloaded the next batch of BATSE data the next afternoon while Tane had his turn steering the sub. A few boats had been cruising the area, and the fine weather of the previous day had disappeared, replaced by squally showers, so they had taken the precaution of submerging and continuing the trip in the relative calm of the ocean depths.

  “More of the same,” Rebecca said, peering at the characters on the screen of her laptop. “Just more of the same.”

  Since the “Water Works” and the as-yet-indecipherable “Butt Mop,” there had been nothing but numbers. Always a series of numbers, separated by commas, then a full stop, then another series. Not Lotto numbers; they didn’t fit the pattern. Something else. Something with a lot of numbers!

  Every day it seemed there were more transmissions captured by the satellite and uploaded to the BATSE Web site. They had set both Tane’s computer and Rebecca’s shiny new laptop running Rebecca’s program, day and night, and were working through the backlog of transmissions that had been coming in ever since they had visited Dr. Barnes at the university.

  Rebecca had tried every combination and calculation she could think of to make some sense out of the numbers, but the answer still eluded her. She was convinced, and had said so many times, that the solution would be something not logical. Something lateral. Something that Tane’s creative imagination would be needed to solve.

  “Come on, Tane,” she said. “We need you to think outside the box.”
>
  Tane stared out at the monotonous sameness of the ocean. It was hard to think creatively when you had a splitting headache, and he had one now. He hadn’t slept much the previous night but had lain awake worried about breaking into the lab. That was against the law. It was a criminal act. He had never broken the law before (unless you counted that packet of gum he had “borrowed” from the corner store when he was seven). He had rolled over and over in his tiny bunk, and now his head throbbed with the pulse of the engines. Think outside the box.

  He wasn’t the only one feeling the stress of the mission. He could see it on the faces of the others, especially Rebecca. She could not afford to go to jail. Could any of them? No. But especially not Rebecca. Yet it had to be done. What were the consequences if they did it? What would be the consequences if they didn’t?

  In the clear open water here, there was nothing much to look at. Just the occasional school of fish or curious shark. Ahead at Poor Knights Islands there was a world-famous diving spot, renowned for its clear waters, colorful marine life, and the wreck of the Rainbow Warrior. But that was a bit off course for them, so he had to be content with the blue-green infinity of the open water.

  Think outside the box. It was a well-worn phrase from an old puzzle that he had once seen. Nine dots that formed a three-by-three grid. Join all the dots using just four lines. It seemed impossible to most logical people, but creative thinkers quickly realized that it was easy, if you allowed your four lines to extend beyond the confines of the grid. Outside the box.

  He sketched the puzzle on a notepad, then completed the lines to make the answer.

  Something struck him about that phrase. Think outside the box. He stopped trying to solve it and let his mind drift idly, like the ocean around them. The dead fish in the beer rings came to mind, but he shook that away quickly. Quick flashes of many things, superimposed on each other—Fatboy’s hand on Rebecca’s shoulder, the nervous lawyer absentmindedly pulling at his mustache, the fantail family naively fearless in their flimsy nest, the chessboard he had bought Rebecca for Christmas. And as it usually did, the answer just floated into his mind and was there for quite a while before he realized it.

  The chessboard. Think outside the box. Black and white chess pieces, black and white boxes on the chessboard. Boxes. Think outside the box. The chessboard itself was a box, made up of smaller black and white boxes. Think inside the box!

  “The chessboard,” he finally said out loud.

  Rebecca was in the main cabin, sitting on one of the bunks, working on her computer. She looked through the pressure door at him. “What chessboard?”

  “Any chessboard,” Tane said quickly.

  Fatboy had been lying on one of the other bunks, but now he walked over and sat in the codriver’s seat. “Go on,” he said purposefully. He was wearing his cowboy hat, which seemed a little silly to Tane.

  “A chessboard is made up of eight boxes by eight boxes, right? Some black, some white.”

  “Yes.”

  Rebecca was starting to get it, Tane thought.

  “Suppose you had a chessboard that was made up of one thousand boxes by one thousand boxes. That would be one thousand squared.” He picked up the notepad and wrote it: 10002. “In the first row, instead of alternating black and white, suppose the first, say, eighty were white, and the next—what was it…” He checked the printout.

  BTMP1000:2.80,24,341,55,500.80,24,342,54,499,1.80,24

  “…twenty-four were black. And so on and so on for all the rows. What would you have?”

  “A bloody great, stupid-looking chessboard,” said Fatboy, who was cool and popular but wasn’t really all that bright.

  “A photograph,” said Rebecca, who was.

  “Or a fax,” said Tane who, just at that moment, thought he was the brightest of them all. “A fax is just a lot of rows of black and white dots, arranged in a particular pattern to form a picture.”

  “Brilliant!” Rebecca cried. She put down her computer and rushed into the control room. She threw her arms around Fatboy’s neck and gave him a huge hug from behind.

  Hey, thought Tane, it was me who solved it!

  “What should we do?” asked Fatboy. “Get a big piece of paper and start to draw it up?”

  Rebecca shook her head. “It’d be easier to do on the computer. I’ll do it in Photoshop. I’ll just create an image one thousand dots by one thousand dots and save it as a…” She stopped, and then strangely, and rather tiredly, began to laugh again.

  “What?” asked Tane, a little defensively, thinking she was laughing at him.

  “Save it as a bitmap.”

  It took Rebecca nearly two hours to take the data they already had and convert it into dots on the bitmap. All the weeks of data they had received and it made up less than a third of the image. It was clear enough from that what the image was going to be, though.

  “It’s a diagram,” Rebecca announced from the main cabin, studying the image on the screen of her laptop. “A schematic.”

  “Of what?” Fatboy asked.

  “Of what the hell do you think?” Tane answered a little testily, his head still throbbing.

  Rebecca said, “Easy, Tane. Of the gamma-ray time-message-sender device, Fats. I have a feeling that we are going to need this, sooner than we thought.”

  “How soon?” Fatboy asked, but nobody answered.

  Rebecca came back into the control room and, there being no spare seat, sat on Fatboy’s knee. Tane stared out of the viewing window of the sub. He said, “I think I have a name for it.”

  Rebecca looked up. “Yes?”

  “Well, it’s like a telephone that sends text messages through time, right?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  The name had floated into Tane’s mind in between throbs of pain. Tele was ancient Greek for “distance,” and phone was ancient Greek for “speech.” So a “telephone” was a machine that let you speak across a distance. The ancient Greek word for “time” was chronos.

  “It’s a Chronophone.”

  Rebecca said, “I like it.”

  “Wouldn’t it be a Chronograph?” Fatboy asked. “I mean, it’s more like a telegraph, sending Morse code, than a telephone.”

  “Maybe, but a Chronograph is a kind of watch, so I think Chronophone is best,” Tane insisted.

  “Actually, Fatboy is right,” Rebecca said.

  “Okay, whatever.” Tane shrugged and turned away.

  There was an awkward pause. Fatboy coughed.

  After a moment, Rebecca said brightly, “Chronophone will do fine. But what a paradox.”

  Tane groaned, “Oh, here we go. I suppose you want me to kill Grandad again.”

  “You killed Grandad?!” Fatboy asked.

  “No, Fatboy, don’t worry about it. What paradox?”

  “Think about it.” Rebecca’s eyes were wide. “We’re in the middle of sending ourselves plans for the Chrono…phone, right, from the future.”

  “This much we know already.”

  “But where did we get the plans from?”

  “Which ‘we’ are you talking about?” Tane asked.

  “Okay,” Rebecca said. “Call the future Tane and Rebecca ‘them.’ Now, where did they get the plans from? From us, right?”

  “From us?” Fatboy queried. “How did we send the plans to the future?”

  Rebecca sighed with exasperation. “We didn’t send them. We just hung on to them. Think about it. Tane and I are the future Tane and Rebecca, just not yet. So future Tane and Rebecca get the plans from us, but where did we get them from? From them!”

  “So who had the plans in the first place?” Fatboy asked.

  “Exactly!” Rebecca thundered, leaving Fatboy no more the wiser.

  “And this has something to do with Grandad?” Fatboy asked, and couldn’t understand why Tane and Rebecca got the giggles.

  “The plans must have come from somewhere,” Fatboy insisted.

  “Maybe this is one of those kinds of questions that
our brains just can’t comprehend,” Rebecca said, wiping laughter tears from her eye. “Like the infinite size of space. Or what existed before the universe.”

  “Or why in automatic cars you pull the gear lever backward to go forward, and forward to go backward,” Tane contributed, and even Fatboy started laughing, in a confused kind of way.

  Eventually Fatboy said, “Okay. So I don’t really get all this paradox stuff, and I don’t understand where the plans for the Chronophone came from, but did you guys ever think about what a weird coincidence this whole thing is?”

  Rebecca, still sitting on his knee, twisted her head around to look at him. “Yeah, I know.”

  She idly lifted off his cowboy hat and put it on.

  Tane asked, “What do you mean?

  Fatboy hesitated. “Well…”

  Rebecca said, “He means that us, well, you really, Tane, thinking up the idea of receiving messages from the future, just at the right time to stop Dr. Green and her Chimera Project, is a very unlikely coincidence. Right, Fats?”

  Fatboy nodded. “Did anything else unusual happen, when you thought up the idea?”

  Tane asked, “Like what?”

  “Like, did you see anything, hear anything…”

  Tane shut his eyes, remembering. “There was a shooting star.”

  Rebecca looked up sharply. “What?”

  “The moment that I thought of the idea of messages from the future, I saw a shooting star. That’s it. Nothing else.”

  Fatboy shook his head. “Maybe it wasn’t an ordinary shooting star. Maybe the shooting star was actually a thought from the future hurtling through the atmosphere in some cosmic ray from the depths of the universe just before embedding itself in your brain.”

  Tane said, “That’s nuts.”

  Rebecca was already adding it to the notebook where she kept the message dates and times. She spoke as she wrote. “Please remember to send a shooting star above West Auckland on the twenty-seventh of October at exactly nine-fifty-three p.m. That was the right time, wasn’t it?”