They all thought this was a good idea.
‘But with Faye it was different,’ said Pedro. ‘The person didn’t ask for help – did they Faye?’
Faye wasn’t so sure about that. ‘I don’t know, I can’t say for sure.’ She gave a sigh and then went on. ‘She said I had so much opportunity to study and that I shouldn’t waste it, but that I should use it to help others.’
‘That fits,’ said Colin decisively. ‘There is always something about the need to help someone. So let’s keep our eyes open. As soon as one of us has any news, we should let the others know immediately. I am sure things will become clearer soon. Agreed?’
Everyone agreed.
Pedro had something to add, though.
‘I was just thinking. Remember what we were talking about before Faye told us about this friend of Camille’s? We were trying to figure out what we could all have in common – us classmates and the clerk from this office – with the mysterious invader. And I have a hunch.’
‘What have we got in common, then?’ asked Sonia.
‘It’s that we have all studied, or we are studying – we can all read and write. That’s why we can understand the value that our guy puts on literacy.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Colin. ‘I wouldn’t really think that being able to read and write is enough of a link.’
‘Yeah, lots of people are literate,’ said Sonia, ‘especially these days. It’s not really a major link.’
‘Still, you could be right,’ Colin said. ‘Our mysterious hacker is quite possibly communicating with us because he or she thinks we are capable of appreciating words. The messages are not only a cry for help, but you might say they are also a vote of confidence in us. This is one further element for our consideration,’ he went on, in his lawyer-like way. ‘So let’s go our separate ways now and think these things over. Agreed?’
This time, nobody had anything else to add. They all said goodbye and went home.
10 – Rhythm, Poetry and Death
A few days passed before there was any new message from the Brainy Hacker. Little by little, the kids’ ordinary day-to-day routine was filled with things that took time or demanded attention: studying for exams, doing homework, playing games, going to a party, to a gig or to the movies. Since the Brainy Hacker hadn’t made contact for a while, they gradually put this subject aside. It’s not that they had forgotten about it or had become less curious. It was just that other things began to dominate their thoughts and their conversations.
Garibaldi High played a football match one Saturday morning that ended in a draw, despite the total mastery shown by their team. It was bad luck, and it left a bitter taste, because they all knew that their team had played better than the other team.
Afterwards, they all needed to go and have some fun and forget about the match. That’s probably why, after the game, Pedro asked Robbie to have lunch at his house. Perhaps later they might play a game with Will on the computer.
‘Thanks,’ said Robbie. ‘That would be cool, but I can’t, Pedro. Today is Saturday, remember? I’ve got the radio show.’
How could he forget? Every Saturday afternoon Robbie became famous. He turned into Robert Freitas and commanded the microphone of the community radio programme, on air for two hours. He talked to everybody, passed complaints along to the authorities, told stories, took phone calls from listeners, interviewed lots of people, played cool songs, presented new bands. He was the closest thing to a celebrity that they had in the group.
‘But your programme doesn’t start until four,’ argued Pedro. ‘We’ve got plenty of time.’
‘Yeah, but we’re in the middle of the rap contest and I still need to listen to some new stuff that arrived. I’ll catch the bus with you, but I’m not getting out at your stop.’
After a pause, Robbie added, ‘Actually, the main thing I want is to listen to one particular song again. I’ve heard it a few times already and I can’t seem to reach any conclusion.’
‘Is it good? Who wrote it?’ Pedro asked as they got on the bus.
‘It’s a total mystery, Pedro. A really strange rap, from somebody who appeared out of nowhere on the radio’s computer without identification or anything and left the recording there. It’s quite weird. I can’t even tell if it’s good or not.’
A quick suspicion crossed Pedro’s mind. Could it be? No, it wasn’t possible. But … perhaps.
In any case, he asked, ‘How do you mean, it just appeared on the computer?’
‘I don’t know how it happened. The technician who works on the radio programme thought it might be a virus. Apparently it came in as some kind of encoded message that appeared over another one and came with an attached file. Of course, the tech guy knows better than to open an attachment from a stranger, but it just opened itself, apparently, and the recording was in the attachment.’
‘So it appeared out of nowhere, with no explanation?’ Pedro was starting to get excited. It had to be the same guy.
‘Yeah, weird.’
‘What about the song, what’s it like? Is it good? Is the guy a good singer?’
‘As far as rhythm goes,’ Robbie said, ‘it’s quite odd. And his voice is a bit metallic, like it’s been distorted, you know? Sort of how robots talk in movies. Or how they distort the voices of testimonies on the news on TV, so that the person won’t be recognised later and get into trouble for what they said. Crime witnesses, families of the victim, people that journalists want to protect when they’re interviewed. But his rap is not bad.’
Pedro was getting more and more curious. He had to find out more.
‘What about the message?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t you say it also came with a weird message that introduced the song?’
‘The message was really confusing, all messed up, full of weird little symbols. Like little squares in the places of missing letters, that kind of thing. But I could understand some parts of it. He talked a bit about poetry and asked for help. But it wasn’t signed and you couldn’t tell who it was from.’
‘So how can it be a candidate for the contest?’
‘That’s the thing. It can’t. The rules say that all the contestants have to identify themselves, give their name, phone number, address, so they can be contacted later if they win. This guy can’t even be in the running. In any case, I don’t think he would win. He wouldn’t have much of a chance – there’s a lot of really good raps in the competition.’
‘But it is a good song?’
‘Yes and no. This guy uses strange words. He talks as if he’s really old or a foreigner, I don’t know. The words exist, but nobody would use them for rapping. It’s quite strange. I think that’s why I’ve got the song in my head. It’s just different.’
‘What is it about?’ asked Pedro. ‘Can I see it?’
‘Death,’ answered Robbie.
‘Guns? Violence? Gang wars, that sort of thing?’
‘No, nothing like that. It’s quite different, like I said. I have never heard a song like it before. That’s probably why I can’t get it off my mind.’
Robbie had a different air about him when he talked about this strange rap. He seemed lost in thought. He paused, scratched his head and then added, ‘But it’s also about life. I don’t know – about the stuff we can use to beat death, about what’s left of a person after he’s gone.’
‘Organ transplants?’ asked Pedro, surprised. ‘Cryogenic freezing of the body? That kind of thing?’
Robbie laughed. ‘No, man, nothing like that. It’s not about what’s left behind in the hospital or in the cemetery.’
‘His soul?’ suggested Pedro, trying to work it out but feeling a bit embarrassed.
Robbie said, ‘No. It’s what’s left in other people’s memories. Sort of like the mark we leave in the world. Everybody leaves some kind of mark, right? Or should leave. Or they’re sure they will leave, I don’t know. That’s why later I kept thinking about this stuff. Hold on, it’ll come to me.’
; Robbie stopped talking and was clearly trying to remember something. Sure enough, the song came back to him, and soon he was tapping the rhythm on his backpack and singing the words:
I call to you, my brother,
to tell you what’s on my mind.
I have come from very far,
I have lived through every kind
of event, through peace and war,
and everything else combined.
But it’s like there is a curse and it haunts all of mankind.
That’s when suddenly you find
that your time has come to die.
In a coffin you will lie
and there’s nothing left behind.
When he heard the tune, Pedro understood what his friend meant when he said it didn’t sound quite like rap. The language was a bit funny for that type of music, and the rhythm was a bit different. Meanwhile, Robbie repeated the chorus, improvising over it.
In a coffin you will lie,
now your time has come to die,
and there’s nothing left behind.
It was easy to pick it up. Soon enough, Pedro was singing along. It was fun.
Another boy on the bus, who was in the seat in front of them, turned towards them and joined in. Robbie repeated the same part again and then continued:
You’re thinking you’re all that,
you’re the man running the show.
You’ve got fame, lots of girls
and your pockets full of dough,
you are eating caviar
and you live in a chateau.
Everything is going great,
you’re just going with the flow.
And then, suddenly, whoa!
No more fun and no more games,
No one remembers your name,
And you’re buried down below.
The other kids joined in, singing the new chorus:
And then, suddenly, whoa!
No more fun and no more games,
No one remembers your name,
And you’re buried down below.
Then, as more people in the bus started listening to what they were singing, Robbie started the next verse:
Stop that talking, all those words,
all that spoken jamboree.
Singing loud or screaming hard,
words are frail, lost at sea.
If nobody reads it,
then one day it will cease to be.
If it isn’t written down,
what’s it worth, the poetry?
Then it went back to the first chorus:
That’s when suddenly you find
that your time has come to die.
In a coffin you will lie
and there’s nothing left behind.
Suddenly, Robbie’s voice was recognised. ‘Aren’t you Robert Freitas, from the radio?’
An old lady wanted to take the opportunity to bring up an issue that he should discuss on the show: the buses were not stopping at the stops for old people.
‘They don’t stop for kids in school uniforms either,’ complained a girl.
‘It’s the same thing. The drivers can’t be bothered stopping for people who don’t pay full fare,’ said a guy wearing overalls and tapping the beat on a toolbox. ‘You should start a campaign on the radio about this kind of behaviour. It’s disgraceful.’
‘Not to mention the lack of respect for people with disabilities,’ shouted another voice, coming from the back of the bus.
Everybody had a complaint to make. The music faded. Robbie had to respond: he asked them to call the radio and promised to give a voice to all the complaints.
Pedro was getting impatient. He couldn’t wait to talk more about the rap and the message that it had come attached to. He wanted to try and find out whether it could be coming from the Brainy Hacker, now posing as a musician.
But he didn’t get a chance to find out any more about it. The bus was almost at his stop. As he stood up, he tried once more to get Robbie to come home to lunch with him.
‘I can’t, I told you,’ Robbie replied.
‘I need to talk to you about something.’
‘So phone me tonight. Or come by the radio station after the show.’
‘All right, then. Bye!’ Pedro said, as the bus pulled in at his stop.
He was just going to have to wait. In the meantime, the song was stuck in his head. He walked through the door singing:
If nobody reads it,
then one day it will cease to be.
If it isn’t written down,
what’s it worth, the poetry?
Yes, it could very well be the Brainy Hacker. It was that same story about reading and writing. And a good excuse to call Sonia. Perhaps she’d want to go with him later to meet Robbie at the radio station, so they could talk it over and see if they could find something out? It was always nice to get a chance to see her at the weekend. And with news like that, it was quite natural.
11 – A Frozen Window
‘Hello, Pedro? What’s up?’
When the phone rang, Sonia was so enthralled by the conversation she was having with Faye that she did something surprising even to herself. Instead of saying ‘Hi!’ enthusiastically and interrupting everything else to talk to Pedro, as she would usually do, she replied almost automatically, saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m a bit busy. Can I call you later?’
Pedro couldn’t exactly put his finger on why, but he felt put out at being treated like that.
‘Try not to be too long,’ he said. ‘It’s urgent, Sonia.’ And, to pique her curiosity, he added, ‘I think it could be important. We might have a really great clue about the Brainy Hacker. But we need to act fast, as time may be running short.’
He was sure that, on hearing this, Sonia would drop everything to talk to him. He was not prepared for the answer he got: ‘In that case get over here straight away, because I’ve also got a great clue and I can’t stop now or I’ll miss it. Bye.’ Beep. Beep.
She’d hung up! It couldn’t be! But it was. It had happened.
It must have really been something serious, then. He was just going to have to go over to her place. Even though he was starving.
Pedro was permanently starving, actually, but especially when it was past noon, after a hard game of football, with his head spinning at a thousand miles an hour.
He just had to eat something before leaving home. On his way through the kitchen, he grabbed a banana and a slice of bread left over from breakfast and headed towards the door.
‘Bye, Mum,’ he said as he went. ‘I’m off to Sonia’s.’
‘Now, Pedro? We’re just about to have lunch!’
‘I can’t, it’s urgent.’
‘In that case, take a slice of meat in that bread and make a sandwich that you can eat on the way.’
The meat smelt irresistible, making Pedro’s mouth water, so he did as his mother suggested and started to make himself a sandwich.
‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ said his mother as she sliced the meat. ‘That classmate of yours, Faye? She called three times this morning. I told her you were at school, playing football. She said to tell you she was going to Sonia’s house.’
Faye? She wanted to talk to him?
‘Apparently Matt is going too,’ his mother went on. ‘He also called looking for you and I said you might go to Sonia’s house to meet the girls when you arrived home, since Faye was so insistent. But I think he already knew that.’
What was going on? Matt hadn’t come to the game because he had the flu. He hadn’t been to school the day before either. Perhaps Faye had called him too – and of course, flu or no flu, he could never resist a call from her. They were probably all together at Sonia’s house by now. Just like that, on a Saturday morning?
By the time Pedro arrived, the other two had got the gist of Faye’s story. She had told it in her usual roundabout way, leaving important information out and putting in things that were totally irrelevant. But by now Sonia and Matt had worked it
out, and they were able to sum it up nice and concisely for Pedro, which was just as well, because if he had to hear it at Faye’s pace, Pedro really couldn’t take it. She was a nice girl, but sometimes she drove him mad, the way she told a story – or rather, the way she didn’t tell it.
As soon as Pedro walked in, Matt announced right away: ‘The hacker has contacted Faye again, Pedro!’
‘How?’
‘Well, after what happened last time and all the stuff we talked about, I started thinking a lot about the model-woman thing,’ said Faye. ‘I decided to do some research online. It was amazing. Who would have thought, I found out that –’
‘Faye found out a lot of incredible stuff about what women’s lives were like in various places at various times – I’ll tell you the details later,’ Sonia cut in, kind but firm. ‘Anyway, on the website for this university library, there was a form asking her to agree not to use that information for commercial purposes. Then another window popped up asking her to agree not to abandon the written word, not to stop reading books, stuff like that. Right, Faye?’
‘I thought it was a bit weird and I didn’t quite get it, but I was in a hurry to move on, so I just ticked the box,’ Faye explained. ‘Then another window appeared asking me to take this commitment to my network of friends. I thought that was even weirder. But once again I agreed and moved ahead. I wanted to search for some stuff and I knew they had a paper about women in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. Listen, it’s amazing how this kind of situation still exists nowadays. After all, it wasn’t that long ago. They couldn’t study, or work, or go out in the streets – at all, for anything. Not even to buy food. If they didn’t have a man in the family, they could starve to death. And since there was a war –’
Sonia interrupted her again. ‘Then another message appeared, right, Faye? This time, in big letters.’
‘Actually, there were two messages on the same window, in two font sizes,’ Faye corrected her. ‘One of them asked, “IF YOU DON’T READ WHAT’S BEEN WRITTEN, WHAT IS HISTORY WORTH?” The other one, in a larger size, had an exclamation mark at the end: “DO NOT ABANDON YOUR ANCESTORS. READ WHAT THEY HAVE WRITTEN. NO MORE BETRAYAL!” And at the end of it all, almost like a challenge, it said, “SO? ARE YOU GOING TO HELP ME OUT OR NOT?”’
The History Mystery Page 8