The Tomorrow Code

by Brian Falkner

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.

  Tane just said, “Whatever.”

  Fatboy changed his culture like other people changed their clothes. A couple of years ago, he had been totally into his “homeboy” phase, walking around with an outsized baseball cap and calling everyone “m’homey.” Now he was into this Maori heritage phase. Tane couldn’t help wondering what was next.

  Rebecca glanced up as Fatboy took off his helmet. “Cool!” she said.

  Tane looked to see what she was talking about. Fatboy was grinning at them through a brand-new moko, a Maori face tattoo. The left half of his face was inscribed with a fern-like design that seemed to swirl and dance with a life of its own.

  Tane turned back to the game, shaking his head. “Mum is going to kill you.”

  Fatboy laughed. “No, she won’t. It’s cultural.”

  Tane ignored him and launched a vengeful, ill-considered attack on Rebecca’s queen.

  “What are you doing?” Rebecca asked slowly.

  “Revenge,” Tane said with a mock sneer. “Teach you to take my queen!”

  Rebecca shook her head and studied the board. “You can’t play chess like that.”

  Tane looked up. Fatboy was watching the game with interest.

  “You look like a gang member,” Tane muttered.

  Rebecca said, “I think it looks great. Really suits you.”

  She smiled at Fatboy, which annoyed Tane more than a little. She had known Fatboy almost as long as he had, and she was the last person he would have expected to be taken in by the whole dreadlocks, leather jacket, rock-star-in-the-making persona. And now that Fatboy had a face tattoo, he was “cultural” as well. Tane thought things couldn’t get a whole lot worse.

  Things got much worse, very quickly.

  Fatboy stopped at Rebecca’s smile. Whatever he had come home for, he seemed to forget about it. It might have been to get their mum to do his washing or ask to borrow the Jeep (because as cool as it was, sometimes a motorcycle could be a little inconvenient); but whatever it was, he forgot it and stopped, looking at Rebecca as if seeing her for the very first time.

  Tane looked at Rebecca, who had already turned her attention back to the board, and he thought he understood why. The short, spiky haircut with the blond tips. The pierced nose and the determinedly unfashionable clothes. Her eyes were too big for her face, but that with her fine cheekbones gave her a slightly elfish appearance (in a rebellious, punky kind of way!). The slightly awkward girl he had grown up with was blossoming into the kind of lovely young lady who would attract the attention of people like his older brother.

  Get lost, he willed Fatboy. Go and show Mum your moko, or whatever you came here for.

  “Are you winning?” Fatboy asked, turning on his false rock-star charm for the first time with Rebecca. Surely Rebecca would see through that in a second.

  “I’m doing all right,” Rebecca said, glancing up. Tane gave Fatboy a dirty look.

  “What are you doing on Saturday night?” Fatboy asked.

  Tane glared at Fatboy and bit his lip. It started bleeding.

  “Nothing,” Rebecca said cautiously.

  “I’m recording with Blind Dog Biscuit all this week,” Fatboy said, name-dropping with relish, “but I’m free on Saturday. How would you like to go to the movies? On the Harley,” he added for good measure.

  “I, um…” She looked at Tane for inspiration, but he just shrugged.

  “It’d be fun,” Fatboy said.

  “Okay. That’d be okay,” Rebecca said after a moment, trying unsuccessfully to act cool.

  “I’ll pick you up at seven,” Fatboy said. “Blind Dog Biscuit might be having a wrap party later on for their new album. We can go to that too, if you want.”

  Rebecca shrugged. “Okay.”

  Fatboy disappeared into the depths of the house, leaving Tane staring after him, trying not to show his annoyance.

  Rebecca moved her queen to the end of the board. “Checkmate,” she said with a smile, and looked up at him. “Your lip is bleeding,” she noted with some concern.

  “It’s nothing,” Tane said.

  She looked at him closely. “Tane, you don’t mind if I go to the movies with Fatboy, do you?”

  He shook his head quickly and said with just a trace of irritation, “No, why would I?”

  Just then, there was a scream from the kitchen.

  The week passed surprisingly quickly. In fact, when he looked back on it the next weekend, Tane felt as if time had somehow compressed itself, and they had somehow time-slipped from one weekend straight to the next and missed the five days of school in between. Which made him think idly about his time-radio-transmitter idea.

  On the Saturday night when Rebecca was out with Fatboy, he spent a lot of time thinking about his time-radio-transmitter idea. But she hadn’t mentioned it at all, so he felt he was probably just wasting his time and brain cells.

  On Sunday morning, Tane arrived at Rebecca’s house just after eight, the panicky phone call from Rebecca ringing in his ears the whole way. He’d cycled the few miles between their houses at a breakneck pace.

  It was drizzling, which made cycling dangerous and not much fun, but he made it without incident. He left his bike lying in the carport next to the old two-door sedan with the missing front bumper and raced up the cold concrete steps.

  Rebecca met him at the front door, crying. She was trying to hold it back but was failing, so her words came out in muffled lumps between the sobs. She put her arms around Tane’s neck, and he hugged her.

  “Is this something to do with Fatboy?” he asked. “Last night…”


  She shook her head. “No. No. He was nice. It’s this.”

  She uncurled from around his neck and showed him a piece of paper she was clutching. He read it quickly. It was a notice from their bank of the mortgagee sale of their house.

  “I got home really late after the party last night. I had such a good time, and Fatboy was such a gentleman. And I got to meet the band, and they weren’t like I thought they’d be; they were just regular guys. But the party went on all night, and I didn’t get home till four this morning.”

  Tane thought that was far too late for a fourteen-year-old girl to be out at night. Especially with his older brother.

  Rebecca continued, “I was tired, but really happy. I’d had such a great time. Then a man came to the door this morning, at seven-thirty; he got me out of bed. I was barely awake. He wouldn’t talk to me and insisted that I wake Mum up. When she came down, in her dressing gown, he asked her for her name, and when she told him, he just handed her this envelope, and said, ‘You have been served,’ and walked away. Just like that. He didn’t say anything else.”

  “Oh, Rebecca,” Tane said, feeling useless.

  “Mum just threw the envelope in a drawer and went to watch TV. She didn’t even open it.”

  Judging by the sounds from the other room, it sounded like Mum was still watching the show.

  “So I opened the drawer, and look!”

  Rebecca took Tane into the small dining room of the house. On the old glass and metal dining table were piles of envelopes and pieces of paper.

  “They’re bills and mortgage demands; they go back months.”

  Tane picked up an electricity account. “This one’s up-to-date,” he noted.

  Rebecca nodded. “Dad had set up most of them to be paid by automatic payment. Things like the power and the phone. But others have just been accumulating. And it looks like the mortgage hasn’t been paid for months!”

  It took Rebecca three or four days after school to straighten out the accounts.

  Tane helped as much as he could, which mostly consisted of opening the envelopes for her and sorting out bills into piles from the same company, and also by date.

  It wasn’t good news at the end, though. The house was definitely going to have to be sold, and with all the unpaid bills, Rebecca and her mum would have nothing. No house and the only money they’d have to live on was the small allowance her mum got from the government as a widow with a dependent.

  “What will you do?” Tane asked when they finally worked out all the numbers and realized just how dire the situation was.

  Rebecca shrugged. “I tried to talk to Mum, but she was watching The Beautiful Years, and Dr. Messenger was just about to poison his wife’s sister, so she wouldn’t listen to me.” There was the faintest trace of bitterness in her voice.

  “So what will you do?”

  Rebecca sighed. “I think we’re going to have to move to Masterton, to live with Grandma.”

  Tane caught his breath and held it for a moment before releasing it. Masterton was a six-hour drive away. That meant he would hardly ever see her. If ever.

  “When?” he asked.

  “The lady at the bank said we have about a month, until the house sells.”

  Tane nodded. He looked at Rebecca, head in her hands, leaning forward over the lined pad she’d used for her final calculations. The light from the single bulb above the table made little shadows around her eyes. He thought she suddenly looked a lot older.

  He wished there was something he could do. But there wasn’t.

  “Just a month,” she said slowly, shaking her head. “It’s not much time.”

  “No,” Tane agreed, trying to think of a way to take her mind off her problems.

  To his surprise, though, her mind was somewhere else entirely.

  She said absently, “So we’d better go and see Professor Barnes as soon as possible.”

  Tane raised an eyebrow. “Professor Barnes?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  THE BURST AND TRANSIENT SOURCE EXPERIMENT

  The university corridors were long and winding. The high arched walls of the outside quickly disappeared to high, polished wood panels, which in turn gave way to white-paneled walls, white-paneled floors, and white-paneled ceilings.

  This deep inside the university, the corridors branched frequently and unexpectedly.

  The maze of corridors would have stymied Tane, but Rebecca had been there a few times to visit her dad, when he’d worked there, before the accident.

  Rebecca’s father had been one of the brightest minds in the Earth Science department at the university. Some said the only brighter mind was that of his wife. Rebecca’s mother.

  His car had been crushed by a furniture truck that had failed to take a bend. The truck driver was a sensible, experienced, and sober driver. He just took a bend a fraction too fast one day and killed Rebecca’s father.

  Rebecca was familiar enough with the layout to understand the rather confusing array of small blue signs posted on the walls at corners as they hurried down the long passageways to a pair of white-paneled double doors marked GEOPHYSICS LAB.

  Rebecca caught Tane by the arm. “Let me do the talking, and agree with everything I say,” she said.

  “Are you sure you should be doing this?” Tane asked. He’d asked the same question a couple of times at school that day and had gotten pretty much the same answer, but he asked it again anyway. “I mean, with the house and everything.”

  It was Friday, and after spending most of the week straightening out her family’s bills, it did seem a little odd that she was now spending energy on what was really nothing more than a whimsical conversation they’d had while lying on a platform at night on Lake Sunnyvale.

  Then again, he thought, maybe it took her mind off her worries.

  “I already told you,” Rebecca said. “After we move to Masterton, I won’t have the opportunity to do this. This is the only lab in the entire country that has access to live feeds from BATSE.”

  Tane still had no idea why they needed live feeds from BATSE, or even what on earth BATSE was, and he wasn’t even really sure he wanted to know; but Rebecca had promised to explain it all in very simple terms, “terms that even an artist can understand,” she’d said, after they had the data. Which was what they were here for.

  She pushed open the doors, and they stepped into the lab, which didn’t look like a lab at all. Whatever Tane had been expecting, it was not simply a row of desks with a computer on each one.

  A balding man with gray hair and beard and narrow, wire-framed glasses looked up from his desk and rose to greet them. He looked very much the image of a university scientist, which of course he was.

  “Rebecca,” he said warmly. “You’ve grown.” He looked as though he didn’t know whether to hug her or shake her hand, so ended up doing neither.

  “This is my good friend Tane,” Rebecca said, and the man shook Tane’s hand; then, as if that had made his mind up, he shook Rebecca’s as well. She continued, “Tane, this is Professor Barnes. He used to work with my dad.”

  “How’s your mum?” Barnes asked.

  “She’s…okay. She’s fine.”

  “So, Rebecca, how can I help you?” the professor asked after a moment or two longer of meaningless small talk. “You said something about a piece of art? But I couldn’t work out what that has to do with geophysics.”

  Rebecca smiled. “Tane is an artist, and a very good one, and he has this great idea of creating a piece of art from transmissions from the depths of space. Sort of an ‘art of the universe’ thing. It’s kind of hard to explain.” She gave Barnes a look as if to say, “Artists, you know.”

  “I see. I think,” Barnes mused, and turned to Tane. “Any particular kind of transmissions you had in mind? There are a lot of them, you know.”

  Rebecca cut in before Tane would feel that he had to answer. “I was telling him about BATSE and the gamma-ray bursts. Tane felt that we could use th
e raw data from one of those bursts and model it digitally to create visual patterns in the computer.”

  Barnes looked confused. “Well, I suppose that could be considered as art. Actually, I paint a little myself. Landscapes, still lifes, that sort of thing. I have quite an original technique using flat knives. Maybe that would be of use to you, too. I could take some photographs and e-mail them to you. There is one painting in particular—”

  “That would be great.” Rebecca cut him off with such a wide smile that it didn’t seem at all rude. “And the BATSE data?”

  Barnes considered for a moment, then said, “Well, I don’t suppose it would do any harm. As long as you’re only using it for artistic purposes. We’re the only lab in the country that has access to live feeds of this data, you know.”

  “Really?” Rebecca said, wide-eyed. “I didn’t know that.”

  “There was a burst this morning. I downloaded the data a few moments ago. It’s all just bits and bytes, though. Raw numbers, if you know what I mean. Are you sure that will be of any use to you?”

  “Oh yes. We’ll put it into some imaging software that will create representations of it, no problem,” Rebecca said.

  “Very well, then, I’ll write it onto a disk for you.” He disappeared through an unmarked door at the back of the lab and reappeared a few moments later with a CD.

  “You promise you won’t let anyone else have a copy of this? It’s not top secret, but the data is copyrighted; it belongs to NASA.”

  Rebecca said sweetly, “Who on earth would I give it to?” She took the CD from Barnes’s outstretched hand and passed it straight to Tane.

  The data made no sense to Tane at all. It was as Barnes had described, just long strings of ones and zeros. Raw computer data. But he also didn’t understand Rebecca’s explanation of what this was all about.

  He lay on his bed, watching her tap carefully at the keyboard on his study desk. They were at Tane’s house because he had a new and powerful computer. Tane knew Rebecca envied his computer and resented a bit the fact that he mainly used it to play games. Rebecca didn’t have a computer at all.