by Alex Scarrow
In all that time he’d played the memory of that night in his bedsit over and over in his head, trying to understand what it had been about. Trying to keep the memory of their faces fresh and vivid. Preparing himself to accept the possibility that this was for real, that that little ticket stub was actually going to reunite him with someone who’d travelled across time.
Adam had called work this morning, told them he was feeling poorly. Told them he might not be in for a couple of days. Sherman-Golding Investment would cope just fine without their IT systems security consultant for a couple of days.
Seven years. It felt like a lifetime ago, those unhappy university years. He’d never kept in touch with those moronic beer-heads he’d shared digs with. Couldn’t care less what they were doing now. Because he was doing just fine. A nice Manhattan apartment, a gold American Express card, membership of an exclusive gym that overlooked the Hudson. He earned more money a year than his old man earned in a decade. And all he was really was a hacker in a smart suit.
But then this life, this career, everything he’d planned and done since he was twenty-one, had been so he’d end up here in New York, so he could be there at that club on that night. His whole career, his life, governed by the faint print on a crumpled stub of coloured paper.
Totally mental.
Now, watching this little backstreet in the morning, Mr Sensible urged him to make a move. Mission Control toAdam, time to go and say hello now, don’t you think?
The thought sent butterflies fluttering in formation around his gut.
Come on, Adam, you’re a confident man now. Not that nerdy little weasel, not any more. Right? A player. Not a loser — a WINNER! And winners don’t sit around whining.
He nodded. ‘Right.’
Mission Control says we’re good to go. Time to go.
It was then that he saw them. Four of them emerging from one of the archways. He spotted the tall girl who’d twisted his finger nearly out of its socket. Looking no different. Wearing exactly the same clothes she’d been wearing that night — the very same clothes she’d been wearing seven years ago … and it looked like she’d not aged a day! With her was a small Asian girl, thirteen, maybe fourteen. A young man perhaps a couple of years older, and next to him a giant of a man. He had to be seven foot tall, at least a yard across the shoulders and over two hundred pounds of muscle.
That leaves the other girl. The one called Maddy. She’d been with this lot last night. He’d watched her bouncing around amid the sweaty mob like a loon. He’d liked that kind of thrash music when he was a student. Not now, though. It was music for kids. He preferred jazz, classical, rhythm and blues. It better suited the sophisticated professional executive he’d become. All part of the new image. New Adam.
Mission Control says go. Green light, mate. Time to knock. Or are you going to bottle out again?
‘Who dares wins,’ he whispered.
That’s the spirit.
He’d noted which archway they’d come out of. The fifth one along. He waited until the others had turned out of the backstreet and east to head into Brooklyn before he tossed the paper cup of bland coffee he’d been holding on to into a litter bin and took a first tentative step across the pedestrian walkway towards the dirty little backstreet.
‘Here we go,’ he whispered.
Maddy heard the shutter door rattle as someone lightly tapped on it from outside. One of them must have forgotten something. She got up from the office chair and crossed the floor. Rubbing her eyes tiredly, she punched the green button and let the shutter clatter up to knee height before ducking down.
‘What did you forg-?’
She looked up and saw a tall, tanned and well-groomed man in a very expensive-looking suit. He removed a pair of designer shades and smiled. ‘Uh … hi,’ he said with an English accent and a small self-conscious wave.
‘Excuse me?’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’
He smiled. ‘You and I, we, uh … met some years ago.’
Maddy frowned. Confused for a moment. ‘I don’t think so.’ Then she realized there was something about his face that looked vaguely familiar.
He shrugged. ‘I think I looked quite a bit different then. Long scruffy dreadlocks, pretty bad zits … and, if I recall correctly, I had a beard — if you can call it that. I don’t think you caught me at my best.’ He smiled, a handsome expression on his lean sculpted face. ‘But you,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘quite incredible! You don’t seem to have changed one bit.’
Her eyes widened with surprise. She suddenly recognized him. ‘Oh my God!’ she whispered. ‘You’re … you’re that young — ’
‘Adam Lewis,’ he said, squatting down to face her on the level. He offered his hand.
‘How did you …’ Her jaw flapped uselessly.
‘How did I find you?’
She nodded.
He reached for the inside pocket of the well-tailored pinstriped jacket and pulled out a leather wallet. ‘I’ve kept this safe in here, you know, all these years. And every now and then, I pull it out and look at it, just to remind myself that I wasn’t going mad. That I didn’t imagine that night.’ He pulled out a frayed and faded corner of paper and held it in the palm of his hand. ‘It’s a little bit of litter you left by mistake in my room.’
She could just make out the name of the club they’d been to last night. ‘I dropped that?’
He nodded.
He looked up at the clear blue sky and sighed. ‘I do believe, back in 1994, you promised to come back and tell me what the message was all about. So … how did you get on with finding out the truth? Finding out what Pandora means?’
‘Oh boy.’ She looked up and down the street. ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’
CHAPTER 16
2001, New York
Adam straightened up inside, his eyes slowly adjusting from the bright September morning outside to the dimly lit interior.
‘My God …’ he whispered and turned to her. ‘This is your … your base, is it?’
She nodded. ‘’Fraid so.’
He took several hesitant steps across the floor towards the bank of computer monitors, the perspex cylinder and the rack of machinery standing beside it. ‘And this? What is …?’
‘That’s our time displacement unit,’ she replied, drawing up beside him. ‘We have to talk, Mr Lewis.’
He shook his head. ‘Adam will do. Clients call me “Mr Lewis”.’
‘Fair enough. We have to talk about Pandora, Adam.’
‘You know what it means now?’
She shook her head. ‘No … Look, my colleagues don’t know about it yet. I plan to tell them, but not yet, not until I know what it means.’ She looked at him. ‘Maybe you can help me. I need to know everything you know about the Voynich. How you managed to decode it when no one else can. And how you’ve ended up here.’
He nodded. ‘Yes … yes, of course.’
‘Let’s go sit.’ She gestured to one of the threadbare armchairs. ‘I’ll make some coffee.’
A couple of minutes later she sat down opposite him with two mugs of coffee and a packet of Oreos.
‘So?’
‘Where do I begin?’ Adam took off his suit jacket, laid it carefully over one arm of the chair and loosened his tie. ‘Not long after you visited me I became a news story for a day. A national newspaper ran an article on me, and a story about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript became the next day’s fish-’n’-chips paper.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘But the damage was done. Everyone at university knew who I was. A loony. A deluded little sad case who made up the story just to get some attention.’
‘Why? You managed to decode it successfully. So you didn’t explain how you did it? Show them you weren’t a nutcase.’
‘I couldn’t explain the technique to anyone. I couldn’t demonstrate the deciphering method.’
‘Why not?’
Adam sipped his coffee. ‘Because …’ He sighed. ‘It sounds crazy.’ He shook his head. ‘Ma
ybe because it is.’
‘Just tell me why you couldn’t explain how you managed to decode it?’
‘Because I believe it used a cipher aimed specifically at me.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘It was encrypted in a way that only one person in the world could unlock.’ His eyes widened. Looking more like the paranoid student he’d once been than the successful and groomed executive he was now. ‘Someone in 1194 — ’ he laughed edgily — ‘knows me. Knowsme very well.’
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 Naraza a?gu?he!’
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.
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.’
