Codex

by Adrian Dawson

  She did not understand the details she was decoding, so she simply added them to her already extensive temporary database. She had done this without question six times, picking the relevant information up when required and running it along the next unbroken string.

  But then she had broken the seventh seal.

  Only two letters appeared in the final code; ’Aleph and Tãw. They formed a random looking series of A’s and Z’s, but that was not how her software saw them. To her this was a code made from only two characters. It was, therefore, a binary system and was treated as such. Simple on and off, black and white.

  Darkness and light.

  When the complete code was generated it was then sent along the FireWire to her temporary database. This was housed within the main FireWorX system, at the epicentre of the panic within the Technical Division.

  It took the form of a brief system command. One that would remove Lara’s image forever.

  On receiving the file, the main Quotient system did exactly as it was instructed to do. It had a powerful brain, but not a human brain. It thought and it analysed but it still relied on its main system software. Software that did not yet know what it meant to question a direct instruction.

  So it took less than one hundredth of a second to complete the task.

  The letters which swirled effortlessly through Lara’s space were no longer seagulls waiting with expectant hunger to feed on her knowledge. They were vultures, and they had tired of waiting. Their prey was weakened and they attacked...

  * * * * *

  “What happened” Jack asked. The relief was overwhelming.

  As the journalists rose to their feet, disorientated by the sudden stillness of the room, Eric stared blankly at his control panel as though it had somehow inherited a mind of its own. Every screen was blank. The system was dead.

  “I don’t know,” he said without turning. “It just... went dead. But it can’t just go dead.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Because that’s impossible.”

  “Is it hardware or software?”

  Eric smiled, tapping keys as he spoke. “Simple rule,” he said. “If it ain’t on fire then it’s a software problem.”

  Better than anyone else on campus, Eric understood the safeguards that had been in place; because he had single-handedly coded every one of them. Each one was designed to offer just one facility; protection of the system from sabotage within a given timeframe. A timeframe that had yet to run its course. He therefore knew that what had happened just now could not happen.

  “All the hardware’s still operational,” he said, “but hard disk occupancy is registering precisely zero megabytes. There isn’t even a format block. The entire database has been wiped; including the master system software, the ReelRooms Suite, the FireWorX system and the software that was running the race.” He looked at Jack apologetically. “We’ve got blank screens worldwide.”

  As the lights sprung back into life and the monitors showed no fireworks, Jack tipped his head, closed his eyes and thanked God.

  “So, if it wasn’t the earthquake,” he said eventually, “what the hell was it?”

  Eric shook his head. “No way, this system was airtight,” he said. “Shit, this system was better than airtight.” But at the same time he could not believe the message he was now seeing displayed on his master control screen. Opening his eyes wide and shaking his head in gentle resignation, he turned it to show Jack with a disbelieving expression:

  ACCESS.DATA.CDE.ACCEPTED/SYSERASENREFORMAT/FULLNET RECVD-Q03:15-T08:31:45:562/INTFIREWIRE03/COPY/RUN

  Jack shrugged. “What does it mean?”

  “It means that the system received an ‘ERASE AND REFORMAT’ request from within its own FireWire Network at 08:31am. And it acted on it. In other words, one of the machines located on-campus suddenly told it to trash everything on the network.”

  “Everything?” Jack asked, still trying to piece the jigsaw puzzle of information in his head. Still trying to see the image on the box. Eric nodded and leaned back in his chair, his index fingers pressed pensively against the tip of his pronounced nose.

  Jack creased his brow. No machine on the network was programmed to make its own decisions unless they were within the confines of chosen situations as defined by their software. Such as a game of chess.

  “And this was Quotient number 03?” he asked. Eric nodded again. “Which one is that?”

  Jack did not even know for sure why he had bothered to pose the question. Somehow he already knew.

  silence in heaven

  Revelation 8:1

  Whilst Phoebe Rollins, IntelliSoft’s hastily-appointed Relations Director, dealt with the long-overdue barrage of harsh questioning from the press and delivered half-stories of severe natural forces leading to hardware malfunction, Jack lowered his aching body on to the remains of one of the twisted benches beside the Lake. Warner manually reversed his chair up beside him and for a few minutes they just stared across the unnaturally calm waters, trying in vain to make sense of the things they had witnessed that morning. Neither truly believed that they ever would.

  “I still can’t believe it happened,” Jack said eventually. “I really thought the bastard had won.”

  He watched as the members of the crowd who had escaped injury milled disillusionedly toward the exits, whilst others were loaded carefully into ambulances. Apparently there had been few serious injuries during the earthquake, though nearly all attendees had suffered varying degrees of cuts and bruises. Whilst the earthquake had been frightening, not one of the crowd was aware that they had been so very close to a horror they would scarcely be able to imagine. They, along with millions of unsuspecting others worldwide, had been saved.

  Nobody, least of all Jack, was even sure how.

  In the furthest corner of the campus, IntelliSoft security staff were standing in the cordoned area protecting the pyrotechnics launch unit. Once they had been briefed on the situation, all had volunteered. It would be another hour until campus was cleared and anything up to two before the Chemical Warfare Units arrived. The Veracruz personnel had all been detained, although Jack did not think that even they were aware that the fireworks had been rigged. Like everybody else he had used in his quest to unlock the power of the book, they were pawns of Simon. Minor pieces that he was forever ready to sacrifice.

  “I know this is California and all,” Warner said with a sigh, “but that was a heck of a time to have an earthquake.” He laughed gently. “Or a launch, I’m not quite sure which.”

  Jack was not listening. He was thinking back to a fiery speech, extracted from the words of the New Testament and delivered as though it was a direct prophecy of things to come. He remembered the cold blue eyes, the confident stare and the passion with which the prophecy had been delivered. He also remembered the inherent sense of fear he himself had felt as he had been forced to listen.

  “Remember the kid in Cyprus?” he asked cryptically.

  “Smart-ass... #224?” Warner replied, his eyes probing. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake;” Jack said quietly. His voice was distant, as though lost at the base of a deep pit of thought. “and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.”

  “Yeah, he quoted that shit,” Warner said. “But I still don’t follow.”

  “The Book of Revelation; chapter six, verse twelve,” Jack said, turning to his friend with a satisfied smile. “That was when she was breaking the sixth seal. Just before the seventh made her wipe the entire system.”

  Warner breathed deeply, unable to understand what Jack was trying to tell him. “She...? Who was breaking the sixth seal?” he asked dubiously. “Who the hell wiped the
system?”

  Jack looked across to the blackened glass of the IntelliSoft Research and Development building and toward the wall-mounted camera that continuously filmed the campus in order to create the virtual window. He laughed gently to himself, still barely able to believe that he was going to say what he was going to say.

  “Lara,” he said, smiling at the lens as though it was the distinctive eyes of his daughter watching him from above. “My little girl.”

  he shall send a saviour

  Isaiah 19:20

  By the time Daniel was twelve and approaching his traditional Jewish transition into manhood, Jack began to feel that he was old enough to know everything he could tell him about his past, despite the fact that there were still so many things he did not fully know or understand himself. Enlightenment for his grandson had resulted in Jack reluctantly bringing him to Kozlar; to the remains of the settlement into which he had been born. His close friend, retired F.B.I. Special Agent Frank Warner, had also decided to come along. Just to taste the sweet scent of victory one more time.

  Since the launch Jack had taken a back seat within IntelliSoft and usually worked three months on followed by three months off so that he could spend more quality time with Daniel. He could afford to do that because he had built such a good team around him. Geoff now made all the decisions in Jack’s absence and the rebuilt FireWorX system was ticking along nicely, even if it never did place IntelliSoft at the very apex of the computer hierarchy. The young man in control of the system, however, a twenty-six year old ex-scholarship student named Joaquim Aldez, had big plans for creating an even bigger Network Computer; an NC, that people could access from their own homes. They need never buy software or updates, he said, all they would do would be to pay a nominal charge for per-minute access to every piece of software, music and film available on the market. Computer technology was moving steadily away from purchase toward rental, and that nominal charge would equate to several billion dollars of revenue for IntelliSoft in the first five years alone.

  Jack pretty much left them to it. On the one hand he was getting a little too old for the constant rat-race, and on the other he had more important things to occupy his time. Daniel was following a far more creative track than Jack himself had ever done and now he took him to as many places around the world as he could so that his quest for knowledge could be fed as healthily as possible. The boy had no interest in the computer business at all and Jack openly encouraged that. He wanted Daniel to grow up to be whatever he wanted to be. Whatever made him happy.

  The settlement at Kozlar looked so very different now to how it had been just over eleven years ago. Three months after the launch, the public relations catastrophe, he had travelled here to see for himself what conditions Lara’s child had been born into and had been pleasantly surprised. When he left, he had bequeathed a sizeable donation for the fund that would help to rehabilitate those who had been members of Eternity; The Daniels and the Laras.

  Now everything was overgrown. Even in Bethany where the poisons had previously seeped into the earth, nature had fought back and determinedly pushed its green head back through the soil so that it could feed from the light again. It was a different place, a forgotten corner, but still a beautiful place. A place where Jesus himself might once have lived.

  Jack no longer believed in God. At least, not the one that the rest of the world had chosen to place their faith in. He believed in The Code and whatever deity had been its author. Perhaps a good name for that deity was actually ‘God’, but he felt that such an overused title failed to distinguish something that he felt was supremely elevated above all others. Jack’s deity really did know the answers to everything that was, is and will ever be. He knew that with certainty because he had seen the proof. Now, if he was asked, he simply said that he believed in a Supreme Being.

  The code was undeniably complex, but the results of the first six seals were undoubtedly designed to be linked together. When they did, they would probably have fulfilled their initial promise and issued the answers to life itself. The seventh seal, however, was the safeguard. It should have created those final links, but it did not. Instead it created the binary code that shut the system down and erased those answers forever. Presumably because the author of the code understood that the answers should never be known to those they would affect. It had created the ultimate Catch-22; to break the code was to lose the code. Mankind could never obtain the answers to its own existence.

  Two months after the launch date, with Warner by his side, Jack had burnt Simon’s precious book. He had thought that he would feel reluctant in some way, but when the time came it had seemed like the most natural thing to do. If the author of the code knew so much about human existence then he must trust it when it demonstrated a reluctance to share that knowledge. The world still had amended versions of the Old Testament that some still believed in and the code allowed that to continue. They still knew of the code’s existence and they still deciphered tiny fragments, but even the most powerful systems could never break through the first seal because the base text had been subtly edited thousands of years ago. The only true original was gone forever.

  The thing that would forever stick in Jack’s mind, however, was that the seventh seal was designed not only to protect the code, but also to protect mankind; a species that could no longer exist if it knew with certainty what route that existence would take. Sitting at the ranch drinking brandy with Warner whilst the seven month old child lay asleep, he had thumbed through the book one last time before committing it to the flames.

  It was in the book of Daniel, his grandchild’s namesake, chapter twelve verse eight, that he had seen it. Crossing through the line of legitimate text that read: ‘And I heard, but I understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what [shall be] the end of these [things]?’

  Jack had noticed sequences within the text that he had not seen on the plane. Given the immense number of ELS sequences contained within the text, that particular revelation had come as no surprise. What pleased him most, however, was that Simon had never seen them either. Either that or, more likely, he had simply chosen to ignore them:

  There were two distinct sequences visible; - in the end of days, and: - code will save. They were always there. They had been there for over two thousand years. Only a man consumed by arrogance and self-righteousness would choose to ignore such divine prediction.

  Having been within the site itself, Warner and Jack were now sitting on the hillside which offered a complete view of the overgrown remains of Bethlehem, Bethany, Jerusalem and Qumran. Jack looked to his old friend and smiled. Warner looked tired. But then again, Warner had looked tired for as long as he’d known him.

  “We’d better get moving, Daniel.” he said, turning away.

  Daniel was standing a few feet in front of them, looking thoughtfully across the beauty of the settlement as it nestled beneath nature’s conquering forces. He turned to his grandfather with a worried expression.

  “Why did mummy come here?” he asked.

  Jack’s heart sank. “When she ran away,” he said quietly, “it was because she didn’t think that I loved her.”

  Daniel smiled. “But I know you did,” he said reassuringly,

  “because of how you talk about her.”

  “Yes I did,” Jack said softly. “Very much.”

  He smiled and ragged his grandson’s hair as the three set off toward the jeep, still parked on the Denizli road. Warner and Jack spoke about better times, when they had almost been a team. Daniel started to follow them, but suddenly noticed movement in the grass and veered slightly off the track; movement caused by a tiny bird which had fallen from the trees and broken its wing. It

  had clearly been there a long time, was desperately weak and seemingly close to death. He was going to call after his grandfather and Mr. Warner but they were too far away now. Instead, Daniel leaned over and cradled the bird in his hands. He stroked its feathers as delicately as he could for a few seconds a
nd then threw it high into the air. The bird floundered for only the briefest of moments and then started to fly. Soon it was soaring high above the three of them with new strength, its loud song echoing across the valley as it celebrated a second life.

  It had been saved.

  Jack would never know anything about the bird because for Daniel it would always be a private moment. He would never require praise for the things he would come to realise that he could do, he would want only to help God’s creatures. This would be the first of many unknown miracles he would perform during his time on earth. Each one would be a completely selfless act, so very different from the kind performed by those who claimed to be ‘magicians’ or ‘master showmen’.

  And each would be an act worthy of a true Messiah; a child whose very existence on earth had started a chain of events that had ultimately prevented the end of days.

  A Saviour, born of the lineage of David.

  THE END

  “Codex” will be available in Paperback, August 2010.

  If you enjoyed this novel,

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  Thankyou.