Dot Robot

by Jason Bradbury

  Jackson dressed quickly and threw a few things into his bag when he noticed the MeX handset on his bedside cabinet. The coins and pen were sitting beside it. He certainly couldn’t leave them there for his dad to find. He scooped them up and dropped them into the pouch on the front of his backpack, then slid his own mobile in beside them and nervously headed out.

  There was a flower stall near the bus stop. Jackson bought a bunch of about eight sunflowers, big enough to keep his dad happy, but small enough to mount vertically in his backpack since the sentiment behind them would be lost on his peers at school.

  Jackson’s wait for the bus was excruciating. He was convinced he was going to be grabbed at any second. Everyone was suspect. Who was the man in the black raincoat walking down the street towards him? Was he staring at him? The gang of older kids hanging out on the opposite side of the street looked incredibly shifty. He’d never seen them before. And what about the woman standing with a pram near the corner shop? Jackson couldn’t hear a baby crying. Perhaps there was no baby in there at all?

  Calm down, he told himself. The school bus pulled up and Jackson scrambled on it.

  He dug out his mobile phone and started its miniature web browser. He had always found that busying himself with something ‘technical’ was a good way of calming his nerves. He thumbed the buttons, filling the teensy white web address field with the first address that came to mind. It took a couple of minutes for his math-fu.com home page to load, which wasn’t too bad considering how deathly slow the Internet could be on his mobile. Checking his site for comments was part of Jackson’s daily routine, but the events of the last few days had left his routine in tatters. As the ‘comments’ section loaded, he could see there was a message waiting for his approval, and strangely it took the shape of a short, two-line poem. For the most part visitors to his site left behind maths problems and general number trivia, the odd chess puzzler and, of course, the abusive comments that were always anonymous and always bore Hughes’s hallmark. But this message was distinctive, not just because it was written in verse, but because of the name beside it. GeekSugar. Jackson recognized it immediately. It was Brooke’s username, the one she’d sent him when she’d let him rev her Hummer.

  Now in here least evermore I languish

  A brilliance of strategy is required hastily

  Jackson sat in geography, his last lesson of the day, staring at the poem scrawled inside the sweet wrapper. Two lines. Seven words in each. Whatever it was, it had managed to flummox him all day. It was a pattern, of sorts, but more than that he just didn’t know.

  He sighed in frustration. He was running out of time, and later this afternoon he’d be at his mum’s grave … Jackson froze – that was it! His mum was the key. His mind shot back to his first real chat with Brooke, when she’d been fascinated by his mum’s Pi poem. She’s using the Pi poem code.

  Jackson dipped a hand into his bag and retrieved a felt-tip pen. A quick glance up revealed that Mr Christy, the geography teacher, hadn’t noticed what he was up to.

  Mr Christy didn’t have Mr Willard’s natural flair for teaching, but at least he made an effort. This afternoon’s lesson, on the wonders of Brazil, saw him dressed in a Brazilian football shirt. Bearing in mind that Crusty Christy was only a few years shy of a pension, it was quite impressive. He had also rearranged the desks so that they formed one large surface, on to which he’d unfolded a huge map of South America, about half of which was dominated by the continent’s largest nation. At various positions on the chart, Crusty had placed objects. There were some foreign coins over Brasilia, the country’s capital city, a small pile of coffee beans, a toy petrol pump in the sea near Rio de Janeiro, various plastic animals and a toy lorry with some twigs taped to its back. The students had to pick an object and talk about its relevance to Brazil. Of course, no one volunteered.

  ‘Sarah Jacobs, I volunteer you. Which of my Brazilian knick-knacks do you feel you could tell me about?’

  As Sarah leaned confidently across the map, picked up the toy lorry and proceeded to tell the class all about the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest, Jackson turned his attention to the task, quite literally, in hand.

  First word? ‘Now’.

  Number of characters? Three.

  He wrote a ‘3’ on his left palm, the red ink from his pen filling the tiny furrows and trenches in his skin so that the number looked like it was exploding. The next word was made up of two characters, the third – four; Jackson deciphered each line until he had two rows of seven numbers, vying for space on the inside of his hand.

  3 2 4 5 8 1 8

  1 10 2 8 2 8 7

  He stared at his open palm. It looked as if the figures were written in blood. And in a way they were, because he knew the fate of his friend was locked inside them.

  Why would Brooke send me numbers? What would she expect me to do with them? He added up each line: 31 and 38. The totals meant nothing to him. He tried combining the two lines and rearranged them in size order: 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 8, 8, 8, 10. But other than the six prime numbers that Jackson was naturally drawn towards again, he saw nothing. Don’t get sidetracked, he thought, noting his tendency to overcomplicate things as soon as numbers were around. Brooke’s an engineer, not a mathematician.

  The number ten intrigued him, though. The base of the numerical system. One more than nine. One less than his favourite number, eleven. The sum of the first three prime numbers, 2, 3 and 5. Keep it simple, he reminded himself. Why a ten, why not a one and a zero? Because you can’t make a word out of zero? Was that the reason?

  Jackson could feel himself getting frustrated. There was so much at stake here. He needed to focus. Instinct told him he was looking at two sets of numbers. If he accepted that the ten was nothing more significant than a means of completing the poem with a ten-letter word, then he had 3245818 and 11028287.

  He sighed and looked up to see Rich Jenkins had jumped to his feet, and was trying to tackle Crusty in order to illustrate the Brazilians’ love of football.

  ‘Very good, everyone,’ said Crusty, eventually gathering his breath. ‘Time for a little treasure-hunting, I think.’

  He started writing on the whiteboard. ‘I hope you all remember the map reading we covered last term? There are some points of interest that I’ve hidden in Brazil. I’d like you to find them and write a sentence on each from your textbooks.’

  There was a groan from the class. When he’d finished writing, Crusty moved away from the whiteboard to reveal three sets of handwritten numbers.

  23° 33′ S 46° 38′ W

  30° 20′ S 51° 13′ W

  15° 52′ S 47° 55′ W

  ‘It’s a map coordinate!’ The words burst out of Jackson’s mouth like an involuntary sneeze. He was rewarded for his bizarre behaviour with a burst of laughter from the rest of the room.

  ‘Well, Farley! I was unaware you were such a fan of cartography,’ said Crusty, surprised. ‘It’s a shame your classmates don’t share your enthusiasm for maps. Now, settle down, all of you. I’d like three sentences from each of you before the end of the lesson …’

  Jackson looked excitedly at the coordinates on the whiteboard and then down at the numbers in his palm. Degrees, minutes and seconds, it was the numerical language of navigation. It seemed so obvious to him now; the format was slightly different but, to the young mathematician, the meaning behind the two sets of numbers in his hand was clear: the secret buried by Brooke in her poem was a precise latitudinal and longitudinal map reference.

  X marked the spot.

  CHAPTER 22

  Brooke was bored. She was also cold and damp. But it was the boredom that was really getting to her. It was day three in captivity and she’d read every word of the old newspaper she’d managed to steal from the door pocket of the jet-black, blacked-out Range Rover she’d been bundled into. Thirty-three pages of the Las Vegas News Herald by candlelight, by the end of which Brooke decided there ought to be an award for reading it. Mo
st of what hadn’t been pulped by the moisture in the mine shaft, where she was being held, had been used by her during toilet breaks. Her captors, two goons with pistols and a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for pizza, allowed her out a couple of times each day to stretch her legs and ‘answer the call of nature’.

  On the first night, she’d made such a fuss about them watching her that they let her go behind the truck – where she’d reached under the engine block and disconnected an oil pipe. When, next morning, the two chumps discovered an oil slick around the front of their only vehicle, Brooke reminded them of her mechanic’s credentials.

  ‘You think I wanna go without food too!’ she’d shouted through the wooden barricade behind which she was incarcerated. ‘I may have issues with your choice of a pure carbohydrate diet, but I’d rather not starve. Let me take a look at the truck. I’ll have her fixed before you can say “pepperoni with three cheeses”!’

  And the two fatheads had obliged. They’d watched as their prisoner had spent a few minutes under the big red cruiser, then most of the morning sunbathing on its bonnet while waiting, supposedly, for the rest of the oil to drain. Indeed, they were both extremely impressed when Brooke demonstrated that lamp oil is a perfectly good substitute for engine oil. The only point at which they suspected foul play was when she’d climbed inside the car.

  ‘Easy with the pistolas, boys! I was just makin’ sure the lamp oil had done the job,’ she said, as at gunpoint, she was frog-marched back to the mine shaft. ‘Being as I fixed her up …’ she added, as they had padlocked her in. ‘Any chance one of you oafs could stretch to a salad? I swear I’m gonna barf if I see another dough ball!’

  What the heavyset duo didn’t know was that the oil change was the final act in an elaborate charade. From the moment the two masked kidnappers had broken into Brooke’s garage and seized her where she slept, she had been planning her escape. She may have been blindfolded for the six-hour journey, but that hadn’t prevented her from making a couple of critical observations. First, there was the fact that one of her abductors had a working mobile phone. She’d heard him pacing around when they’d stopped for gas and, while she’d failed to catch anything of what was said, the existence of a working mobile phone had been noted. And then there was the voice of Whinin’ Wilma, as her dad called her – the sharp tones of the satellite-navigation system that her dull-witted abductors had used to find their way out of Brooke’s hometown. They switched off the sound for the last part of the journey, but Brooke knew that a GPS and a mobile phone provided all the technology she needed to broadcast a cry for help.

  The first stages of her plan had gone smoothly. The oil scam had given Brooke some precious time in the driver’s seat with the electrics on. It took several heart-pounding seconds for the sat-nav to boot up and give her location. As expected, the map itself gave her a big fat nothing. She was truly in the middle of nowhere. But in the time it took the fattest of the two knuckle-heads to notice that the wily young girl had climbed into his vehicle’s cabin, then fumble to release himself from his flimsy deck chair, she’d found the two sets of numbers she needed at the bottom of the display.

  Brooke had spent the rest of the afternoon in the relative cool of the tunnel, considering how to get her location details to someone useful. She was confident she could get to the mobile phone, but less certain how to use the numbers. After all, she didn’t want to take any chances; whoever was behind her kidnapping had managed to bypass the security at her father’s ranch. Likely as not, they’d been monitoring her family for a while and there was a chance they still were. If she was going to get her grid reference out, she’d have to be canny about it.

  Having meditated on the problem for hours, she gave her tired brain a rest and leafed through what was left of the Herald. The last streaks of late afternoon sunlight shone through her slatted prison door to illuminate a grubby crossword on the back page.

  Across

  9. Exceptionally talented or intelligent.

  The answer hit her – and not just the answer to the crossword clue. She could substitute the two sets of numbers from the sat-nav for words! And who did she know that could crack that kind of code? Jackson Farley.

  Jackson was running late. He jogged down the corridor towards the front entrance to the school and retrieved the sunflowers from the big vase on the front desk where they’d been soaking contentedly for the last few hours. They left a glistening water trail on the polished concrete floor as he hurried towards the glass doors.

  On his way out he passed Violet Poole.

  ‘Good luck!’ She smiled.

  ‘With what?’ Jackson replied.

  ‘Your date?’

  ‘Leave it out,’ he replied indignantly as his classmate disappeared through the school doors chuckling.

  It was only spitting as Jackson walked outside, but it looked like rain might spoil the rest of the afternoon with his dad – and mum. The thought of it added to his awareness of being outside the safety of school and exposed again.

  There was a group of ex-pupils by the school gates, huddled under their hoodies. They were there after school most days and they never normally gave Jackson a second look. But today all four of them seemed to be looking straight at him. It must be the flowers, he told himself and hurried away.

  The rain had picked up when he reached the high street and Jackson dodged between the shop awnings for cover. Being among the hustle and bustle of the shoppers calmed his nerves slightly. Even so, he was still unnervingly alert to sights and sounds that would normally fail to catch his attention. A stall trader shouted the price of his apples and Jackson anxiously doubled his pace. And then there was the blacked-out Range Rover that cruised past. Had he seen it before?

  Away from the high street and up Staffordshire Street, Jackson began running at a pace Mr Spinks, his sports teacher, would have been proud of. Usually Jackson would end up at the back of their monthly PE cross-country runs, or just plain walking with the equally unathletic smokers. Today, however, he ran hard, his rucksack beating out a constant rhythm on the small of his back. He told himself it was so he wouldn’t be late for his dad, but there was a good dose of spook in each step, and he checked each junction and crossroads as he ran.

  It was about two kilometres to the cemetery. Jackson knew the route well. It was completely out of the way of his route home, but he’d made the massive detour many times. He never went in; that was a privilege reserved for this one day each year. It was enough to just feel close to her, to keep his mum a part of his daily routine.

  The rain had been falling in spatters, and Jackson had found its cooling effects on his face quite refreshing. But as he left the shelter of the high street, the rain became a lot heavier, pouring through the tall trees that lined the cemetery.

  Jackson’s dad was waiting at the entrance, wearing just a thin jacket, but unbothered by the driving rain.

  ‘I won’t say you’re late, because I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot,’ he said with a mock scowl. Jackson considered a PE-style excuse, but pulled the sunflowers from inside his blazer instead.

  ‘A bit worse for wear … but they’ll do,’ said Farley Senior, ruffling his son’s sopping wet hair.

  The cemetery was huge. Almost every patch of the one-hundred-acre site had been allotted a marker. And while the angry rainclouds had turned the rest of the city a gloomy grey, here two whole hillsides dotted with wet granite and glass sparkled as far as the eye could see.

  ‘So, did you do as your mum told you … did you do something you really enjoy today?’

  Jackson thought about how he’d spent half his day trying to solve his friend’s kidnapping and the other half terrified that he was next. Far from enjoying himself, he was exhausted, distracted and increasingly jumpy. Even as they walked, Jackson cast cautionary glances at the road that ran alongside the cemetery, any vehicle a shade deeper than light brown causing him palpitations.

  He chose not to burden his dad with any of it. Th
is was his problem, and this definitely wasn’t the right time.

  ‘Yes … I did. I had cheesecake for lunch and I played video games at break.’

  ‘Good lad!’ said his dad, as the two made their way along a narrow gravel path. ‘And it’s chess club tonight. You love that, right?’

  Chess club had completely slipped his mind. All he wanted to do was get back to his computer and see what he could do with Brooke’s grid reference.

  They walked, past the ranks of angels and straight-faced cherubs, solid stone urns draped in rock cloths and a multitude of photographs in plastic sleeves, of people and pets, some of them twitching in the breeze so they looked alive. But for Alison Anne Farley, there was just an upright slab of steel-blue granite, her name, a date and two uncomplicated words scored into its polished surface. Jackson had wanted to include one of his mum’s poems. He kept a notepad full of them in the bottom of his wardrobe. But his dad had informed him the engraver charged by the letter so, in this case, shorter was sweeter. In the end they’d gone with ‘Sadly Missed’, which, Jackson decided, got straight to the heart of the matter.

  They started by clearing the remnants of last year’s sunflowers from their metal pot and picking away the leaves. Jackson’s dad said a few words about how they both missed her and how he was doing well at work. Then he asked his son if he’d like to have a word on his own, which Jackson knew meant he needed to go off for a few minutes and cry.

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ he said, crouching in the wet grass. ‘Things have been a bit hectic. School is good. I’ve taken up chess – turns out I’m pretty good at it. I think I’ve managed to get Tyler Hughes off my back. You won’t believe how …’