PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘What have you noticed about the numbers?’

  I’m still looking at the table. An old burn looks like a little bird, I suddenly realise. Or possibly a rabbit.

  ‘The numbers are all three digits or fewer,’ I say, frowning. ‘Um …’

  ‘What’s the highest number there?’

  I open the pamphlet again. ‘Two hundred and something,’ I say, flicking through it. ‘None of the numbers start with a three.’

  ‘Excellent. If you look at something like the Beale Papers, the numbers get quite large. In the first one of the three, the numbers go up past 2000. Was a larger text used in that case? Or a less common range of words? Of course, we now know that the first of the Beale Papers was encoded using the American Declaration of Independence as a key. Anyway, it is indeed a very good point to start asking questions.’

  ‘So what was the book Stevenson used?’ I ask, sipping from my mug of tea.

  ‘Oh, Alice.’ My grandfather looks at his hands and sighs. ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Why not? I won’t tell anyone.’

  He sighs again. ‘I can never tell anyone, I am afraid. I can tell you that it doesn’t exist any more, and that I had to virtually put it together myself, backwards …’

  ‘But you told Dad!’

  ‘No I didn’t. He thought he’d worked it out for himself.’

  ‘Had he?’

  ‘No. But he wouldn’t be told he was wrong. And I couldn’t tell him why he was wrong without revealing the right solution.’

  So my father isn’t coming back with treasure. Great.

  ‘Did he get the answer from my necklace?’ I ask, touching it under the collar of my T-shirt.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But it is the answer, isn’t it?’

  ‘No.’ He pauses, relighting his pipe. ‘It’s a key to the answer.’

  My grandfather infuriates me when he speaks like this. I want answers, not riddles.

  ‘Why won’t you tell anyone? Are you going to get the treasure in secret?’

  ‘No. I am not going to get the treasure in secret. I’m not going to get the treasure at all.’

  ‘You’re not going to get the treasure! Why not?’

  ‘There is more to life than money and possessions, Alice.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘They say pirate treasure is always cursed, you know. I don’t necessarily believe in supernatural curses, but people who go treasure-hunting rarely find happiness. Your friends and relations become quite interested in you when they realise you are going to look for treasure. You can be sure they will want more than just love and friendship when you return. If you do return with treasure, you’ll find you suddenly have a lot more friends and maybe even relatives, too; people you didn’t even think you knew. So many people will want what you have got. Of course, that’s if you even make it back. So you go to some remote place and dig up a big chest full of antique gold, jewels and money. How do you transport it? Where do you take it? What do you do with it? There are plenty of people in the world who, if they knew what you were doing, would quite easily relieve you of something like that, and probably kill you too. Or maybe you would have to use some sort of violence to stop them. And all for what? To come home and have a private swimming-pool and some fur coats? We have all we need here – why would we risk our lives for more?’

  He has got a point. Treasure-hunting sounds quite terrifying.

  ‘Couldn’t you send someone else to get it?’ I ask.

  ‘Like who? And what would you pay them? If they dig it up, why wouldn’t they just keep it? There’d be no incentive for them to bring it back and give it to you, would there?’

  ‘Gosh. I suppose not.’

  I hear the pad, pad, pad noise of my grandmother coming down the stairs.

  ‘Have you told her about the bird sanctuary yet?’ she says to my grandfather when she enters the room.

  ‘What bird sanctuary?’ I ask.

  ‘Ah,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, there is another reason why I won’t reveal the whereabouts of the treasure.’

  ‘A bird sanctuary?’

  ‘Yes. The treasure – if it exists – is situated in an area that is now part of a bird sanctuary. This is where I am afraid I seriously fell out with your father. He believed that digging up the natural, protected habitat of some almost-extinct birds was a small price to pay for the treasure we would find. I disagreed. When I told him this was my reason for not going to get the treasure – or one of them, at least – he simply treated it as a clue, listing all the bird sanctuaries in relevant parts of the Pacific and Atlantic, trying to guess which one it was. I am afraid I got very angry with him.’

  ‘He never had money, Peter,’ my grandmother says. ‘You can understand his attitude.’

  ‘He had enough. He was able to work. He didn’t want the treasure so he could survive. He wanted it so he could be rich. I’m sorry Alice. In many ways your father is a good man, but in this he was mistaken. People have to respect the natural environment. Otherwise, what will you have left? A society made of greedy, unhappy people, and a lot of extinct animals.’

  ‘So no one knows that you’ve solved the puzzle?’ I say, filing the information about my father away for more careful perusal later.

  ‘No,’ my grandfather says.

  ‘He did it for the intellectual challenge in the end,’ my grandmother explains. ‘He wanted to be known as the person who solved the most difficult hidden-treasure question in recent history. But now there’s no way he can be known for it – because once people know he has a treasure map he doesn’t intend to use, he – we – will be inundated with people who do want to use it.’

  ‘Like those men at the bus stop?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And they knew because my father told them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  My grandparents start bustling around the kitchen, making lunch, while I sit there at the table feeling tired and quite small. I am angry with my father; the anger feels bigger than me. He was the reason for those men who approached me yesterday. How could he have been so stupid? And how could he go off on some stupid, dangerous, ill-fated treasure-hunt? How could he go without me? How could he do that? My thoughts blur into confusion over a lunch I can only pick at. I am not sure I understand about the bird sanctuary. I think I do but, given the choice, I would have the treasure. I’m sure the birds wouldn’t mind really. But then I love the fact that my grandfather is so solid and predictable. He would never run away and leave me on a whim. He wouldn’t think it was right. And my grandmother. Does she know where the treasure is? She must do. I wish I wish I wish I knew. After lunch I go for a lie-down and I take the pamphlet to read in private, in bed. I will find out where Francis Stevenson buried his treasure, just to prove to my grandfather that I can. My necklace is a key. That’s what my grandfather said. My necklace is a key and I have the code right here. I will do it. With these thoughts I fall asleep, the open pamphlet on the floor by my bed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The white envelope is still on my desk where I left it. I have brought a bottle of beer with me from the East Wing kitchen and I open this and take a few sips before considering the envelope. It isn’t frightening me so much any more, the fact that someone is contacting me in code. Nothing bad seems to have happened as a result of it, not yet, anyway.

  It only takes five minutes or so to decipher this one; it is written using the same key as the others. Need help to send longer message, it says. Very important. What? Need help to send longer message? Well, OK. Sure, I can tell you how to do that, but who are you? You haven’t told me how to get in touch with you! I realise that I am speaking these thoughts aloud and stop, quickly drinking some beer instead. Really, though. This is stupid. I burn the note and consider my reply. As I have no idea who I am dealing with, I can’t think how I would respond to this. Is my correspondent observant or not? Is he or she capable of following clues? I real
ly don’t know what to do. Could I just do nothing? Unlikely. I do want to know who this is and what they have to say. I really, really hope this isn’t just some teaser for a new product.

  When I first joined the company, e-mail viruses and ‘viral’ style e-mails were a new-ish thing, at least for people who had only just started using computers all the time. At the launch of one product, a young guy from the marketing department decided to create and send out a viral e-mail telling people about this new product, which had been hyped in-house as that year’s most likely Christmas must-have toy. The e-mail went around the world in about fifteen hours, and then started going around again. Before too long, people were sick of getting this e-mail, and then started asking questions about where it came from. When people realised that this was a corporate marketing device, they went mad. The toy had to be withdrawn, and the marketing guy was sacked. The team who had created the concept for the toy were very pissed off. All that work for nothing. Which just goes to show. You can give people information a couple of times, but do it too often and they just won’t want the information, or anything relating to it, ever again.

  It’s almost eleven o’ clock. I switch on my radio, and wait while the soft voice of the woman presenter bleeds into some experimental organ music. As she finishes speaking, I realise that this is a special programme about a woman composer who eventually killed herself. Her music is spare, strange and magical. I lie back on the bed and suddenly there is nothing in the world except for an F sharp and me, then an A, majestic but alone. I am suddenly not there; somehow observing from a point of invisibility, perhaps as a cloud or a wisp of nothingness. I can see a forest with a cottage, all made up of one note, the A, and then an unexpected friend coming to visit, a B flat, carrying a gift – something made of hay, or grass. Am I asleep? I must be because there’s no answer when I ask myself this question, nothing at all.

  When I wake up, it is about six o’clock in the morning and the radio is still on. My instinct is to switch it off, take off my clothes and snuggle back into bed for an hour or so of ‘proper’ sleep before I need to get up for breakfast. However, once I have gone to the loo, looked blankly at my odd reflection in the mirror, fiddled with the radio and started to undress, I realise I am actually no longer tired, and go to the kitchen to make tea instead.

  From the kitchen window I can see that dawn is just nibbling at the sky as if it’s a biscuit it doesn’t really want. There is still dew on the grass outside, and I remember someone telling me that dew is a magical substance, if you gather it in moonlight. Back in my room, with my tea, I think again about how to respond to the message. It’s frustrating; I know what to tell but not how to tell it. Sending a long message is, of course, easy. You use a book as the key, and then make the code out of numbers relating to the placing of words in the text. But how do I tell this person that? Even if I just write a message with that as the content, using the PopCo code (which would take ages), I wouldn’t know where to deliver it.

  There are other ways of sending a long message, of course. One of my favourites, even though it is really for kids, is one I described in my KidTec kit. You have to glue one large envelope inside another one, and then you conceal your message in the ‘hidden’ envelope. When the receiver gets the package, they know to cut it open to find the hidden message inside. Could that work here? Fuck it. Not knowing what else to do, I write KidTec page 14 on a Post-it note, and stick this to the outside of my door. (I know it’s page 14, because there were problems laying out the envelope image when the book was at flat-plan stage and I have virtually a whole folder of e-mails on my work computer with the subject header: Page 14 Problems).

  Back inside the room, I pace for a bit before opening the door again and removing the Post-it note. It’s too obvious. Anyone could walk past, read it, check what’s on page 14 of the KidTec book and know I am up to something involving double envelopes. They wouldn’t even have to be the enemy to be intrigued by that. Not, of course, that I even know who the enemy is. I screw up the Post-it note and throw it away. Then I take it out of the bin and burn it. The smoke alarm in the centre of the ceiling flashes a single red pulse. Perhaps I should stop setting fire to things in here?

  At breakfast, Kieran and another guy are giving everyone packs of cards. Each pack is made out of thick, pulpy, recycled-looking orange paper and fastened with string and the sort of button you get on duffel coats. Mine contains five cards. The cards themselves look like an odd combination of Tarot and kids’ trading cards. The symbols on them are both familiar and unfamiliar to me. I have one with a man’s head on it, this head comprised entirely of leaves and vegetation. The legend on the card says ‘Green Man’. Around the edge of the card are numbers corresponding to the north, south, east and west edges, which are themselves implied by a semi-transparent compass graphic behind the Green Man’s head. On this one, north has a value of 31, east has a value of 15, south has a value of 1, and west has a value of 25. I have four other cards. One is a picture of a crossbow, which has values of 4 on all its edges. Another is a winged dragon, with the values 5, 6, 12, and 4 for N, S, E and W. The other two are almost identical, and carry images of wood sprites. One seems stronger than the other, having a value of 10 on its west edge, and 3 on all the others. The second one has a west value of 7, and 3 on the others.

  ‘Enjoy!’ calls Kieran, as everyone starts examining and comparing their cards. I am on a table with Ben, Chloë, Dan, Esther, Grace and Richard. Richard, Dan and I are eating poached eggs with muffins. The others are all eating cereal or toast.

  ‘Don’t show anyone your cards,’ Ben says to me.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You have an advantage in the game if other people don’t know what you’ve got. And you should definitely hide that.’

  ‘What?’ I look down at the cards on the table. The Green Man is my favourite, so I have put him on the top of my pile.

  ‘That,’ Ben says, again, gesturing at the Green Man. ‘It’s a powerful card. You don’t want people to know you have it.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’ I shuffle the Green Man into the small pile of cards. ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘Oh, Kieran’s been going on about it for days. It’s his big idea.’

  ‘What, for teenage girls?’

  ‘God no, he couldn’t give a shit about that. No, this is his online card trading game. He thought he could try it out with a bunch of people offline, to see if there were any bugs or anything.’

  ‘I see. So … he’s not into the teenage girl thing at all?’

  Ben pours some more cereal into his bowl and adds milk from a blue jug on the table.

  ‘Don’t think so,’ he says.

  ‘So what’s he doing here? I mean, why doesn’t he just go back to work?’

  ‘He’s having too much fun here. Pagan symbols, witchcraft legends – you get more of that stuff on Dartmoor than you do in Reading. In fact, we’ve been invited to go along on this weird nature ramble with that lot on Saturday, if you’re up for it.’

  We’ve been invited. God, that sounds so coupley.

  ‘We?’ I say.

  ‘Well, me,’ Ben says. ‘But I asked if you could come.’

  ‘And how is it going to be “weird” exactly?’

  ‘Not sure. At best, it may involve tree-hugging. At worst, we might be required to help summon something.’

  ‘Yeah, count me in, then,’ I say, laughing. ‘It sounds unmissable.’

  ‘What’s unmissable?’ says Dan.

  ‘Kieran’s crazy nature ramble,’ Ben says. ‘You should come, too.’

  ‘There might be more hill forts,’ I say.

  ‘Cool.’

  While we are talking, the question of how to respond to my odd correspondent keeps turning in my head like cement revolving on the back of a lorry. And then, suddenly …

  ‘Where are you going?’ asks Dan, as I jump up from the table.

  ‘Back in a tick,’ I say.

  ‘You’ll be late,’ he warns
.

  ‘No, no. I really will only be a minute,’ I say. I don’t want to be late for the seminar but this is important – or at least, it feels important, which is the main thing. As I am going, I see Ben give me a raised-eyebrow look. I shake my head almost imperceptibly and try to send him the telepathic message See you later.

  It is dusty in my room; the early sun picking out millions of dark particles dancing in the air or lying lazily on the desk. Which book? Which book? I select the teen novel about the girl and her horse in the end, not wanting to waste any more time. I scan the first page, looking for the word ‘use’. It’s not there. I scan page two. Yes. It’s there, in the second paragraph. A neighbour is telling the lead character, ‘Take care when you use the stony path after dark, strange things lurk there.’ The page is 2, and the word number is 197. I write 2, 197 on a sheet of writing paper, then the numbers 2, 243, which lead to the word ‘this’. There. Use this. As long as the right person cracks the code (which isn’t hard), it will tell them all they want to know. If anyone else picks up the book and cracks the code, they won’t know what ‘use this’ means. Satisfied that this is the best way of responding, I tuck the sheet into the book and leave my room, already five minutes late for the seminar. The only thing now is … Where to deposit the book? I have it tucked under my arm as I walk briskly down the steps towards the main part of the building, and I am thinking so hard about what to do with it that I don’t notice Hiro walking in the other direction and almost bump into him.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, smiling.

  He looks embarrassed. ‘Do you have something for me?’ he says.

  ‘Huh?’

  He grimaces. ‘This is well embarrassing. All I’m supposed to say is, “Do you have something for me?” I don’t know. It might be like a message, or a secret, or something. I really don’t know any more than that.’

  ‘Who asked you to …’

  ‘Can’t say. I’m just the messenger. Really.’

  ‘Oh. Well, perhaps they mean this?’ I hand over the book and he accepts it without even glancing at it.