The Doomsday Code

CHAPTER 6

2001, New York

Just as Maddy had promised, the archway was there as they’d left it, and not empty and disused nor occupied by alternate versions of themselves giving them grief for causing some weird time paradox.

She pulled the shutter down once they were all inside. ‘Gonna need a coffee here. I think I need a caffeine hit.’

‘Affirmative,’ said Becks.

‘I’ll go check on Bob,’ said Liam. ‘See how the fella’s coming along.’

Maddy nodded distractedly as she made her way to the computer station. ‘Now let’s see what’s what,’ she muttered as she sat down in the chair and swivelled round to face the monitors. A dialogue box popped up.

› Hello, Maddy. How was the musical performance?

‘We call it a gig, Bob.’

› How was the gig?

‘It was cool, very cool and I’ll tell you all about it later. Right now I need to hook into the external Internet link and do a search.’

› Affirmative. External feed active.

She pulled up the system’s search engine and tapped into their connection with the World Wide Web. ‘What was the name of that movie again?’

‘The Manuscript,’ said Sal, taking a seat beside her.

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.’