Alex Scarrow: The Doomsday Code

‘Thanks.’ She scanned the hits and finally picked a link and clicked on it. A moment later the screen went black and a banner logo appeared: a red-flaming eye.

‘Oh look, bingo-bango-bongo ,’ she said, reaching for the coffee, ‘let’s see what this gives us.’

The article was a lazy cut-and-paste job from a tabloid newspaper on to some guy’s foil-hat conspiracy-theory website, Dark Eye .

… Adam Lewis, a student doing a degree in Computer Studies at the University of East Anglia. The computer geek, looking more like a tatty bearded animal rights protester than a Microsoft pencil-neck, claimed in an article posted to New Scientist magazine that he had singlehandedly achieved what historians, code-breakers and several big American mainframe computer systems have all failed to do: to produce a single legible phrase from the mysterious leather-bound book known to historians and code-hounds as the Voynich Manuscript.

Lewis, 19, laughingly admits that the deciphered phrase sounds a lot like something that might have come out of the kind of dungeons-and-dragons fantasy games he loves to play with fellow geeks. The sentence he supposedly managed to produce from a passage in the Voynich, which he’s not prepared to identify, is this: ‘Pandora is the word. The word leads to truth. Fellow traveller, time to come and find it.’

Maddy spurted hot coffee over the back of her hand.

Sal looked at her, concerned. ‘Maddy? You OK?’

Maddy sat back in the chair, glasses in her hands, absently wiping the lenses as she gazed wide-eyed and unfocused at the monitor in front of her.

‘Maddy? What’s up? What’s the matter?’

She shook her head, chewing her lip a while before finally turning to Sal, with Becks still towering over them in platform heels and looking bemused. ‘I think …’ she started. ‘I’ve got a feeling this Voynich thing might just be the work of another team.’

‘Another team?’ Sal’s jaw slowly dropped open. ‘You mean … another group, like us? TimeRiders?’

Maddy hunched her shoulders. ‘I think we’re not alone, folks.’

2001, New York

‘You sure about this, Mads? I mean, it’s just a sentence, that’s all. And it doesn’t really say anything anyway.’

All three of them were slumped in the threadbare armchairs around the wooden kitchen table and Maddy had printed out the web pages she’d read on-screen. Despite explaining her point (very clearly, she thought), Liam still didn’t seem to have grasped it.

‘The point is, Liam,’ she tried again, ‘the point is … this Voynich Manuscript may well be a document used by another team to communicate forward from the past, just like you did with the museum’s guest book, like you did with that fossilized message. Now, if someone’s managed to decode some of it, then maybe they’ll decode more of it, or all of it, and God knows what sensitive agency messages are in there being sent forward. If they think their code’s unbreakable, they could be saying all kinds of stuff in there.’

‘And the agency is meant to be super-secret,’ added Sal.

Liam pursed his lips. ‘All right, I suppose I see your point … I suppose.’

Maddy sighed, not so much frustrated with Liam being slow on the uptake but more because she was keeping something from him, from Sal too. It felt wrong, unfair, and worst of all it made her feel lonely. She remembered word for word the scribbled message she’d found in that deposit box in 1906 and it was beginning to haunt her dreams.

Maddy, look out for ‘Pandora’, we’re running out of time. Be safe and tell no one .

More than a message, it seemed like a warning. No, it was a warning. But a warning of what?

‘Well, surely we don’t need to go right now, though, do we?’ moaned Liam. ‘It’s late, so it is, and my head’s still ringing from that noise you call music. And I’m tired as — ’

‘In the morning, then,’ Maddy cut in. ‘We all need a good night’s sleep, anyway. I’m still a little hazy.’

‘Good plan,’ agreed Liam.

‘But this time it’s not you who’s going back, Liam.’

The other two looked at Maddy. ‘What?’

You going to tell them about Pandora, Maddy? You ready to do that? No, she decided, at least not yet. Not until she knew a little more.

‘ I’m going, and I’ll take Becks with me for security, of course, but you need to be here, Liam, to watch over Bob. If I’m delayed and he’s ready to hatch, you should be here for him when he comes out so that he sees you first. You remember what Foster said? The clone imprints on the first person he sees. Bonds with them. You should be here for his birth.’

‘True.’ He nodded at that. She knew he didn’t want to miss that moment.

‘And, look, it’s not exactly like I’m heading somewhere super-dangerous. It’s England, 1994.’ She turned to Becks, standing patiently at the end of the table. ‘Where is it exactly?’

‘Information: Adam Lewis is a registered second-year student at the University of East Anglia in the city of Norwich.’

‘A university campus … there. Hardly dangerous.’ She grinned. ‘Maybe even fun.’

‘I could come,’ said Sal hopefully.

‘Sorry, not this time, Sal. It’s probably best you’re here too, watching for signs. We’ve had one small ripple … there could be more on the way.’

Sal huffed. ‘Why do you always get to decide everything now?’

‘I’m sorry, it’s …’ Maddy sighed. ‘Foster made me leader, Sal. So I’m supposed to lead . That’s the way it is. I wish it wasn’t. I wish somebody else was calling the shots. I wish Foster was still here, to be honest. But it is what it is.’

‘Just seems unfair.’

‘All of this is unfair ! I didn’t want to come here. I didn’t choose to die in a plane crash at eighteen. I had plans, you know? I had plans to do more with my life than watch a bunch of computer screens and live in this cruddy dump.’ She could have said more. Things she’d regret later. It was bad enough having to be in charge when she barely felt she had a grasp on how things worked. But, add to that, somebody somewhere seemed to be trying to warn her about something and she was way too stupid to get it.

The moment tasted sour and all of a sudden she felt tired. She looked at her watch: it was gone two in the morning. ‘Look, I’m hitting the mattress. Maybe we all should. It’s late and we’ve got stuff to do tomorrow.’

She got up and headed into the arched recess where their bunks were and pulled a curtain across as she changed into her PJs.

Liam looked at Sal and shrugged, both of them perplexed at her mood. ‘Maybe she’s missing home?’

‘Aren’t we all?’ said Sal.

2001, New York

Maddy and Becks were treading water in the perspex tube one moment and gone — along with sixty gallons of diluted disinfectant solution — the next. The large plastic tub flexed inwards with a loud thud that echoed through the archway.

‘Jay-zus! Does that tube always do that?’

Sal nodded. ‘The pressure of all the water suddenly not there … it makes the perspex flex.’

‘Oh, right.’ He looked round at Sal sitting patiently beside him, hands crossed in her lap. ‘So what normally happens now?’

Her smile was resigned. ‘We haven’t had “normal” yet. Either we’ve been hiding from cannibal mutants or we’ve had secret-service agents knocking at the door.’ She laughed skittishly. ‘It seems like we’ve been hopping from one crisis to the next since we first arrived here, doesn’t it?’