An unobtrusive polished wooden door under the main staircase turned out to be the entrance to a lift. Robin left them at the first floor, and Katherine and Matt continued up to floor six. The lift door opened to reveal a bare stone passageway, lit by electric wall lamps that were in the shape of burning firebrands. The lights flickered, sending shadows eerily back and forth across the pale stone floor and walls. A flight of stone steps emerged next to the lift, continuing up to the next level.
‘He likes to contrast the old and the new, doesn’t he?’ Matt said, meaning Harper.
‘Mr Harper sees technology as a way of unlocking and utilising the mysteries of the ancients,’ Katherine said. She led the way along the passage. ‘A way of illuminating the past – literally so here.’ She smiled at her own joke.
Matt wondered if she ever actually dared to laugh. With the shadows and light flashing across her pale face and her platinum hair she might almost have been made of ice.
The passageway ended in a large door of dull metal studded with rivets. There was a keypad beside it, but Matt couldn’t see what number Katherine punched in. The door sprang open.
‘Wait here a moment.’ She seemed suddenly unsettled, as if she had thought of something that should have occurred to her earlier. ‘Let me check that …’ She hesitated. ‘That the staff aren’t busy with something. There shouldn’t be anyone here at the moment, not at this time. But I want to check, all right?’
Matt shrugged. ‘OK.’ He waited in the passage, staring at one of the fake firebrands and trying to see how the flickering effect worked.
There were half a dozen lights inside, each shining through a different section of the fake wooden stave. They flashed in what seemed to be a random sequence to create the effect of flickering flames, but in fact the pattern was repeated every so often. But since this light was not synchronised with any of the others, the pattern was obscured.
Matt knew that nothing technological was completely random. When a computer program created a random number, it needed a seed number to start from – a number on which it performed some calculation to generate an apparently random result. That seed number was often taken from the computer’s clock. So, if you knew the exact time the program instruction was run, then in theory you could work out the result. Which was cheating, so far as Matt was concerned. If you could predict it, then it wasn’t truly random. Not like the way the air molecules moved when the wind blew, or the drops in the ocean were affected by the tides and currents …
His thoughts were interrupted by Katherine’s return.
‘There’s no one about,’ she said. ‘So I can give you a quick tour. Come on.’
It was indeed an impressive facility. It was hard to believe that Matt was inside an ancient stone pyramid in the middle of the Brazilian jungle. The computer suite must occupy most of the floor, apart from the narrow passage from the lift to the doors. It stretched almost out of sight – lines and lines of computer system units. Racks of circuit boards and memory arrays.
Matt could not hear any noise from outside, so he guessed it was soundproofed. Certainly, from the blast of cool air as he stepped through the doors, it was air conditioned. The hum of the ventilation added to the sounds of the computers.
Along one wall was a line of desks – plain, pale wooden office furniture – with computer screens on them. A stylised letter H twisted and turned and spun and spiralled on each screen apparently at random, but in fact following the directions of a program which Matt knew was anything but.
‘Impressive,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Katherine agreed. ‘Mr Harper likes to do things properly.’
‘So I see. Have you worked for him for long?’ Matt wondered.
‘One of his companies sponsored me through university,’ Katherine told him. ‘My parents could never have afforded it, and I was lucky enough to get on to the sponsorship scheme Harper was running. I didn’t think Mr Harper would know who I was, but when I got my degree he sent me a personal letter asking me to come and work for him.’
‘Perhaps he does that with all the students he sponsors,’ Matt suggested.
She smiled thinly, not amused. ‘They don’t all get a double-first. He offered me a job, and here I am.’
‘You owe him a lot then,’ Matt said.
‘I suppose he made me what I am.’ She started walking down one of the aisles between the rows of equipment, the subject evidently closed. ‘I gather you know something about computers, so let me show you round.’
She led him between banks of servers and disc drives, explaining which machines serviced which of Harper’s industries and connected to which continents.
‘Do you have a lot of systems programmers and stuff?’ Matt wondered. Even though everything was running smoothly on its own, he knew it was a lot of work to keep systems up to date and install new software and so on.
‘A few. Mostly it’s done remotely. Our technical people access the systems from wherever they happen to be on high-speed access lines. There’s a microwave link through the rain forest as there are no phone lines. But we have a few hardware engineers here in case of failures. And our chief technical executive is here too, with an office on another floor.’
‘He must have his work cut out for him,’ Matt said.
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Katherine said. ‘They’re new, but settling in well.’
There was a bleeping from somewhere nearby, and Matt assumed it was one of the computer systems they had just passed. But it was Katherine’s mobile phone. She flipped open the cover and read the message she’d just received.
‘We have to go now,’ she said. ‘Mr Harper is asking for me. It doesn’t do to keep him waiting.’
‘Can I stay here for a bit?’ Matt asked. ‘It’s fascinating. I’d like to look round some more if I may? I won’t be long.’
Her eyes narrowed slightly as she considered. ‘All right,’ Katherine decided. ‘But just ten minutes. And don’t touch anything. You can find your way back to the lift?’
‘Through the doors and down the passage. I don’t think I can get very lost.’
She nodded without comment. The click of her heels was still audible long after she was lost to sight behind the racks of servers and computer storage.
Matt waited until he had heard the door close at the far end of the huge room before hurrying back in the same direction. He sat himself at one of the desks, and moved the mouse. The spinning H on the screen was replaced with an administrator’s user interface.
But overlaid on it was a window demanding a password. The user’s access code was already entered, so at least he didn’t have to guess that. But what could the password be? He tried ‘Harper’ but, not surprisingly, it wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t ‘Atticus’ either. Or ‘waterfall.’ Probably not a word at all, Matt decided. Probably a jumble of letters and numbers. He drummed his fingers on the desk as he thought about it.
Mum had once told him she used a system for her administrator passwords that was based on the current month, and changed every month. Her own passwords were never so predictable, but it was a system she used if other people had to remember them. It was a pattern on the keyboard starting from the number of the month and preceded by the first letter of the month. So the password for January started j1 and for September it started s9. Maybe it was a system lots of computer administrators used, though that didn’t sound very safe and secure. But then who was going to get inside a pyramid in the middle of the jungle to try?
It was July, so Matt typed j7ygvcft6, taking the letters y g v from down the keyboard under the 7 And then c f t back up to the 6.
And the screen bleeped. The window changed to say:
Password accepted. Login in progress.
Matt grinned. He could almost believe Mum had set up the systems ready for him. Almost. Amazed at his good luck, Matt set about finding out how Harper’s computer network was arranged. He wasn’t really hacking in, he told himself. He wasn’t doing anything wron
g. Just looking, just interested. He was soon absorbed in his work.
There was a whole section – a set of servers and a network of client computers – to do with Harper’s archaeological work and ancient research. Matt found a map of the world with ancient sites marked on it. If you hovered the mouse pointer over a site, a set of coordinates popped up giving its longitude and latitude. A pop-up menu from the right mouse button gave him access to data about each site – both archaeological data and details of the state of the site today. It even listed who owned it, and Matt found that many were owned by AH followed by a date. When Atticus Harper had acquired it, he guessed.
He glanced at his watch, and was amazed to find that it was almost half an hour since Katherine Feather had left him. Probably time to log off and head back to his room. He reached for the mouse.
And a shadow fell across the screen.
‘What are you doing?’ a soft female voice asked.
‘I nearly died!’ Matt told her when he’d recovered from the shock.
‘You might, if Harper finds you,’ Robin said. She’d told him it wasn’t difficult to work out the code for the door, and apologised – while grinning – for surprising him. In return, Matt showed her the data he’d found.
‘What do you mean?’
She shrugged. ‘Just that I don’t trust him. Or that woman.’
‘Just because she called you a child,’ Matt teased.
Robin didn’t try to deny it. ‘Not just that,’ she said. ‘When she left you here, she actually checked on me. Came to my room and opened the door to see if I was asleep. Probably had some plausible excuse ready and waiting in case I wasn’t.’
‘But you weren’t,’ Matt pointed out.
‘She doesn’t know that. The light was out and I was in bed.’
‘You expected her to check up on you, didn’t you?’ Matt realised. ‘Crikey, you’re devious.’
‘Crikey, I’m right,’ she told him. ‘Why don’t you see what that says about this place?’ She pointed to the map that Matt had brought up on the screen.
‘She’s just concerned that you’re OK. Probably,’ Matt said. Not thinking, he clicked the left button on the marker for the Waterfall Pyramid, not the right one. And instead of a pop-up menu, the screen changed completely. He cursed, and moved the mouse, wondering how to get back.
‘No, leave it,’ Robin said. ‘What is that?’
It was a three-dimensional model. A wire-frame representation of a building – all lines and corners with none of the walls or floors or detail filled in.
‘It isn’t the pyramid,’ Matt realised. ‘It’s the wrong shape.’
‘It’s all curves … Can you get it to paint the rest of it so we can see the thing properly? What do you call it when the computer paints it all in – rendering?’
There were some controls and buttons on a panel at the bottom of the screen. Some of them, Matt knew, would tilt the picture or move the screen’s point of view through the model so it would look as though you were walking through the real place. He experimented with a few of the controls, and after a while managed to get a picture of the whole structure. It was still just a framework, but it was more obvious now that it was a building.
‘Looks like Roman architecture or something,’ Matt said. ‘Circular, like the Coliseum.’
‘Older than that,’ Robin said quietly. ‘I wonder why it’s on here?’
‘Some ancient site. Just got linked to the wrong point on the map, that’s all.’
‘Could be,’ she agreed.
‘There’s a link button here, with an arrow on it. Probably takes us back to the map.’ Matt clicked on it.
The screen changed again, to show another wireframe model. But this was not a building.
‘Looks like a person,’ Robin said. ‘Why’s that linked in?’
‘To give an idea of scale?’ Matt suggested. ‘Or maybe they’re building a recreation of the place when it was in use, centuries ago or whatever. They can populate it with models of people. Like the figures in those simulation games. They’re called avatars,’ he tried to explain. ‘Those are …’
‘They’re computer simulations of people or creatures that have some behaviour and habits that the computer generates. So you can simulate an environment. Like those games you get recreating cities or battles or whatever.’
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Matt said, a bit disappointed that she knew.
Robin nudged his shoulder. ‘So stick him in the model and see what he does.’
‘We can try.’
It took Matt a few minutes playing around with the mouse and the keyboard before he was able to do it. In the process he discovered how to make the building a solid, real-looking structure with stone walls and floors. They could see now that it was in a poor condition – walls were broken and the floors were scattered with sand and rubble.
‘Right, I think I’ve got the hang of it now,’ he said. ‘Let’s put our little man in this area here, beside the wall.’
Matt positioned the mouse pointer on a section of sandy floor beside a stone wall. The detail in the wall was impressive now it was fully rendered – a thick creeper was hanging down, large, veined leaves gripping the crumbling stonework as the creeper looped in a lazy S shape towards the sandy floor.
In response to Matt’s click, a figure shimmered into existence beside the wall. It had the shape of a man, but it did not look like a man.
Away from watching eyes, wreathed in shadows, the sand had lain on the stone floor for centuries. It stirred, as if worried by a breeze. But no breeze disturbed the large, veined leaves of the creeper hanging down the wall and gripping the crumbling stonework.
On the ground, the sand shimmered and shifted, slowly at first, but gradually it rippled and moved. Grains rolled together, coalescing into a shape. A flat image on the floor, like a relief carving …
Then the figure filled out, rose up, gathered more and more of the sand into itself as it rose. It didn’t climb to its feet, but flowed upwards – sand forcing its way like water bubbling from a spring.
Into a crude approximation of a man.
‘I think there’s a problem with the program,’ Robin said.
‘Looks like he’s picking up the same texture map as the floor, or something,’ Matt agreed.
The man’s shape was filled in with a rough, pale brown texture. His face was a crude approximation and his whole form seemed lumpy and misshapen – as if he were made of sand. The sand man took a step forward as Matt moved the mouse again. Flecks and particles dripped and rubbed from him as he walked, leaving a faint trail across the screen behind him.
‘Make him walk through that door.’ Robin pointed to an open archway on the screen. Let’s see where it goes.
The man followed the pointer through the arch. Into blackness.
The figure made of sand lurched forward, towards the archway. As it moved, feet dragging slightly, grains of sand rubbed off, fell away, eroded from its body and dripped to the ground. Leaving a faint trail of sand and dirt across the ground behind it.
‘Must be the edge of the model,’ Matt said. ‘They haven’t built any more of it. Unless there’s another model linked in to this one, to extend the world. You might be able to plug them together like a jigsaw. Let’s see.’
He clicked away for a few moments, and sure enough, another environment sprang into existence replacing the blackness. More stone walls and sandy floors. And a studded, metal door.
‘That can’t be right,’ Robin said. ‘Pull back a bit, let’s see what it is.’
The figure was walking again, still heading in the direction that Matt had sent him – through the door and up a set of stairs beyond. The picture pulled back, and the man and the staircase became smaller as the image zoomed out.
The figure was walking out of the building, and up into another structure that seemed to be built above it. Or was it upper floors of the same building, perhaps? Further back, and the figure was a moving dot on a windi
ng staircase. The circular building filled the bottom half of the screen. The top half was the other building.
The trail of sand dusted the steps that wound up out of the ruined building. The figure moved slowly and deliberately on its journey, towards its appointed destination.
‘That can’t be right,’ Matt said.
The building above, joined to the circular structure by the winding staircase, was a stepped pyramid.
‘That’s here, that’s us,’ Robin said. ‘The circular building or whatever it is must be buried below this pyramid.’
‘It’s only a computer model,’ Matt told her. ‘It’s not real.’
Robin was still staring at the screen. ‘I suppose not. Bring him up here,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘The man – make him walk up to the sixth floor, to this room. Let’s see if the computer suite is part of the model, or if it’s just an old empty pyramid.’
On the ground floor of the Waterfall Pyramid, a heavy steel door was hidden behind a heavy tapestry that showed a medieval map of the world. The countries were angular and misshapen, barely recognisable for what they were supposed to represent.
The tapestry moved as the door opened and a figure stepped through into the pyramid.
A figure that was misshapen and clumsy – barely recognisable as the shape of a man …
Matt clicked the mouse a few times, then sat back to watch the progress of the tiny figure as it made its way to the top of the winding staircase and into the pyramid.
‘We’ll give him a minute, then set the computer to show us his point of view, so we see him come into the pyramid.’
The shadows in the corridor outside deepened as a large figure appeared at the top of the stairs. It paused for a moment at the end of the corridor, then started slowly towards the computer suite. The flickering firebrand light threw distorted shadows against the walls and across the floor, making the figure seem misshapen, like a crude approximation of a human being. It moved slowly but deliberately towards the door at the end of the corridor.
The door opened. The figure stepped into the room and headed towards the boy and the girl sitting at the computer screen.
The Chaos Code Page 12