The Tomorrow Code Part 3

"It's so unfair," she raged quietly. "They're the criminals, killing whales and calling it research, but we're the ones who end up with a criminal record!"

"Don't worry about it," Tane said. "You're still a kid. They have to erase all record of the arrest the day you turn eighteen. I read that somewhere."

She was silent.

"Really," he insisted, trying to make her feel better. "It's nothing. It won't matter at all."

He was wrong, though-as it turned out, Rebecca getting arrested mattered quite a lot.

111000111

Tane's computer was very new and very powerful. It had a shiny silver case and a flat nineteen-inch screen, with a cordless mouse and keyboard. It was very expensive. He'd gotten it for his fourteenth birthday, so it was pretty much the latest processor, and it had a lot of memory, a fast hard drive, and a high-powered graphics processor, and it was generally really quick at anything, especially games. and very powerful. It had a shiny silver case and a flat nineteen-inch screen, with a cordless mouse and keyboard. It was very expensive. He'd gotten it for his fourteenth birthday, so it was pretty much the latest processor, and it had a lot of memory, a fast hard drive, and a high-powered graphics processor, and it was generally really quick at anything, especially games.

So it was a little bit hard for Tane to understand why it was taking so long for it to run Rebecca's program. She started to explain it to him once or twice, but her explanation about the program code made no more sense to him than the code itself.

The only good thing was that once it was running, it kept running all by itself, without needing a.s.sistance from anyone. Not that Tane felt he would be able to give it any kind of a.s.sistance anyway.

They had started it running on Friday night, the day before the protest march, and it was still running the next Sunday. And Monday.

More days pa.s.sed. A week. Then another. Sometimes Tane would wake up during the night and would feel that the insistent flashing of the cursor was reaching out to him. But mostly he just wondered if it was really doing anything at all, or if it was just stuck in some mindless loop because of some bug in Rebecca's program.

A third week went by. That week, Rebecca had another date with Fatboy, although she said she didn't feel very much like dating, with all that was happening. But she went anyway. That night, the flashing cursor seemed like a warning light.

The day of the auction, November 14, was the day that the program finally paused and displayed some data on the screen, but Tane wasn't there to see it. Neither was Rebecca. Painful as it was, they were both at the auction.

It was a bright, chirpy day and for that reason the auctioneer, who looked just like a dapper little English gentleman but who spoke with an Australian accent, held the auction outside in the small backyard. Tane had mown the lawn, and they had both spent an entire weekend weeding to make the place presentable. He thought it looked as good as it could look, as the potential buyers, the tire-kickers, and the nosy neighbors gathered around.

The auction turned out to be a disaster. It was over in less than ten minutes, and the house, Rebecca's family home, sold at a bargain-bas.e.m.e.nt price to some flamboyantly dressed young entrepreneur.

Rebecca shuddered once or twice as the hammer fell, and Tane put his arm around her shoulders.

At that price, Rebecca and her mother wouldn't even be able to fully repay the bank. They'd have to keep making mortgage payments, plus pay the creditors, and they'd have no money for the move to Masterton. It was an all-around disaster.

Rebecca was crying silently as Tane led her inside. He offered to make her a cup of cocoa, but she shook her head and said she wanted to go to bed for a while.

He rang his mum and told her he'd be home a bit later than expected. She didn't mind and asked if there was anything she could do to help, but there wasn't really.

When dinnertime came, he found a few bits and pieces in the cupboards and the freezer and made some savory pancakes, but neither Rebecca nor her mother would eat them.

He ate them himself at the dining table, which was still covered in mounds of paper, and a bit later, he went to check that Rebecca was okay.

He pushed the door open noiselessly. The light from the hallway spilled inside. It was not a little girl's room, and it was certainly not a typical teenage girl's room. In place of the posters of boy bands, there were posters for Greenpeace and Amnesty International. The books on her bookshelf were by Stephen Hawking and Salman Rushdie, rather than Meg Cabot or Jacqueline Wilson.

She was lying on top of the bedcovers, still fully clothed but sound asleep. In sleep, the heaviness and the tiredness lifted from her face, and there was a stillness and a calm about her that wrenched Tane's heart.

He pulled a blanket over her and gently brushed his hand against her cheek by way of a goodbye.

It was still light, but only just, when he stowed his cycle in the garage and wound his way up through the many levels of his parents' house to his room, and there, waiting for him on the screen, was a long line of ones and zeros.

Rebecca's software had found a pattern.

"Thanks, Tane, thanks for everything." Rebecca smiled at him tiredly over the Sunday-morning cup of cocoa he'd made her. He'd quietly let himself back into the house at about eight, using Rebecca's key, which he had borrowed on his way home the night before. "You're a good friend. We'll keep in touch, after I move down to Masterton, won't we?"

"Of course we will," Tane said. "We'll probably be on the phone every night, and I can come and visit you on long weekends, stuff like that."

She smiled and nodded her agreement, although they both knew that it would probably never happen.

She said, "Yesterday was such a nightmare. I don't even want to think about what we're going to do now."

"When do you think you'll leave?" Tane asked.

"I dunno. I think the settlement date is in about three weeks, and we'll probably have to be out before then. I expect I'm going to have to organize it. Mum doesn't seem to want to have anything to do with it. I don't know how we're going to pay for it, though."

Tane had a thought and said, "Maybe my mum and dad can help out. A loan of some kind."

Rebecca looked down at her mug. "I'd say no and tell you that we're too proud and all that. But I guess we're not. We're just desperate." She laughed. "I just hope my BATSE a.n.a.lyzer finishes running before we leave."

"It already has."

"What?!!"

"I was going to tell you, but it didn't seem like it was important."

Rebecca put down her cocoa slowly, phrasing her words carefully. "Not important? Not important! It's probably nothing, just a random series of numbers that happens to look like a pattern, but if it is really a pattern, then we could be talking about the scientific discovery of the century!"

"I was going to tell you-"

"Bigger than the splitting of the atom. Bigger than the invention of the airplane. Bigger than...than...big. But don't get excited, because it is probably nothing."

It was a little hard not to be just a bit excited, Tane thought, considering that Rebecca was just about jumping out of her skin. "Do you want to come and have a look?" he asked.

"We'll take Mum's car. It'll be faster," was her answer.

Tane hesitated. "I don't have my license."

"Me neither," Rebecca said as she picked the car keys off the hook by the door.

0001100110010000100000011001100011000001100111001100000110011100000010011001111000000001100111001010101100000000110001010101100000111101010110001000001111101010100000000111111001100001110111100011000101000001001000001100001010101110001111110001111010100101

Rebecca was still wearing the same clothes as the previous day, Tane noticed. But then the previous day had been a day from h.e.l.l, so he supposed it didn't matter.

She had been poring over a printout of the numbers for nearly an hour, trying to make sense of it, but as far as Tane could see, it made no sense at all, not even to her.

"Look," she said, running her hand along a line of ones and zeroes. "It looks like a pattern all right, and parts of it repeat, which is not the sort of thing you'd expect from a random explosion of gamma rays."

Tane looked, and it appeared pretty random to him. Just a long series of ones and zeroes printed in fine black ink on a plain white piece of paper. "Really?" he asked.

"Look, see this section?" She drew some quick lines in pencil on the printout, marking out a series of six digits. 001100. 001100. "Look how many times that sequence repeats throughout the data. Nine times. Too often to be a coincidence. Here's another sequence: 0101100." "Look how many times that sequence repeats throughout the data. Nine times. Too often to be a coincidence. Here's another sequence: 0101100."

She pored over it some more, making notes on another piece of paper and occasionally adding up some figures on a pocket calculator. "The next step is trying to decipher it. Like cracking a code."

Tane peered at it, squinting, turning his head slowly to each side, trying to see some kind of picture in the numbers, like one of those hidden picture paintings.

Something stirred a faint breath of recognition, as though he had seen patterns like this before, a long time ago. He breathed out slowly, which was his usual way of trying to relax into a memory that would not quite come. The memory tickled and teased agonizingly at the far corners of his brain, but the picture would not come into focus. The harder he tried, the more it kept darting just out of reach.

After a while, Rebecca shook her head. "Maybe it is just random after all. Depending on how you group the digits, there could be any different number of recurring sequences, or none at all. They say that if you had enough monkeys and enough typewriters, one of them would eventually type Hamlet. Hamlet."

"What are you talking about?" Tane snorted. "Monkeys and typewriters? Hamlet?"

"Not literally," Rebecca tried to explain. "It just means that if you have enough random..." She saw the grin on his face and threw her pen at him.

"But wouldn't they be better off using word processors?" Tane asked.

"Who?"

"The monkeys."

"Whatever."

The excitement of the morning had worn off by lunchtime (cheese on toast, provided by Tane's mother). If there was any kind of a pattern there, it was proving to be elusive, and the dark circles under Rebecca's eyes had returned. Even her hair, normally spiky and sharp, was limp and lifeless.

"I thought I was on to something for a while there," Rebecca sighed. "I really thought I had it."

"What?"

"No. It's wrong," she said sadly. "Binary code. That's the language that computers talk in-I mean, way down in the depths of their operating systems. Information is stored in bits, which can be on or off-"

"Yeah, I get it," said Tane, even though he didn't. "Move along."

"Well, the BATSE data is actually in binary code. My program just displays it in ones and zeroes to make it easier for us to read. So I had this bright idea of translating the binary code into ASCII characters."

"Um, ooohkaaay."

"G.o.d, it's like talking to a monkey some days," Rebecca stormed.

"Maybe, but I've written this really cool play about this guy named Hamlet-"

"ASCII characters," Rebecca cut him off with just a brief smile, "are eight-character binary codes for the letters of the alphabet. For example, 01000001 is A, A, 01000010 is 01000010 is B, B, and so on. So I translated the whole string of characters using ASCII." and so on. So I translated the whole string of characters using ASCII."

"And?"

"Oh." She seemed distracted. "Nothing, just gibberish. So then I tried it in BASE 64, which is another kind of computer code, but no luck; then I realized there were two hundred fifty-eight characters, which is two too many for ASCII or BASE 64, which must be in groups of eight, so I took off the first two characters and tried that in BASE 64."

"And?"

She handed over a printout.

ZkIGYwZzBnAmeAZyrj8czAMVDDVz9UA/MO8YycAkxQ==

"'Zuhkiggy wazzabeen ameezy,'" Tane read out importantly. "You know this is a really significant moment, like when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and said, 'Mr. Watson, come here.' Except our first message says, 'Zuhkiggy wazzabeen ameezy.'"

"Bell didn't invent the telephone," Rebecca said sourly.

"Maybe that's the language they speak in the future," Tane said. "Maybe 'Zuhkiggy wazzabeen ameezy' is future-speak for 'Hi, what's up?' or..." He trailed off, seeing that she was not laughing. "Sorry."

A tear appeared at the corner of Rebecca's eye and found its way slowly down her cheek.

"Let's go for a walk," said Tane, feeling stupid and useless.

From the back of the house, a narrow, little-used track wound through the trees and eventually joined up with one of the main hiking trails through the bush of the mountains. Not even forty-five minutes of steady walking along that brought them to the top of one of the dams that were scattered through the mountains to provide water for the city below.

This was a small, earthen dam that almost seemed a part of the hillside. They leaned on a solid wooden handrail, hewn from a half-round log, and looked down at the lush bush-covered hillside below.

The memory that had been tickling at Tane's mind was still there. He tried not to think about it. That was what his dad always said. Stop trying so hard. Let your subconscious sort it out.

"It's beautiful here," Rebecca said. "I love it. All you can hear is the water and the wind in the trees and the birds-" She stopped, interrupted by a loud bell-like sequence from just above their heads. "There, what's that one?"

"Korimako," Tane said. "Bellbird. And that's a saddle-back over there."

"How do you know all these?" Rebecca asked with a grin. "Are you a secret bird-watcher?"

Tane smiled and shrugged. "Nah, just Boy Scouts. Had to learn them all in Scouts. If you pa.s.sed a test, you got a badge that...you...could..."

The delicate tendril of a memory tugged again at the back of his mind, tantalizingly close. He shut his eyes for a moment, and then, after what seemed like an age but was no more than a second or two, he said, "We've got to get back to the house."