by Alex Scarrow
He sighed. ‘OK, here goes,’ he said, sitting forward on the chair. ‘I was really interested in palaeolinguistics – the study of dead languages – and I took a gap year before my degree to go to South America with some others. We were following the trail of a pre-Aztec tribe called the Windtalkers. Theory was they had a form of writing long before the Aztecs arrived. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I managed to locate a cave wall, high up on a cliff overlooking the rainforests. A wall covered in this dead language, their glyphs. It’s unique, Maddy. Completely unique. No one has ever discovered that cave, or written a paper on the Windtalkers and their language.’
‘Why not?’
‘I guess because no other palaeolinguist has discovered the cave since.’
‘And why didn’t you make yourself famous then? Go public with your find?’
He shrugged. ‘Various reasons. I wanted to understand it first. I wanted to keep it to myself. It’s also a unique character set. Perfect for encryption.’ He grinned coyly. ‘I use some of it in the work that I do now, creating software security ciphers. And that’s why I’m one of the most sought-after IT security consultants in New York. The ciphers I write are unbreakable.’ He waved that comment away, embarrassed at how conceited it sounded. ‘Anyway, I’m telling you that because, well, because I spotted two very specific glyphs from the cave wall … in the Voynich Manuscript.’
Maddy nearly dropped an Oreo in her coffee.
‘They’re very important glyphs. They were used by the Windtalkers to separate ideas. Sentences, if you like. Much like we use a capital letter and a full stop. One glyph always appeared at the beginning of a sentence or an expression and the other at the end.’
‘So, what? You’re telling me the Voynich was written by, like, Aztecs?’
‘No. It’s not. The glyphs are only used once.’ He raised a finger. ‘On just one occasion. The Voynich Manuscript is hundreds of pages crammed full of random characters, some of them Roman Latin, some Egyptian, some Greek, some mathematical – and then there’s this one passage of those same random characters, which begins with a Windtalker glyph and ends with one.’
‘My God!’
He nodded. ‘Yes, like it was flagged up. Like someone was saying, Focus on this passage alone.’ He stirred uneasily. ‘Like they were saying, Focus on this passage … Adam Lewis.’
A nervous grin skittered across Maddy’s lips then slipped away. ‘That is so-o-o creepy.’
He nodded. ‘Anyway, I won’t bore you with the technical details of breaking open a cipher, but if you can isolate a chunk of meaningful language from random gibberish – a technique often deployed to throw cryptanalysts off the scent – then it’s just a matter of time before you can break it down. Those Windtalker markers were the reason I’m the only person who’s ever managed to extract something meaningful from the Voynich.’
He set his mug on the table. ‘And that’s the reason why I couldn’t explain myself publicly. That’s why I was dismissed as an attention-seeking nut. I couldn’t say some medieval bloke knew I was going to take a field trip to the Amazon and discover the key to breaking the code! I just had to take all the criticism, all the mickey-taking on the nose. It’s a period in my life I’ve tried to put behind me.’ He smiled. ‘Then of course this bloody film comes out.’ He sighed. ‘Luckily they changed the character’s surname.’
‘And who’d want to be portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, eh?’
They both laughed politely at that.
Maddy weighed him up silently. She realized he already knew too much. That at some point they were going to have to undo history and see to it that Adam Lewis never found his way here. Until then, though, he appeared to be a reluctant part of this mystery, linked to Pandora somehow. Perhaps even the key to it all. Just like his pre-Aztec glyphs.
‘Cookie?’
CHAPTER 17
2001, New York
‘So where’s this place you’re taking us?’ asked Liam.
‘It’s a theatre and antique junk shop that does expensive fancy-dress hire. The clothes are the proper thing, not all the nasty cheap polyfabric and synthetic shadd-yah you get in, like, joke shops.’
‘Polly …?’
‘Horrible.’ She shuddered. ‘In my time my parents used to wear bright-coloured polyfab kurtas and these imported jogging suits … and plastic jewellery. Ughh. Hideous. There,’ she said, gesturing along the street, ‘it’s just a couple of blocks down this way.’
‘Right-oh,’ he said, nodding. ‘It’ll be good, though, to try on something more comfortable.’
She looked him up and down. ‘You don’t like the jeans and the hoody?’
He couldn’t help but grimace a little. ‘The trousers seem a little tight around my legs, so they do. It’s quite difficult to walk. And it’s rubbing me sore in places I’d rather not talk about.’
She quickly lifted the bottom of his hoody up and laughed at what she saw. ‘That’s because you’re wearing the waist way-y-y too high. They should, you know, hang really low.’ Liam had the belt cinched tightly and the waistband of his Diesel jeans hawked up high over his hips to just beneath his navel. With that, the T-shirt underneath tidily tucked in, and his shock of grey-white hair, he looked like an old man.
‘It’s all got to hang loose and low, you know? Jahulla, you wear trousers like how my great-grandfather wears trousers, tucked up under his armpits.’
‘Well, that’s where a pair of trousers should be, so. Not round your knees.’
She huffed and rolled her eyes. ‘You’d never fit in in 2026. Even if I dressed you up in the streetiest polyfab booger suit and loads of chump-bling round your neck, you’d still stand out like a Nārāza aṅgūṭhē!’
He pressed a weary smile out. ‘I think I prefer the way people used to dress in the past to the way they do in the future. It all seems to be about lookin’ poor and as scruffy as you can. I mean, why is it, tell me, that people deliberately rip holes in their trousers? I’ve seen that several times now.’
‘In their jeans, you mean?’
‘Aye.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s just the fashion. I don’t know, to make them look older than they are, I guess.’
He shook his head, and circled a finger at his temple. ‘There! See? That’s just completely peculiar, that is. Back home my mother was always trying to keep all me school clothes and me Sunday suit looking as new as if they’d just come out of a shop.’
‘Well, I guess in your time clothes were really expensive. In Mumbai, in my time – even now in 2001, I guess – it’s all so cheap. You wear something a couple of times then you just, sort of, throw it away.’
‘That sounds like such a waste to me.’
Sal shrugged. Maybe that was why in 2026 the news always seemed to be about this or that running low: the world’s resources, one by one, finally exhausted. She vaguely remembered news reports on Digi-HD-Sahyadri of the oil shortages. Wars in far-away countries full of deserts, burning pipelines and burning tanks.
‘Well now,’ said Liam, cutting into her thoughts. ‘Good to have Bob back, so it is. I missed the big old ape.’
Sal looked at Bob and Becks walking half a dozen yards in front of them like a pair of Presidential minders; eyes panning smoothly in all directions, ever ready to throw their lives down in the line of duty. While Becks moved with practised grace and agility, Bob lumbered along like a tank, still adjusting to the use of his new body.
‘I wonder what those two talk about,’ she said.
Liam smiled. ‘Aye.’
Becks nodded at the incoming low-frequency Bluetooth signal. She agreed with her colleague’s observation.
[01110100 01101000 01100101 01111001 00100000 01100100 01101111 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01101011 01101110 01101111 01110111] she said.
His grey eyes swivelled to look down at her.
[01110100 01101000 01100101 01111001 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100.]
Her mind processed
the suggestion for a moment. ‘You are correct,’ she said aloud after a moment’s consideration. ‘We should practise verbal communications when possible.’
Bob’s voice rumbled out past his thick lips. ‘It … feels like a long time since I have communicated verbally.’
‘Feels?’ She looked at him curiously. ‘Feels. This is a very human word to use.’
He vaguely remembered the muscle movements required to pull off a smile. For a moment, as he worked his lips, he looked like a horse baring its teeth. ‘Agreed. Humans use unspecific terms of measurement often in their verbal communications.’
‘Words like “feels”, “seems”?’
‘Affirmative.’
She stored that observation, then looked at him. ‘You … seem … to have absorbed more human behavioural characteristics than I have. Yet we are both running identical versions of the AI. I am running version 3.67.6901 of W.G. Systems Mil-Tech Combat Operative AI module.’
‘Confirmed.’ He nodded. ‘I am running the same version number.’
They walked in silence for a while.
‘It is my observation that the silicon-carbon interface between the processor and the undeveloped organic brain has produced unanticipated side-effects,’ said Becks. ‘Additional soft-coded AI sub-routines.’
‘Affirmative,’ replied Bob. ‘I have also noted this.’ He trawled through terabytes of data stored from months ago. ‘During my mission with Liam O’Connor, input from the organic brain allowed my AI to recalibrate mission objective priorities. I was able to make a tactical decision to save him.’
‘Yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘I have access to that … memory also. That was effective. Because my AI is a duplicate of yours, I benefit from that decision tree advancement.’
She cocked her head, a lock of dark hair swinging across a face momentarily frozen in deep thought. ‘I believe a human would extend a verbal gesture of gratitude.’ Her smile was more goat-like than horse-like. ‘Thank you.’
He acknowledged that. ‘Affirmative.’
‘On the last mission I observed some basic principles of humour from the humans. Would you like me to upload a joke?’
Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative. I have very few files on humour.’
She tilted her head and Bluetoothed several megabytes of data his way as they walked in silence. Bob blinked the data away into long-term storage and replayed a memory of jungle terrain, standing atop a cliff face and looking down at a group of nervous-looking children.
‘It appears you made Liam O’Connor … laugh?’
She nodded. ‘Cluck, cluck,’ she added drily. ‘I called him and the others chickens. They laughed at this.’
He frowned, pondering. ‘Why did they find this amusing?’
She frowned too, puzzled. Eventually she looked up at him. ‘I do not know.’
Sal drew up outside the front window of the store. ‘This is it,’ she said. She called the support units back to join them and they stepped inside, a musty smell of mothballs and dust tickling her nose.
Becks and Bob led the way in, Liam following after them. ‘What sort of thing do I want?’
‘Large, plain coloured woollen smocks,’ replied Sal. ‘Nothing patterned.’
Liam nodded and headed off down a cramped aisle spilling over with costumes of all sorts of colours and eras. She watched him admiring a pirate’s costume, inspecting its lace cuffs and braiding with a grin on his face. She shook her head. He looked like a kid in a toy store.
She turned to see if there was someone in the shop she could ask for some help, and was walking back towards the shop front and the dusty front window when something caught her eye.
Something blue. Something vaguely familiar … sitting in a wooden rocking-chair to the side of the store window. A teddy bear. She walked over, squatted down to get a better look at it.
‘I know you,’ she whispered, lifting one of its threadbare paws.
She remembered this bear – this little faded blue bear – this one-eyed bear; she remembered it from somewhere, tumbling head over paws.
Where do I know you from?
She was pushing her mind to explore the fleeting image when Liam called out from the back of the shop. ‘Sal! Sal? Is this any good?’
She got up and headed back into the shop’s tight warren of musty aisles to try and find him; the little bear, for now, forgotten.
CHAPTER 18
2001, New York
Maddy looked round at the sound of the shutter rattling up. She saw four pairs of legs and then Liam ducking down and stepping into the gloom of the archway.
Here we go.
He stood up and waved a hand at her. ‘You should see the daft bleedin’ costumes we –’ He stopped dead. ‘Who’s this?’
Becks was straightening up beside him as he asked. Her cool eyes evaluated the visitor. ‘This person is Adam Lewis,’ she answered. ‘He should not be here.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Maddy. ‘You can say that again.’
Bob ducked inside. ‘Unauthorized presence.’ His deep voice filled the void. ‘He must leave immediately.’
‘Relax, guys,’ said Maddy. ‘He already knows too much. I can’t just turf him out.’
Sal was the last in. She hit the switch and the shutter descended noisily.
Both support units approached Maddy, a united wall of disapproving frowns. ‘This person is not authorized to be in here. This is a security –’
Maddy raised her hand. ‘I get it. It’s a security breach. But here’s the thing –’ she nodded at Adam – ‘he found us. We …’ She shrugged guiltily. ‘All right, I … was careless. I left a breadcrumb trail that he’s followed.’
Liam stepped around Bob and Becks, warily looking at the man. ‘He’s the fella you went to see?’
‘Yes. Adam Lewis.’ She turned to him. ‘Why don’t you say hello?’
Adam’s eyes remained on the intimidating form of Bob standing over him. ‘Uh … hi.’
Liam broke the stony silence with a proffered hand. ‘Well now, there’s always room for another, so there is. My name’s Liam O’Connor.’
Adam, relieved, grasped it.
‘And this here is Sal.’
She waved. ‘Hi.’ Adam returned the gesture. But his eyes flickered towards Bob. ‘Is this the, uh … support unit you were telling me about, Maddy? Am I safe –’
Liam followed his gaze and grinned. ‘You mean safe from Bob?’
He nodded. ‘I’ve heard a little about his … uh … exploits.’
‘You mean ripping the arms off bad Nazis?’
‘Yup.’
‘Oh, now don’t you worry about Bob. He’s a good, reliable chappie, so he is. He means well.’
Maddy got up from her chair and addressed Becks and Bob directly. ‘As team strategist, I’m authorizing him to be in here. In this field office. Is that understood?’
Both support units nodded like children and chorused, ‘Affirmative’.
She turned to Adam. ‘Temporarily, understand? Until we’ve checked out this Voynich Manuscript.’
‘Uh … that’s fine with me.’
‘Once this is done, once we know what’s in there … then we’re going to have to figure something out, Adam Lewis. You can’t stay and we can’t have you walking away from this, blabbing to everyone.’
He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t! Honestly!’
Her eyes narrowed.
‘Listen,’ he said, standing up, ‘I’ve sat on the fact that I know time travel exists for seven years! I haven’t told a soul in all that time. I wouldn’t.’ He shook his head. ‘Really, I wouldn’t! It would ruin me; and ruin my professional reputation, apart from anything else. I’d never get another data security contract again!’
Maddy pursed her lips. ‘I can imagine.’
‘Anyway,’ he added. ‘I’ve been there before – treated like a complete nut, no one believing me. Been a laughing-stock. No thanks, I don’t fancy that again.’
Liam put his han
ds on his hips. ‘Well, you seem all right to me, chap.’
The support units both remained quiet, four grey eyes silently appraising him.
Maddy turned to them. ‘And you two – you’re not going to rip him to pieces as soon as my back’s turned, are you?’
Bob spoke for them both. ‘Negative. Adam Lewis has been temporarily authorized.’ He offered the man a hand the size of a baseball glove. ‘I am pleased to meet you, Adam Lewis,’ he rumbled.
Adam grasped it lightly. ‘Uh … sure, pleased to meet you.’
Becks did the same, offering a slender but equally deadly hand.
‘Sure she’s not going to …?’
Maddy laughed awkwardly. ‘Twist your finger off again?’
‘Negative,’ replied Becks with a friendly smile, grasping his hand. ‘Not unless I am ordered to.’
Maddy grinned and pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘Well OK, great, introductions made. We need to set you two support units up for the trip: data uploads, relevant history, period languages … the whole deal.’ She looked at Adam. ‘You said you’ve got a good knowledge of this bit of history?’
He nodded. ‘Twelfth-century history. It’s become something of an obsession.’
‘Good, then I’ll need your help putting together the data package. You can start by giving Bob and Becks a verbal briefing on the historical situation – what you were telling me earlier about the political situation: Richard and John and all that.’
‘All right.’
She turned to Liam and Sal. ‘A quiet word?’
‘He dies?’
Maddy watched their guest through the open door of the hatchery. He was sitting on the arm of one of the armchairs and talking Bob and Becks through the relevant bits of Plantagenet-era history.
The hatchery was illuminated by the soft peach glow of half a dozen growth tubes, each holding a curled-up foetus, maintained in stasis and ready to be activated and grown at the touch of a control screen; they hummed softly, the gentle aquarium-like noise of the pumps of their filtration systems.
‘He dies. I looked him up.’
