The Tomorrow Code (6 page)

Something stirred a faint breath of recognition, as though he had seen patterns like this before, a long time ago. He breathed out slowly, which was his usual way of trying to relax into a memory that would not quite come. The memory tickled and teased agonizingly at the far corners of his brain, but the picture would not come into focus. The harder he tried, the more it kept darting just out of reach.

After a while, Rebecca shook her head. “Maybe it is just random after all. Depending on how you group the digits, there could be any different number of recurring sequences, or none at all. They say that if you had enough monkeys and enough typewriters, one of them would eventually type
Hamlet.
”

“What are you talking about?” Tane snorted. “Monkeys and typewriters? Hamlet?”

“Not literally,” Rebecca tried to explain. “It just means that if you have enough random…” She saw the grin on his face and threw her pen at him.

“But wouldn’t they be better off using word processors?” Tane asked.

“Who?”

“The monkeys.”

“Whatever.”

The excitement of the morning had worn off by lunchtime (cheese on toast, provided by Tane’s mother). If there was any kind of a pattern there, it was proving to be elusive, and the dark circles under Rebecca’s eyes had returned. Even her hair, normally spiky and sharp, was limp and lifeless.

“I thought I was on to something for a while there,” Rebecca sighed. “I really thought I had it.”

“What?”

“No. It’s wrong,” she said sadly. “Binary code. That’s the language that computers talk in—I mean, way down in the depths of their operating systems. Information is stored in bits, which can be on or off—”

“Yeah, I get it,” said Tane, even though he didn’t. “Move along.”

“Well, the BATSE data is actually in binary code. My program just displays it in ones and zeroes to make it easier for us to read. So I had this bright idea of translating the binary code into ASCII characters.”

“Um, ooohkaaay.”

“God, it’s like talking to a monkey some days,” Rebecca stormed.

“Maybe, but I’ve written this really cool play about this guy named Hamlet—”

“ASCII characters,” Rebecca cut him off with just a brief smile, “are eight-character binary codes for the letters of the alphabet. For example, 01000001 is
A,
01000010 is
B,
and so on. So I translated the whole string of characters using ASCII.”

“And?”

“Oh.” She seemed distracted. “Nothing, just gibberish. So then I tried it in BASE 64, which is another kind of computer code, but no luck; then I realized there were two hundred fifty-eight characters, which is two too many for ASCII or BASE 64, which must be in groups of eight, so I took off the first two characters and tried that in BASE 64.”

“And?”

She handed over a printout.

ZkIGYwZzBnAmeAZyrj8czAMVDDVz9UA/MO8YycAkxQ==

“‘Zuhkiggy wazzabeen ameezy,’” Tane read out importantly. “You know this is a really significant moment, like when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and said, ‘Mr. Watson, come here.’ Except our first message says, ‘Zuhkiggy wazzabeen ameezy.’”

“Bell didn’t invent the telephone,” Rebecca said sourly.

“Maybe that’s the language they speak in the future,” Tane said. “Maybe ‘Zuhkiggy wazzabeen ameezy’ is future-speak for ‘Hi, what’s up?’ or…” He trailed off, seeing that she was not laughing. “Sorry.”

A tear appeared at the corner of Rebecca’s eye and found its way slowly down her cheek.

“Let’s go for a walk,” said Tane, feeling stupid and useless.

From the back of the house, a narrow, little-used track wound through the trees and eventually joined up with one of the main hiking trails through the bush of the mountains. Not even forty-five minutes of steady walking along that brought them to the top of one of the dams that were scattered through the mountains to provide water for the city below.

This was a small, earthen dam that almost seemed a part of the hillside. They leaned on a solid wooden handrail, hewn from a half-round log, and looked down at the lush bush-covered hillside below.

The memory that had been tickling at Tane’s mind was still there. He tried not to think about it. That was what his dad always said. Stop trying so hard. Let your subconscious sort it out.

“It’s beautiful here,” Rebecca said. “I love it. All you can hear is the water and the wind in the trees and the birds—” She stopped, interrupted by a loud bell-like sequence from just above their heads. “There, what’s that one?”

“Korimako,” Tane said. “Bellbird. And that’s a saddle-back over there.”

“How do you know all these?” Rebecca asked with a grin. “Are you a secret bird-watcher?”

Tane smiled and shrugged. “Nah, just Boy Scouts. Had to learn them all in Scouts. If you passed a test, you got a badge that…you…could…”

The delicate tendril of a memory tugged again at the back of his mind, tantalizingly close. He shut his eyes for a moment, and then, after what seemed like an age but was no more than a second or two, he said, “We’ve got to get back to the house.”

“What is it?” Rebecca asked, but Tane was silent.

He flattened the sheet of paper out on the coffee table and smoothed it with his hand.

“You said it would be like cracking a code,” he said, and pointed to the short pattern of numbers that Rebecca had marked:
001100.
“When I was a scout, I got a lot of badges. I got my New Zealand Birds badge, and I also got my Morse code badge. Now, if this was Morse code, then that would be a comma.”

Rebecca froze and turned to him. Her eyes were wide. She didn’t seem to be breathing. “Morse code?” she said in a dry voice.

“It’s a method of signaling that ships—”

“I know what Morse code is,” she rasped.

“Well”—he hesitated—“I can’t remember much of it, but I can remember a few bits. If the ones were dots and the zeroes were dashes, that would be a comma.”

“Okay. So what would this be, before the comma?”

“Ummmmm…”

“Google,” said Rebecca determinedly.

A few moments later, they had a printout of all the Morse code characters.

Half an hour later, they were no closer to solving the puzzle.

“It might be Morse code,” Rebecca said. “But Morse code characters aren’t all the same length, and that makes it really hard to decipher. Take this first bit, for example: 00011001100. That could be
O, I, M, I, M,
or it could just as easily be
M, N, P, W
or any of a hundred other combinations, none of which make sense!”

“Yeah,” Tane said slowly, poring over the printout. “But if I was right about the 001100 being a comma, then we have 00011 comma 1000010000 comma 1100011000 comma, and so on.”

“Well, 00011 is eight,” Rebecca said, checking the chart, “and 10000 is one, 11000 is two, so that would give us eight, eleven, twenty-two, thirty-two, thirty-nine….” She paused and looked at Tane. “Holy crap!” she said. “I think it
is
Morse code.”

They looked at each other for a long time, desperately eager to carry on and translate the code but strangely afraid to. Slowly their eyes dropped back to the paper.

“That’s it,” Tane said after a moment. “See, 101010; that’s a period. That must be the end of it.”

“No, there’s still a lot to work out. But let’s start with this bit,” Rebecca said.

They looked intently at the sheet.

8,11,22,32,39,40,3.

Tane said, “And…”

There was silence for a few moments.

“I don’t know,” Rebecca admitted. “They’re just numbers. The fact that we picked them out of a gamma-ray burst using Morse code is pretty significant, but as for what they mean…”

“Are you sure this isn’t just more monkeys typing
Hamlet
?” Tane asked after a while. “More random noise that just coincidentally happens to make Morse code characters? I mean, why use Morse at all? Why not use that ASCII stuff, or Moonbase 64 or whatever it was?”

“Base 64,” corrected Rebecca. “Anyway, that’s easy. Binary takes eight bits, eight ones or zeroes, to make a single letter like
A.
Morse code does it in less than half that.
E
and
T,
for example, take just one digit.
E
is dot, and
T
is dash. So they can fit many more letters into a single message. Maybe there’s some kind of a limit, like on a text message.”

“They need to change their phone company,” Tane muttered.

“Eight, eleven, twenty-two…,” Rebecca read out loud.

“We’re going to have to think creatively on this,” Tane said. “Think outside the box. How many numbers are there?”

“Seven.”

“The lowest number is three, and the highest is forty.”

“Yes. The numbers start at eight and go upward, until they get to forty; then it suddenly drops back down to three.”

Rebecca said, “Maybe it’s a series, and we have to work out the next few numbers in the series.”

Tane said nothing and closed his eyes.

Rebecca said, “It can’t be letters of the alphabet, because there are only twenty-six of those. Maybe if I calculated the differences between each pair of numbers or…”

“No,” said Tane suddenly, “you’re thinking too logically. Try to think creatively.”

“What do you mean? How can you think ‘creatively’? We have to approach this logically.”

Tane considered that for a moment, then said, “Okay, here’s an example. It’s a puzzle that my dad once gave me.”

He took the pen and wrote a series of letters on a clean piece of paper: O, T, T, F, F, S, S, E.

“What’s the next letter in that series?” he asked.

“Do we have time for this?” Rebecca shook her head.

“Try it.”

“Okay, then.” She took the pen from him and made a few notes on the paper. “
E
would be the obvious answer, because the other ones are doubled, but the
O
is not, so that can’t be right.
O
is the fifteenth letter of the alphabet,
T
is the twentieth,
F
is the sixth—”

“See, you’re already being too logical,” Tane said. “It’s much simpler than that.”

“Simpler?” Rebecca looked confused. “How can it be? There’s no numerical consistency. Ah, but working backward,
S
comes after
T,
and
E
comes after
F,
so maybe—”

“N,”
Tane said. “The answer is
N.
”

“No, it’s not. That’s not logical—”

“One, two, three, four, five,” Tane read out, pointing at the letters. “It is the first letter of each word. The next one is
N
for
nine.
”

“That’s stupid,” Rebecca said. “Anyway, you’re the creative one. You think creatively.”

“Okay, then,” Tane said. “Well, first of all, we need to consider that there are all kinds of numbers. Phone numbers. PIN numbers. Combination-lock numbers.”

Rebecca agreed. “Dates are usually written as numbers.”

“Room numbers, house numbers, decks of cards have numbers.”

“Then there are serial numbers, like on money.” Rebecca stopped, seeing the look on Tane’s face.

“Money…,” he said very slowly.

Rebecca waited, watching him closely. Tane tried to keep his face steady, but it kept wanting to break out into a huge goofy grin.

“Well, share!” she said impatiently.

“What…if…”

“What?!”

“Six seemingly random numbers from one to forty…”

“Seven numbers, and from three to forty,” corrected Rebecca.

“No, six, and from one to forty. The first six numbers fall between one and forty; it just happens that the first number is an eight. Then after those six numbers there’s another number between one and eight.”