The Tomorrow Code (5 page)

Several New Zealand dignitaries that Tane didn’t recognize stood in front of the hotel, waiting to greet the man.

And that might have been the relatively peaceful end of it, if it hadn’t been for the prime minister stopping as he got out of the car, turning to the protestors, and waving cheerily.

Maybe he was just being friendly. Maybe he was waving to someone he knew. But it was the worst thing to do to a crowd that had been winding itself up, chanting and shouting over the past twenty minutes while marching. It was like pouring gasoline onto a barbecue.

There was an angry roar from the crowd, like that of a wounded animal; then suddenly the wooden barricades were down, toppling under an onrush of protestors. The police linked arms and stepped forward to meet the onslaught. Behind them, more police officers drew batons and waited.

The Japanese prime minister and the other dignitaries scurried toward the hotel, all thoughts of ceremony vanishing in the face of the wild beast that lunged toward them.

Tane tried to push himself backward, but it was impossible with the press of the crowd behind him, and he found himself crushed up against a huge policeman with a beard and bad breath. The air squeezed out of his lungs with the pressure from behind, and an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia enveloped him.

The thin blue line held, though, the storm of protestors safely contained on the outside. All except one, Tane saw through a thin gap in the blue uniforms. A small, quick shape, a blur of movement, and Rebecca was halfway toward the Japanese delegation, dodging around the larger, slower policemen like a rugby player evading tacklers.

She almost made it, shouting and screaming something about whales and murder, when one of the large, dark-suited men grabbed her by the arms, pinning her and forcing her to the ground.

At that point, the line fractured and split apart in a dozen places, the fury of the crowd intensifying as one of their own was attacked. Suddenly there were protestors running everywhere, some battling police batons with their makeshift placards.

The bearded policeman whirled away from Tane, and he managed to fight his way sideways, unable to see Rebecca, unable to do anything but try to claw breath back into his lungs and get out of the running, crushing crowd.

He found a small oasis amongst the huge concrete pillars at the base of the Skytower and slumped to the ground, exhausted.

In the end, they had to call in the riot police to clear Federal Street. Over a hundred people were arrested, but most were released without charge after being processed at the Auckland Central police station, just a few blocks away.

Tane waited outside for four hours until Rebecca finally emerged, bruised and disheveled but defiant.

“That was awful,” she said. “They photographed us, took our fingerprints, and jammed us all into these tiny cells while someone decided what to do with us.”

“I tried to get to you,” Tane said, which wasn’t really true but seemed like the right thing to say.

“You couldn’t have done anything,” Rebecca said. “They had me into the police van in three seconds flat. In handcuffs!”

She rubbed her wrists, and Tane could see red marks where the cuffs had been.

“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.

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 assistance from anyone. Not that Tane felt he would be able to give it any kind of assistance 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 passed. 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-basement 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 analyzer 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.

0001100110010000100000011001100011

0000011001110011000001100111000000

1001100111100000000110011100101010

1100000000110001010101100000111101

0101100010000011111010101000000001

1111100110000111011110001100010100

0001001000001100001010101110001111

110001111010100101

Rebecca was still wearing the same clothes as the previous day, Tane noticed. But then the previous day had been a day from hell, 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.
“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.