Alex Scarrow - The Doomsday Code

‘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?’

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.

Liam smiled. ‘Aye.’

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.’