The Tomorrow Code

by Brian Falkner

  She still hadn’t opened it, saving it till last probably, because it was the biggest. Or maybe, he hoped, because it was from him.

  He opened Rebecca’s present slowly. It was delicately, femininely wrapped in layers of colored tissue, bound by ribbons. That wasn’t like her at all. Maybe they had wrapped it in the shop for her, he thought. Inside the wrapping was a white cardboard box. He pulled the top off carefully and stared down at what was inside.

  It was a brand-new harmonica. Engraved on the silver top of the instrument were the words FRIENDS FOREVER.

  He gave Rebecca a hug, with a warm feeling that went from his toes up to the hair of his scalp.

  His parents’ presents for him and his brother were the same, he realized as he opened his. Fatboy had opened his a few moments earlier. It was a genuine hand-carved patu pounamu, a greenstone club, almost a foot long with a leather cord through one end, carved with traditional symbols of their Tuhoe tribe.

  “Goes with the moko, don’t you think?” Fatboy said proudly.

  Tane put his carefully to one side, conscious of the close scrutiny of his parents. It was a kind of cool present, but he had been hoping for a new Xbox console. He forced a smile.

  “Thanks, Mum, Dad, it’s great!”

  Rebecca came over and sat next to him as she unwrapped the chess set. Tane crossed his fingers behind his back.

  It was a hit.

  Rebecca actually squealed with delight as the paper fell away. She slid the wooden case out of its plastic covering and pulled each piece individually out of its velvet casing, noticing the fine detail of the replications.

  She even held up the king, Michelangelo’s David, to show the rest of the room. “Look at the detail!” she exclaimed. “You can see every muscle on his tummy. And what a tiny willy.”

  They all roared with laughter.

  “Thanks, Tane,” Rebecca said, and hugged him warmly.

  Tane never got to see what Rebecca had bought Fatboy, which was the only jarring note on the day. Fatboy unwrapped it, looked inside without revealing the contents, smiled at Rebecca, and wrapped it back up. He gave Rebecca a hug after that, but Tane looked the other way.

  It was a lovely day, and the worries that faced them receded for a few hours at least. They ate, they drank more champagne than they were allowed by sneaking into the kitchen and topping off their glasses just a little at a time, and they listened to “Snoopy’s Christmas” over and over on the stereo until his dad got sick of it and put on “The Little Drummer Boy” instead. They just spent time enjoying their presents and each other’s company. Fatboy got his guitar out after lunch (leftovers from the breakfast) and Tane joined him on his new harmonica. The big windows were open to the forest, and the sounds and smells of the native bush drifted gently inside. The sun was fiery, but sheltered by the trees of the forest, the house was cool and peaceful.

  It was a lovely day.

  In the midafternoon, they went back to the West Harbor house to do some more work on the Chronophone. Rebecca’s mother was still out at her cousin’s, so they had the house totally to themselves. They had already purchased most of the parts for the machine, and Fatboy had arranged for his mate Goony to come over and start building it the moment the rest of the plans came through.

  Rebecca went to sit on a large sofa in the corner of the living room and wrapped her arms around her legs, rocking back and forth slowly. Tane watched her silently. They had managed to put it all out of their minds for a few hours on Christmas morning, but now the reality was breathing down their necks.

  At six o’clock, Tane turned the television on to watch the news. The queen was on, broadcasting her Christmas message, and he flicked over to TV3.

  There was only one story. The news had apparently been running all day. Breathless reporters behind police roadblocks and helicopter shots from a distance told a story of the most catastrophic disaster in the history of New Zealand. Fifty thousand people, cut off, missing or worse. A strange fog. The evacuation of the small town of Maungaturoto, south of Whangarei, the next in the path of the fog as it drifted down toward Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city.

  Auckland residents were urged to remain calm and to not try leaving the city. Civil defense managers assured reporters that special teams of experts had already been brought in from overseas to deal with the problem.

  Rebecca had been drinking some water, but her glass shattered suddenly on the floor. Her face was white.

  “Rebecca?”

  She turned and ran outside onto the patio. Tane ran after her. He sensed Fatboy following.

  “Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no.”

  Rebecca gripped the edge of the patio table with both hands as if she would fall down without it. She was breathing strangely, Tane noticed, hyperventilating. She kept lurching forward.

  “Oh my God, no,” Rebecca said.

  “What is it, Rebecca? Do you think we were exposed to a virus when we were on the island?” Fatboy asked urgently.

  “No. Worse than that. Much worse than that.”

  Worse than that! The world seemed to be spinning around Tane’s head. “What’s wrong, Rebecca?”

  She shut her eyes for a second and breathed out a long, slow breath. “I’ve just put it all together. The island. The fog. The cryptic messages. I know why we had to buy the submarine.”

  “To visit the island. We already knew that, didn’t we?” Tane asked with a growing apprehension.

  She shook her head. “What if there were two reasons? A plan B in case our trip to the island failed.”

  “Which it did,” Fatboy noted.

  “What if we were right? What if this…virus…or whatever it is, is so dreadful, so devastating, that plan B is to give ourselves a refuge, a kind of a fallout shelter under the sea.”

  “A sanctuary,” Fatboy said softly.

  Rebecca asked, “What if we’re supposed to hide underwater in our little yellow submarine to keep ourselves safe from a plague that is about to wipe out the rest of New Zealand?”

  “Or the rest of the world,” Tane said.

  It was ten past six in the evening. On Christmas Day.

  SANCTUARY

  On Boxing Day, while other kids all over the country went swimming or cycling on new Christmas bikes or were just playing with their Game Boys and other presents, Tane, Rebecca, and Fatboy planned for the apocalypse.

  “How long do you think we will be underwater?” Tane asked.

  “However long it takes,” was Rebecca’s answer. “Months, maybe years.”

  The Chronophone plans had finally finished with a last long list of numbers, followed by the single word END. They had printed out the schematic and pored over it.

  “Why even bother?” Fatboy had asked at one point. “It’s too late. It’s no use to us now.”

  Rebecca had looked at him incredulously. “Are you insane? If we don’t build the Chronophone, then we can’t send the messages back through time. If we don’t do that, then we won’t know anything and we’ll just be out there like everyone else, playing with our Christmas presents and lying on the beach, and not even knowing that we are about to be wiped off the face of the planet.”

  Fatboy had looked at Tane in alarm, but Tane had said, “She’s right. No Chronophone, no Lotto, no nothing. We’d better get it built.”

  That had been three days ago. That day, Tane had opened the front door to possibly the thinnest person he had ever seen in his life. Goony seemed to be made of just cling-film wrapped around a skeleton. He introduced himself shyly with a big droopy grin and lugged inside a huge plastic toolbox that looked heavier than he was. He was supposed to be a genius at electronics and, according to Fatboy, had once built a guitar amplifier out of an old kitchen mixer just to prove he could do it.

  The Chronophone plans had given him no trouble at all.

  “It’s a transmitter,” he had said after a cursory look at the diagram. “What’s it for?”

  “It’s a time transmitter,” Fatboy
had answered with a smile. “We’re going to send the winning Lotto numbers back to ourselves in the past and win the Lotto.”

  “Yeah, right!” Goony had just given one of those big droopy grins and got on with his work.

  It had been three days of intensive work. Rebecca helped analyze the plans, and Fatboy helped solder components into place. Tane just stayed out of the way and made lots of tea and coffee.

  Now, nearly at the last day of the year, the Chronophone was a waterproof aluminum box the size of a briefcase sitting in the garage. It was more than just a transmitter, according to Rebecca. Built into it was a radio receiver, which received the signals they would transmit from the submarine and retransmitted them through the gamma-rays bursts.

  “Don’t we take it with us in the Möbius?” Tane asked.

  “No. It needs a much more powerful aerial than the small one on the buoy,” Rebecca explained.

  The signal they transmitted, she told them, was not the one that would be received back in the past. It was a disruptor signal, which would disrupt the gamma-ray burst that was already on its way to Earth from the depths of the galaxy and imprint their message on the radiation of the burst. That burst of radiation would somehow seep through the quantum foam, through the fabric of time itself, into the past.

  The signal from the Chronophone wouldn’t even reach the gamma-ray burst for another two years. It was a hard concept to grasp. They sent a signal to the future, which ended up in the past.

  By far, the hardest part of building the Chronophone was the location of the transmitter, when they had finally deciphered the schematics and worked out where that was. On the plan it showed just a tall, thin spike, with what looked like a satellite dish at the top, a serial number, and some coordinates.

  As usual, it was Tane who had put two and two together.

  “It’s the Skytower. The top of that thing is stuffed with satellite dishes of all shapes and sizes. I think we’re supposed to connect the Chronophone to one of those dishes, one with this serial number, and aim it at these coordinates.”

  “I hope the owner of the dish doesn’t mind,” Fatboy had said.

  “Tough,” had been Rebecca’s answer. “We have no choice.”

  Tane steered the Möbius through a cloud of sludge, whirled up by a passing freighter from the bottom of the harbor. There had been no danger of collision, but the murky water was unsettling all the same.

  Rebecca was intently watching a readout on one of the control panels. “We’re getting close,” she said.

  The next batch of messages had proved quite informative. It was a series of numbers, each with an exactly specified time. It was Rebecca who figured it out.

  “This is the final piece of the puzzle,” she said. “I was expecting this.”

  “What is it?” Fatboy asked.

  “It’s the timings. Each message has to be sent at an exact time, to hit the gamma-ray burst at the right moment and end up in the past at the right moment.”

  The tail end of the last message had been interesting, too.

  GPS,-36,50.999,174,49.876

  GPS map coordinates, Rebecca had recognized at once, and a detailed map of Auckland had shown the spot defined by those coordinates to be on the edge of Rangitoto, a large island volcano, long extinct, that dominated the view from the shoreline of most of Auckland.

  They were on their way to that spot now, while Fatboy and Goony continued working on the Chronophone.

  It was daylight, but time was considered to be more important than discretion. The unspoken question was always, Had they wasted too much time before they had made their move on Motukiekie? If they had been earlier, could they have stopped the Chimera Project in time?

  “What’s in front of us?” Rebecca asked. “We are almost right on the coordinates.”

  The GPS readout on the control panel flashed red numbers in the dim light of the cockpit.

  “Nothing yet,” Tane said. “The seabed is starting to slope up. We must be just about at Rangitoto by now. There’s…oh crap!”

  A cliff face reared up suddenly in front of the Möbius. Tane flicked the craft into reverse for a moment, slowing the craft quickly, and they coasted up to the wall of rock.

  “Just nudge a bit to your right,” Rebecca murmured, and Tane complied, drifting a little in that direction.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Try going down,” Rebecca suggested.

  “We’re just about on the seafloor,” Tane said.

  “Then try going up.”

  A few yards higher up the cliff face, it became immediately apparent what the GPS coordinates were for. The wide mouth of a cave, almost oval, except on the left where a section had broken away from the top and made a mound on the bottom rim of the cave. It was well big enough for the Möbius.

  “Want to take a look inside?” Tane asked, not waiting for an answer.

  He touched a few buttons on the control panel, and the interior of the cave lit up like a cathedral in the glow of the underwater spotlights of the Möbius. The cave was huge.

  “Probably a volcanic vent,” Rebecca said, her voice full of wonder. “It could go on, or down, for miles.”

  Tane remembered stories of underground water channels that ran between Rangitoto Island and Lake Pupuke, just inland from Takapuna beach, and wondered if this was anything to do with that.

  The cave was filled with marine life. A haze of tiny silver fish filtered past the glass dome of the driver’s bubble.

  “This is it,” he said, maneuvering the craft around inside the underwater cavity in the side of the mountain. “This is our hideout. This is where we tuck ourselves away from whatever hell is coming for the rest of the human race, and wait until it is safe to emerge.”

  Rebecca nodded, examining the roof of the cave through the dome. “If we set her down close to the entrance, we’ll be able to run the buoy up outside the cave to the surface. We can suck down as much air as we want and stay here indefinitely, if need be.”

  “I hope it’s not that long,” Tane said quietly. Indefinitely sounded like too long a time to be living in a tiny tin tube on the floor of an underwater cave. “We can bring in supplies, food, diesel, whatever, in airtight drums and stack it up on the cave floor.”

  “I think we’re going to get mightily sick of tinned ham and peaches,” Rebecca said, trying to make light of it, but the darkening circles under her eyes wiped away any trace of humor.

  “God, I hope we’re wrong about all this,” Tane said. But he had a terrible feeling that they were right.

  AN UNNATURAL DISASTER

  The TV was on for the news. The news was not good. In fact, the more they heard, the more frightening it all became.

  Tane held the remote and unconsciously kept turning the volume up, until it became painful, then would turn it back down to a reasonable level, only to start all over again.

  They were watching a press conference. A room full of eager reporters. A thick bush of microphones sprouting from a wooden podium labeled with HYATT OREWA.

  A tall, gaunt American entered and stepped up to the podium, closely followed by a woman, scarcely half his size.

  “That’s him!” Rebecca caught her breath.

  “Who?” Fatboy asked.

  “The leader of the soldiers on the island.”

  A graphic came up at the lower left corner of the screen identifying the speaker as Dr. Anthony Crowe of USABRF.

  Just the sight of him was enough to make Tane’s heart race.

  The woman stood next to Crowe. She would need a stool to reach the microphones, Tane thought, then wondered why he was thinking about such stupid details when the fate of the world was at stake. Her name was Dr. Lucy Southwell, according to the subtitles.

  A large map of the upper north island was pinned to a board behind them.

  Crowe wore a military uniform, but wore it casually, as if the uniform was not a symbol of pride for him, the way it was for many Americans. His face was as long an
d craggy as a cliff face and showed no expression; in fact, his face might as well be made of stone for all the emotion that showed on it.

  Southwell pointed to the map. “The Horouta is a delivery boat. Operates out of Russell, here. She makes a regular weekly supply drop at Motukiekie. Just a small boat, with a skipper and one crewman. Four days ago, she was discovered, beached in Kaingahoa Bay, about forty miles east of Motukiekie. The throttle was wide open, and the engine was still running. There was no sign of the crew.”

  “Odd,” murmured Fatboy.

  Southwell continued, “A coast guard vessel was sent to investigate. Six-man crew. It didn’t return.”

  “Odder still,” Tane said

  Southwell drew a circle on the map. “An airforce Orion was dispatched to search for the missing coast guard cutter. It covered roughly this area here, which was as far as the cutter could have traveled in the time. It overflew Motukiekie but was unable to see anything due to a dense fog. By this time, the local police were involved and wisely decided that it was time to call in the experts.

  “I work for the Biological Hazard Containment Unit, a part of our Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. A team of three colleagues of mine—two men, one woman—was sent in, in full biohazard suits and in constant radio contact with a command unit based in Russell. Naturally, at this stage, our fear was of some…” She clearly didn’t want to say it. “…biological agent that had been released on the island. They…um…”

  “They disappeared,” Crowe intervened. “Their biosuits were found on the island when we went there to investigate.”

  “What about Whangarei?” a female reporter was asking. “Fifty thousand people. They can’t just have disappeared.”

  “Actually, ma’am, that’s exactly what seems to have happened,” was Crowe’s reply.

  Strange how Americans called women “ma’am.” It was such a British expression.