The Doomsday Code

She pinched her lip. ‘Like I say, never heard of it. And, sheeesh, I love DiCaprio.’

The search engine spewed out a page of hits, every last one to do with the movie: reviews, good and bad, mostly bad; entertainment news and dedicated film sites all chattering about Leonardo. She picked a website she used to regularly tap into from her bedroom back in 2010, Ain’t-it-Cool-News. She smiled at how primitive it looked back in 2001.

Good ol’ World Wide Web Version 1.0.

… directed by Don Rowney, a change of pace and direction for the director who normally does drippy romantic comedies. The Manuscript starts out with an interesting high-concept premise before nose-diving and becoming a pretty dull, dial-it-in chase movie. The first twenty minutes of the film introduce us to what it calls the ‘Most Mysterious Manuscript in History’ — something I thought was a made-up story device until I did my homework: The Voynich Manuscript, apparently a book-length document that first surfaced in the Middle Ages, written entirely in a gibberish language that, to this day, has yet to be successfully deciphered. DiCaprio, still hot from his fresh-faced role in James Cameron’s Titanic, plays Adam Davies, a hacker and cryptolinguist — a code-breaker — who manages to write a piece of software that unlocks the Voynich and foolishly decides to brag about his achievement to family and friends and fellow hackers. But, as is always the case, it isn’t long before the bad guys — the nastiest kind of shady government spooks — come knocking, concerned that Davies’s code-breaking software could be equally successful in unlocking the intelligence community’s deepest and darkest secrets. The movie is based on a supposedly true story culled from the British Press — the real culprit, Adam Lewis, a hacker from England, was written off as an attention-seeking loner after the story appeared in a British newspaper called the Sun back in 1994 …

Maddy looked at Sal. ‘Interesting.’

‘I wonder if that’s the same Leonardo DiCaprio as the old man who bought a whole chunk of the Antarctic, like earlier this year.’ She looked at the others. ‘I mean my year, you know? 2026. He went to live there among the penguins. To protect them from oil drillers or something.’

‘You gotta be kidding me. Seriously?’

Sal shrugged. ‘Might be someone else. Pretty sure the name was DiCaprio.’

Maddy shook her head at the thought of it before returning to the task at hand. She typed a search on ‘Adam Lewis’ and ‘1994’ and ‘Voynich Manuscript’. As Maddy trawled through the hits that came back, Becks cleared a space on the cluttered desk and placed a mug of black coffee in front of her.

‘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.’

CHAPTER 7

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.