The Tomorrow Code

by Brian Falkner

  “So where is the sub now?” Rebecca coaxed.

  Fong looked at her and smiled, realizing where she was heading.

  “It’s still in Sydney,” he said. “But please be serious. It costs a million pounds. I don’t know what that would be in New Zealand dollars—”

  “Four million, one hundred twelve thousand, two hundred and twenty-nine dollars,” Rebecca said from memory. “And ten cents. At today’s rate.”

  Fong rose to his feet.

  “It was nice to meet you. But right now, I am going to leave. I don’t like my time being wasted.”

  “Your time is not being wasted,” Fatboy said. “We represent a trust that has substantial funding. The Nautilus you have in Sydney. We’ll buy it.”

  “A trust,” Fong said skeptically.

  “I said we’ll buy it.”

  Mr. Fong looked at Fatboy with a kind of exasperation, as if he were speaking to an idiot who wouldn’t see sense. “Sure. It’s yours,” he said. “Just write me out a check for, hell, round it off to four million New Zealand dollars. It’s yours.”

  The doorbell sounded and Rebecca went to answer it.

  Fatboy stretched out a hand and said, “Mr. Fong, you have a deal.”

  Fong ignored the hand.

  Fatboy continued, “There are two conditions. You ask no questions, and you don’t inform the press. This deal is just between you and us.”

  Mr. Fong looked at him cynically for a moment, but then laughed and shook Fatboy’s hand. “Absolutely. Anything you say. No questions asked. And the check?”

  Fatboy shook his head. “We don’t have a checking account yet, but—”

  “What a surprise.” Fong didn’t sound surprised at all. “Then I’m afraid the deal is off.”

  Rebecca’s voice came from the doorway. “Mr. Fong, I’d like you to meet our lawyer, Anson Strange.”

  “Just in bloody time,” Tane said out loud, without intending to.

  MOTUKIEKIE

  The engine of the small plane roared and spray flew past the window. Tane peered out at the water slipping away faster and faster underneath the hull of the small seaplane. The harbor was smooth, but even so, small waves drummed faster and faster at the hull of the craft.

  “I thought it would be bigger than this!” Tane shouted over the noise of the engine, gripping the back of the seat in front of him.

  Rebecca seemed unconcerned by the fact that they were about to take off from the surface of the sea and head thousands of feet up into the sky in a piece of motorized tin that was probably built by the Wright Brothers. Fatboy was in the copilot seat, joking with the pilot.

  The pilot, a blond-haired man who seemed far too young to be in charge of an airplane, heard and called back, without taking his eyes off the controls, “It’s a Grumman Super Widgeon. It’s quite large compared to most seaplanes you see nowadays.”

  “I’d hate to see an ordinary Widgeon,” Tane shouted.

  He’d been on planes before, plenty of times. But they had video games in the backs of the seats and sixteen music channels and a cabin crew who brought you cold drinks and cookies.

  And they took off and landed on land.

  This was the fastest way to get to Motukiekie, though. Professor Green had recommended the company herself. Tane was a little surprised that she had agreed to see them, but it seemed that having a famous scientist for a father opened quite a few doors for Rebecca, even if (or perhaps because) he was no longer around.

  It was a Friday, but there was no school, as it was the last Friday before exams, and it was officially a study day. Which is exactly what Tane’s parents thought he was doing. Studying. At Rebecca’s house. Not flying to the Bay of Islands in a prehistoric seaplane.

  The rippled surface of the ocean outside turned to a mosaic of blue tiles, painted in flowing brushstrokes, then to a continuous blur, and then it disappeared, and all Tane could see was the sky as the plane banked around in a tight circle, back over the city.

  They climbed as they turned, but they were still so low as they passed back over the wharves and the harborside apartments and office blocks that Tane could see people eating lunch.

  They kept climbing and by the time they passed the enormous Skytower, the largest building in the Southern Hemisphere, it was well below the large floats hanging outside Tane’s window. From this angle, it looked surprisingly small.

  The city slipped away beneath them, and the harbor bridge beckoned, a gray coat hanger joining the central city to the North Shore.

  “You should fly under it!” Fatboy grinned at the young pilot.

  Tane gripped the back of the seat.

  “That’s illegal.” The pilot smiled back. “I’d lose my license. It’s been done, though.”

  “Really!” Rebecca exclaimed.

  “Captain Fred Ladd, back in the sixties or seventies. He was a bit of a legend apparently.”

  “Did he lose his license?” Tane wanted to know.

  “Yeah, but they gave it back to him. He was a bit of a legend, after all.”

  It took little more than an hour to reach the Bay of Islands, even in this old museum piece. The pilot seemed to know the area well.

  “That’s Cape Brett,” he said. “My great-grandfather used to be the lighthouse keeper there. Of course, it’s all automated nowadays. Down to your right, that’s the Hole in the Rock.”

  It was a tiny island with a hole punched right through one end. As they passed over it, a launch packed with tourists cruised right through the gap, seemingly oblivious to the danger from the rock walls that surrounded them.

  “If you like big-game fishing, we can organize a tour for you,” the pilot said. “There’s great marlin fishing up here, but if you prefer kingfish, tuna, shark—”

  “Sportfishing is murder,” Rebecca said quietly, but loud enough to be heard.

  The pilot took no offense. “Then I guess you’d be more interested in the bird sanctuary on Roberton Island.”

  “Another time,” Fatboy said. “We’re on a tight schedule, this trip.”

  “Well, that’s where we’re headed, right there.” The pilot pointed. “That’s Motukiekie Island.”

  There were islands everywhere, but the one he was pointing at was easily recognizable thanks to the small complex of buildings surrounded by a wire fence, not far from a small cove at the end of the island. It seemed a stark contrast to the lush verdure of the surrounding islands.

  The seaplane began to descend, and they flew low over a small hill at the opposite end of the island.

  Fatboy drew in his breath suddenly. “Look at that. A Pa.”

  Tane heard the undertone and looked, but he saw only a lumpy hillside with curious circular ridges. Fatboy was right, he realized; it was indeed the remains of an ancient Maori fort, a Pa. But it still seemed like just a lumpy hillside to him.

  Then, as the plane passed alongside the hill, preparing to land, it all changed. For a moment, the hillside seemed to come alive in his mind. He saw women in flax skirts weaving baskets, children playing. Strong-shouldered men preparing a feast in a dug-out earth pit. Suddenly, an attack by warriors of a neighboring tribe, screaming and charging up the hill at the wooden battlements with their wahaika and taiaha—their weapons—held high.

  Just for a moment.

  Then the floats of the plane hit the water, and a cloud of spray obscured the hillside, and when it cleared, the Pa was gone and he was looking at nothing more than a lumpy hillside.

  Professor Green met them at the jetty herself, which seemed a little unusual, Tane thought. Surely the head of the organization didn’t meet all her visitors personally at the wharf?

  “Call me Vicky,” she said brightly, her emerald-green eyes matching her name. Her hair was red and constantly trying to escape from the loose bun she had it pulled back into. Tane figured that loose hair was probably not a good idea in a science laboratory, but Vicky’s hair seemed to have a mind of its own.

  “We don’t normally allow
visits, for security reasons,” she said, leading them up a concrete path through dense native bush. “But I thought I could make an exception.” She looked sadly at Rebecca. “I knew your father. By reputation anyway. And I did meet him once at a conference in Dunedin.”

  Rebecca nodded silently.

  Vicky continued, “And is your mum still conducting research into climate change? I seem to remember that her work was quite radical. Groundbreaking. But I never saw anything published in the scientific journals.”

  “She’s taking a sabbatical this year,” Rebecca said.

  Tane thought of the blue flickering windows of Rebecca’s mother’s room and said nothing.

  They reached a high wire fence, topped with vicious-looking barbed wire. There was a gate set into the fence and beside it an electronic keypad.

  Tane glanced over as the professor tapped in a four-digit pattern. He caught the last number. Three. Like the Powerball number. Like the three of them.

  The path continued inside the fence, and they made their way through some brightly colored flowerbeds to another door, another keypad, and through some polished corridors to her office.

  Vicky fussed around them, getting them each a glass of cool water, despite the fact that they hadn’t asked for one.

  There was a painting on the wall of her office that Tane recognized immediately and knew that Fatboy would, too. It was one of their father’s works, entitled Tuatara Dawn. It was worth a lot of money, Tane remembered.

  “So how can I help?” Vicky’s emerald-green eyes flashed brightly once again.

  Rebecca began, “Well—”

  “What kind of security reasons?” Tane interrupted, looking up at the CCT security camera mounted in the corner of Vicky’s office. Another had stared at them in the main entrance area.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Earlier you said you don’t usually allow visitors, for security reasons. What kind of security reasons? Do you work with dangerous viruses here?”

  Vicky laughed, a soft, bell-like trill. “Good heavens, no. Nothing like that. All our work is with rhinoviruses, nothing dangerous. The security, and the reason we operate all the way out here on an island, is to get away from protestors, who have no idea what we are doing but object to it anyway. Because we’re a genetics lab, they assume we are creating genetically modified tomatoes or cloning sheep or something like that. Do you know what rhinoviruses are?”

  Fatboy answered smugly, “Of course. It’s the common cold.”

  Tane caught a brief smile from Rebecca.

  “Come and have a look,” said Vicky.

  She talked as they walked along a short corridor with large glass windows looking in on a laboratory where technicians and scientists in white lab coats and plastic hair caps were doing unguessable scientific things with microscopes and test tubes.

  “This is our level-one lab. That’s what we call a biocontainment level. The lab is sealed while people are working in there, but there’s no real danger to anyone.”

  “And if there was an accident?” Fatboy asked.

  “Well, you might catch a cold, I suppose.” Vicky laughed again, pleasantly.

  Tane had been expecting to meet some evil scientist with devious plans, thick glasses, and maybe a Persian cat on her lap. Vicky Green didn’t fit the bill at all.

  Vicky continued, “We made provisions for a level-two lab when we built the complex, but we haven’t used it yet.”

  Tane noticed that her eyes involuntarily flicked toward a solid-looking door at the end of the corridor as she spoke.

  She continued, “That would be for any dangerous pathogens, like influenza or hepatitis C. Labs go all the way up to level four, you know, but that’s only for people who are working with the really deadly viruses like Ebola. The United States has one at the CDC, their Centers for Disease Control, and I think the Russians have a couple.”

  They stood and watched the lab staff at work for a while.

  “What area of rhinovirus research are you conducting?” Rebecca asked.

  “Well, our main area is conserved antigens. Are you familiar with that field?”

  “Slightly,” said Rebecca.

  “I’m not,” Tane said quickly.

  “Okay, do you know how your body’s immune system works?”

  “Antibodies?” Fatboy queried.

  “Well, that’s a part of it. Antibodies are your body’s watchdogs against viruses and bacteria. Macrophages are your body’s soldiers. When the antibodies recognize something dangerous—a pathogen—they latch on to it, smother it, and send out a call for the macrophages to come along and swallow it up. But viruses like the rhinovirus keep changing. Mutating. Your body learns to recognize one rhinovirus but next winter along comes a new one with a different shape, and your antibodies don’t recognize it.”

  She stopped and looked around them, to make sure they were following her, which they were. “We are looking for conserved antigens, which means looking for common characteristics.”

  She drew a felt pen out of her pocket and, seemingly absentmindedly, drew a diagram on the glass window looking into the lab. Tane suspected she did things like that a lot.

  Her diagram looked a bit like a flower, a central circle, with smaller circles surrounding it, joined to the center by stalks.

  “Suppose this is a rhinovirus. Our antibodies recognize these shapes here”—she pointed to the smaller circles—“but then along comes a new virus.” She rubbed out the small circles with her thumb and drew in small triangles. “With a different shape, which they don’t recognize.”

  “Then it wouldn’t be able to smother it,” Rebecca said.

  “Right, but look, the stalks are the same on both viruses. That is what we call a conserved antigen. What if you had antibodies that could recognize the stalks, instead of just looking at the overall shape?”

  “Wow,” said Tane.

  “You’d cure the common cold,” said Rebecca.

  “What about the Chimera Project?” asked Fatboy, and there was a sudden silence.

  Tane winced. They had to be subtle, he thought. Fatboy was as subtle as a bull in a china shop.

  “What is the Chimera Project?” Vicky asked after a while.

  “We were rather hoping you could tell us,” Rebecca said.

  Vicky thought for a minute, then shook her head. “Never heard of it. It could have something to do with genetics, though. A chimera is what we create if we splice together genes from two different organisms. The University of California created a ‘geep’ a few years ago, part goat, part sheep, but there was a lot of hoo-ha about that, and you don’t hear about that sort of thing very much anymore.”

  Tane looked carefully at her. Was she telling the truth? If there was no Chimera Project, then maybe they could just get back to Auckland, cancel the order for the submarine, and get on with spending the six million dollars. That sounded like a good plan. However, he couldn’t get three small letters out of his mind: S, O, and S.

  Rebecca said, “What if you were to genetically splice together two, or more, different cold viruses? To help find your conserved antigen. What if you did that?”

  Vicky laughed, a little too quickly this time. “A chimera rhinovirus. I’m afraid that’s just science fiction, young lady.”

  The trip back was silent. Even the pilot sensed the mood and cut his usual cheery chatter. It wasn’t until they were almost about to land that Rebecca said what they were all thinking.

  “Professor Green was lying through her back teeth.”

  WATER WORKS

  WTRWKSBTMP1000:2.80,24,341,55,500. 80,24,342,54,499,1.80,24

  Rebecca’s software, trawling through weeks of gamma-ray bursts, had found the next pattern, but this one made no sense at all.

  All three of them stared at the characters dotted across the computer screen, trying to see order in the chaos. The early Saturday sun cast long streaks of light across the carpets of the lounge of the West Harbor house but did nothing to illumina
te the puzzle.

  “So you’ve checked earlier messages too?” Fatboy asked.

  “Weeks of them,” Rebecca replied. “The messages start on the day we visited Dr. Barnes.”

  “As if they knew you would visit him that day.”

  “Exactly. That can’t be just a coincidence.”

  “I still don’t understand where we’re going to get this time transmitter from.” Fatboy frowned.

  “Me neither,” Rebecca said with a smile. “I’d invent one, if I had the slightest idea of where or how to start.”

  “SOS means an emergency,” said Tane, whose mind was somewhere else entirely. “It means ‘help, save us,’ but from what?”

  “Water Works,” said Rebecca, looking at the printout. “Like on Monopoly. You know, the Electric Company and the Water Works.”

  The other two looked at her and she shrugged. “Still doesn’t make much sense, though, does it.”

  “Maybe it’s a plague,” Tane said. “Maybe Dr. Green is going to accidentally create some horrible disease and wipe out half of mankind!”

  Fatboy asked, “What if we just went and saw her again? Maybe she’d listen to us if we told her about the message.”

  “Maybe she’d deny everything again and have us arrested,” Tane said.

  “What are you up to?” It was Rebecca’s mother, drifting through the room. They hadn’t heard her come in.

  “Runescape,” Tane lied quickly.

  “What’s that?” she asked vaguely.

  “It’s an online game where you get to be a kind of a character, called an…” He trailed off as she drifted out of the room, not listening to his answer. Tane stared at the computer screen, careful not to look at Rebecca.

  “I think we have to involve the authorities,” Fatboy said. “If it is the end of the world that we are talking about, then that’s too big a problem for the three of us to deal with.”