› No system files have been erased yet. You had another seven minutes before I proceeded with your instructions.
‘Christ,’ muttered Lester, ‘you weren’t kidding.’
Sal shook her head. ‘Nope.’
› My camera detects unauthorized personnel in the field office.
‘Yes,’ said Maddy, ‘we have guests.’
› Are you under duress?
‘No, it’s fine, Bob. These guys are OK, for now.’
Cartwright tapped Maddy’s arm and spoke quietly to her. ‘Anything funny, I mean it… you say anything to that computer that sounds remotely like a warning and it’ll be the very last thing you do.’
She nodded. ‘Don’t worry… I’m not stupid.’ She sat down in one of the office chairs and faced the computer’s webcam. ‘Bob, we got a message from Liam.’
› I am very pleased to hear that.
‘Yes, so are we.’
Sal joined her at the table. ‘Hey, Bob.’
› Hello, Sal.
She held up the piece of paper Lester Cartwright had produced earlier. ‘This is the message. Can you see it clearly?’
› Hold it very still, please. I will scan it.
A moment later the scanned image from the webcam appeared on one of the monitors and the image flickered light and dark as Bob adjusted the contrast to get a clearer resolution of the handwriting. Then a highlight box flashed around each handwritten letter in rapid succession, until finally a text-processing application opened itself on yet another monitor with the entire message typed out clearly.
› Some of the message is in code.
‘That’s right,’ said Sal. ‘It’s a book code.’
› The encryption clue is ‘magic’. Is this correct?
‘Yes.’
› I have more than thirty thousand data strings that include the word ‘magic ’.
‘I think that’s referring to the book you were reading the other day. Do you remember? We were discussing it.’
› Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
‘Yeah, that’s the one.’
Cartwright and Forby leaned forward. ‘You have got to be kidding,’ mumbled the old man.
‘Hey, my daughter is reading those books,’ said Forby. ‘Is that the next one?’
‘It’s the last one,’ said Maddy. ‘Book seven.’
‘Jeez! What my girl wouldn’t give to get a look at that!’
Cartwright cocked an eyebrow at his man. ‘Forby… please be quiet.’ The man obediently drew back and resumed his wary stance, the gun held loosely in his hands.
Sal sat down beside Maddy. ‘Bob, you and the duplicate AI will have the same digital book file, right?’
› Affirmative. The file was in my short-term memory cache when we downloaded the duplicate AI into the support unit.
‘Then this should be pretty much straightforward,’ said Maddy.
‘Yeah.’ Sal flicked her hair out of her eyes. ‘You’ve just got to replace each three-number code with the letter. You understand how the code works, Bob, yeah?’
› Affirmative. Page number. Line number. Letter number.
‘That’s right.’
› Just a moment.
They watched in silence as clusters of numbers were momentarily highlighted on the document, while on another screen, pages of the book flashed back and forth in a blur. The task was completed in less than thirty seconds.
› The complete message is: Take this to Archway 9, Wythe Street, Brooklyn, New York on Monday 10 September 2001. Message: Sip, two, sehjk, three, npne, gour, zwro, aix. Key is ‘Magic’.
They stared at it in silence for a few moments, trying to make sense of it.
‘Well, that’s just gibberish, isn’t it?’ said Cartwright.
‘Are you sure you’re working from the same digital book file?’ asked Maddy.
› Affirmative.
‘The original numbers on the fossil,’ said Cartwright, ‘some of them were indistinct, or incomplete. I have access to the original piece of rock.’
‘No… it’s OK,’ said Sal. ‘If it’s just numbers it’s really easy to work out. Sip is six. Sehjk, must be seven.’ She worked quickly, writing the numbers down on a scrap of paper.
‘There.’
6-2-7-3-9-4-0-6
‘It’s not in the usual time-stamp format,’ said Maddy.
› Please show me, Sal.
Sal held the piece of paper up to the webcam.
› It is a number. 62,739,406. Suggestion: it is the AI duplicate’s best estimation of their current time location.
‘Oh my God!’ gasped Maddy. ‘It actually managed to work it out?’ She looked at the cam and smiled. ‘Well, that’s you, actually, isn’t it? A copy of you, Bob. Well done!’
‘To the exact year?’ said Cartwright. ‘To the exact year? That’s
… that’s incredible. How could anyone possibly — ’
› Negative. The best resolution guess can only be to within 1,000 years of that year.
That silenced them all.
They could be up to 500 years before or after the specified time location.
‘Oh jahulla,’ whispered Sal. ‘Then that’s no good to us.’
‘The nearest thousand years?’ Maddy’s head drooped. ‘How are we supposed to find him in that?’
Cartwright looked down at both girls. ‘So your machine can’t bring back your colleague?’
Maddy shook her head. ‘It takes time to build up enough charge to open a portal, particularly for one that long ago. I don’t even know how long it would take to accumulate enough to open one then anyway, let alone do it thousands and thousands of times over.’
› Information: approximate charge time — nine hours.
‘So we can do it,’ said Sal.
Maddy laughed drily. ‘Yes, we can… but a thousand years? If we opened one window for each year it’ll take us nine thousand hours… what’s that? Just over a year of constantly opening and closing portals.’
‘So? We’ll do that for Liam, right?’
Maddy sighed. ‘That’s opening one window per year. What are the chances of Liam standing right there in the two or three seconds of that year? Hmm? What if he was asleep at that moment? Taking a leak? Hunting for food? To stand any sort of chance we’d need to open one… like… every day!’
‘This sounds like a needle-in-a-haystack problem,’ said Cartwright unhelpfully.
‘Oh.’ Sal bit her lip. ‘But we could try, couldn’t we?’
‘Three hundred and sixty-five thousand attempts!’ replied Maddy. ‘Do you want to have a guess how many years that would take us? Hmm? Lemmesee,’ she muttered, as she gnawed on the nails of one hand. ‘Oh, there… three hundred and seventy-five years or something.’ She made a shrewish face, growing pink and mottled with frustration and anger. ‘So, what do you say we get started, then?’
‘Then I’m sorry, that’s it,’ stepped in Cartwright. ‘I’m afraid your friend is stuck where he is. This facility will
