The Tomorrow Code (2 page)

Some teachers enjoyed having Rebecca in their class because she was very, very clever, if a little rebellious and uncontrollable at times. But other teachers found it stressful to have a girl amongst their students who took great delight in correcting them whenever they made mistakes.

So if Rebecca said that time travel was impossible, then time travel was impossible. But there was something about the stars that night. Something about their slow drift through the heavens above and below them, something about the beautifully random and randomly beautiful patterns they made.

Or then again, it might just have been that Tane liked to argue, and he especially liked to argue with Rebecca.

“I read a book once,” Tane said. “I can’t remember what it was called, but it was about these grad students who go back in time to medieval days to rescue a missing historian, and they fight—”

“Timeline,”
interrupted Rebecca, who also loved a good argument and especially enjoyed showing that she knew more than Tane. “Michael Crichton, 1999.”

“Yeah, that’s it. But anyway, they manage to create this…like…pinprick in the fabric of time somehow, and then they kind of transmit themselves through it.”

“I know. I read it,” said Rebecca. And then, perhaps because she realized that she was sounding a bit negative, she said, “I mean, the science was quite good in it, about the fabric of space-time, and the quantum foam, all the way up to the part where they transmit themselves through this tiny hole into the past.”

Tane twisted his head around to look at her, but it hurt, and all he could see were her shoes, so he twisted back again. He thought for a moment. True, he wasn’t as good at math and science as she was. Tane’s strengths were in art and music, and he was a school legend on the harmonica, but even so, the time-travel thing sounded at least feasible to him.

“Why?” he asked eventually. “Why couldn’t they transmit themselves?”

“Try to think logically,” Rebecca said firmly but not unkindly. “How could you transport a live human being through a pinhole of any kind?”

“What about a fax machine!” Tane said suddenly. “You put a piece of paper in at one place, and it gets sent along a telephone wire and comes out in another place.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Yes, it does,” said Tane, starting to get into the argument, even though he knew she was going to turn out to be right.

“No, it doesn’t,” repeated Rebecca. “A copy of the piece of paper comes out. The actual piece of paper you sent stays right where it was. All you are sending is an electronic image of the paper, just like a digital photograph of it.
Fax
is short for
facsimile,
which means ‘copy.’”

“So…um…” Tane was losing and he knew it.

“We can transmit pictures, sound, even movies, through wires, or through the air in radio waves. But we can’t transmit a solid object. Not even a piece of paper.”

And that was pretty much the end of the conversation for the moment. They stayed on the platform for a while longer. Neither of them really wanted to go home, for reasons of their own. They talked about school a bit and made some jokes about some of the people in their classes. It was about ten o’clock, after they had sloshed their way through Lake Sunnyvale back to the road, when Tane resumed the argument, as if they had never left off. Which just showed that he had been quietly thinking about it the whole time.

“Well, if we can’t transmit people through time, what about sounds, pictures, and movies, like you said?”

Rebecca had to actually think about that for a moment, which was a small victory for Tane. He pulled out his harmonica and played a slow blues riff as they walked. “Nope,” she said at last. “If I understand the science right”—and Tane thought she probably did—“then you could only send stuff backward. You couldn’t transmit to the future because that hasn’t happened yet.”

“But you could send it to the past?!”

“Well…theoretically. But let’s say we invented some kind of radio transmitter that could broadcast through time. Something that could transmit messages through the quantum foam. Nobody could listen to the messages we were sending, because in the past they wouldn’t have invented a radio receiver that could pick up the transmission.”

“Oh,” said Tane, thinking that Rebecca, as usual, made perfect sense.

They reached Rebecca’s house and stopped.

All the lights were off, but one of the windows flickered with the blue glow of a television. Her mum was watching TV, which was no great surprise, because that was pretty much all her mum did all day and all night. At least since Rebecca’s dad had died.

“Oh,” said Tane again pointlessly, and glanced up at the sky just in time to catch the brief flash of a shooting star.

That was when the inspiration struck him. That was the moment when it all seemed so clear.

“So what if someone in the future had already invented a time radio transmitter and was sending messages back to the past, waiting for someone to invent a receiver?”

He wasn’t sure if that sounded silly or not, so he just waited for the usual rebuff from his friend.

It didn’t come.

“What’s that again?”

“Well, let’s just say that some time in the future, someone invents one of those transmitters you were talking about. And just say they are sending out messages, through that foamy stuff, just waiting for someone in the past to invent a receiver.”

“Well, I…um…”

“What if we built a receiver and just listened. Just waited for a signal from the future.”

“Well, the whole concept of quantum foam is not even proven. And I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to build a receiver,” Rebecca mused. “But it’s an interesting idea.”

That may not have sounded like much, but it wasn’t very often that Rebecca thought that Tane had an interesting idea, so it was kind of an important day, if only for that reason.

Although, in hindsight, it was actually an important day for much bigger reasons than that.

“You want to come on another march with me?” Rebecca asked, walking slowly backward up the driveway toward her darkened house.

“Of course,” Tane said automatically. “What are we protesting about this time?”

“Whales,” Rebecca said.

Tane shook his head. “I’ve got no problems with whales. They’ve never bothered me.”

Rebecca laughed. “It’s a couple of weeks away. I’ll remind you.”

She turned and disappeared into the carport and inside her home.

F
ATBOY AND
H
IS
M
OKO

It was a couple of
weeks before the subject of the quantum foam came up again, and in all that time, Rebecca never mentioned it once, which made Tane think she had forgotten about it.

However, a lot of other things happened during those weeks, some of which were to have far-reaching and long-lasting effects, such as Tane’s older brother asking Rebecca out to the movies or Rebecca getting arrested. Another thing that happened was that Rebecca and her mother were kicked out of their home.

Tane’s older brother’s name was Harley. Harley had been a chubby kid, and with a name like that, he quickly picked up the nickname Fatboy, as in the classic Harley-Davidson motorcycle. He hated the name when he was ten, but by the age of fifteen, thanks to years of rugby, the weight had turned into muscle; yet the name had stuck, and Fatboy—Fats to his friends—kinda liked it. It was no coincidence that when he got his full motorcycle license, he came home the same day with a genuine Harley-Davidson Fat Boy.

Fatboy was a musician. The kind with dreadlocks and a leather jacket, not the kind who played in a symphony orchestra. And he wasn’t a rock star about to be discovered and have number-one hit singles around the world. At least Tane didn’t think so.

Fatboy was a session musician. He played guitar and he was pretty good at it. Good enough that he had dropped out of school before his sixteenth birthday to pursue it. (“Over my dead body,” their mother had said, but somehow she had survived.) Fatboy had a kind of natural affinity for music, which must have run in the family because the same aptitude flowed through Tane’s veins.

Fatboy was seventeen, and although he wasn’t particularly good-looking, he always seemed to have at least two girlfriends on the go at any one time, which seemed a bit excessive to Tane, who (in his opinion) was much better-looking but didn’t have a girlfriend at all.

Rebecca, on the other hand, had had a couple of boyfriends, but they hadn’t lasted long. She was quite nice to look at, quite pretty in fact, in her rebellious, punky way. But some boys were afraid of her intelligence and thought she was a bit of a know-it-all, which in fact she was. Other boys thought she was going out with Tane, which in fact she wasn’t.

The day that Fatboy asked Rebecca out, she was at Tane’s house playing chess. It was Sunday. The day after Lake Sunnyvale.

The lounge of Tane’s house was huge and split over three levels, so it was almost three lounges connected into one. Up through the center of the three levels grew the massive trunk of a hundred-and-fifty-year-old tree. It wasn’t technically inside the house. It was more like there was a hole up through the center of the house in which the tree grew, with huge plate-glass windows on all four sides.

They were on the lower of the three lounges, nestled into the embrace of the native bush that surrounded the home. From the middle lounge, the house had million-dollar views out across the valley to the lights of the city, and from the uppermost lounge, a long balcony led off to a series of treetop-level rope walkways. This high in the mountains, you could walk out amongst the trees and surround yourself with birdsong on a warm summer’s evening.

It was a very expensive house that Tane’s father was able to afford because of his very successful career as an artist. Rangi Williams painted animals, usually New Zealand native animals, in their own environment. He often disappeared into the bush for days at a time, armed only with his sketch pads. His paintings sold all around the world. There was something especially appealing, apparently, about paintings of New Zealand’s native creatures painted by a descendant of the Maori, New Zealand’s native people.

The architecturally designed house was a stark contrast to Rebecca’s home, which was old brick and tile and was nestled on the hillside that encircled Sunnyvale School.

Tane advanced his knight to attack Rebecca’s rook. He liked to attack his opponents’ rooks early in the game, as it weakened their attack later on.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” Rebecca asked.

Tane considered the move. And he considered Rebecca. Sometimes she would say that because he had just made a really dumb move. But other times she would say that to make him think that he had just made a really dumb move when really he hadn’t.

He examined the board once again and removed his hand from his piece.

“I’m sure.”

Rebecca shrugged and moved her rook. On her next turn, she captured his queen.

“Bum,” Tane said quietly. It
had
been a really dumb move.

The throaty roar of an engine was followed by a spray of gravel from the driveway as Fatboy spun his motorcycle around and flicked down the stand. He always parked like that, roaring up at high speed and spinning the back wheel around on the gravel. He said he liked to leave the bike facing the way he was going, not where he had been, but Tane thought he did it just to show off. It annoyed their mother to distraction, as she had to spend hours picking pieces of gravel out of her prizewinning flowerbeds.

Still, he knew she was always secretly pleased when Fatboy came to visit, which wasn’t all that often now that he had his own flat in the city.

He left his motorcycle boots at the door. Not even Fatboy was brave enough to tramp all over their still-new-looking carpets wearing outside footwear. He left his jacket on, though, as he swaggered inside and was just taking off his helmet when he noticed Tane and Rebecca lying on the floor with the chessboard.

“
Kia Ora,
Rebecca.
Kia Ora,
little bro,” Fatboy greeted them in Maori.

“
Kia Ora,
Fats,” Rebecca replied.