Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow (24 page)

Chiefly because he is at heart a number nut, Strand spends a few minutes calculating that if every home computer, smartphone, tablet and e-reader on Earth
held a terabyte of information, to contain fifty-six powers of ten bytes of data, those devices would cover the entire Earth’s surface two feet deep.

Reading further, Strand sees. The molecular DNA encoding is a computer. If not a computer, it is a data storage device. Storage for i
nformation on a grand scale.
But why is it needed?

That much storage could be Jerry’s Akasha, and if so could
contain every answer to every question, describe every stage in human, animal and plant evolution, record the path of every comet asteroid planet and rock in the solar system since creation, write down the individual life story of every fish, mammal, person, flower, and microbe, record every prayer and every curse ever uttered, and most valuable of all, hold the revealed secret of humankind's destiny and true purpose. Far denser than this hopscotch of Whalesong messages, Strand envisions a continuous tapestry of facts and events, entire histories. But it stops him, the way Carl had described it.
Past and future?

In the article there is an odd segue the mathematician finds jarring. It
warns that anyone accessing the Akasha must be morally and spiritually prepared to accept the knowledge, the supposed record of the entire universe, from one end of time to the other. Such a record would indeed require deep storage.
But why a spiritual warning in a technical article?

Strand ponders. The clock on Jerry’s laptop reminds him that the linguist will return soon, expect access to his computer. Strand reels with gut-sick dread.
He can’t share this.
What if this device could be built, to access the information in sequences of living DNA? What information would be found there? Past and future histories? Unreal.

Glancing back over the article, Strand finds it, the most damning evidence of all, something he’d rushed past on first reading. In only the third line of the article, beneath the title, beneath the author’s name, there is a date. It is a date in a year
that has not yet come to pass. As he gapes at the screen, his decision clicks into place. Strand knows, as clearly as he knows his wife’s calm face, what this is about, what it could mean, and how very dangerous.

Strand does the unthinkable.
Quickly, he copies the decoded file to a flash drive and deletes it from Jerry’s laptop. Accesses the Whalesong master library, opens the number sequence for whale 5023, scrolls deep into the string, changes a single digit. He saves the file, pushes it back into Jerry’s stack, and restarts the unpacking algorithm. The result will be corrupted nonsense.

Problem temporarily solved, Strand needs a more substantial diversion. The tiny flash drive hot in
guilty fingers, he clears his throat.

“Hey guys, message from General Solberg. We have to prioritize the Annetka murder and correlate it with the mass hallucination events. There is a new multiple homicide, in California.
There are a dozen others reported in the States and in Europe, South America. The methods are similar to the Annetka murder. I want Gary, Jerry and Carl to put a model together.”

“What?” Pulled from deep concentration on
a decoded passage he is reading, Carl sounds annoyed. “Chris this is just getting good.”

“True that.” Strand agrees. “We have orders. The Whalesong has been reduced to a known problem. Sami and I will stay with it. I want the three of you to devise a model for correlating everything known about Annetka with all available facts about the Malibu
murders and the others. You’ll be able to find them.”

“Malibu, as in the movie-star colony?”

“The very one.”

Carl laughs, trying to overcome his frustration. “I hear a lot of wannabees are living there now. It’s not
vintage Hollywood anymore.”

“Well soon’s you dig out some forecasts, send me your report and I’ll get you back on the Whalesong sequences. Solberg wants to know if there is anyone that needs protection from Annetka-style attacks, military in particular. I’m un-mapping your drives from the Whalesong partition. We started
building datasets on Annetka threads the hour it happened. You’ll have plenty to work with.”

Carl Vogt stands and stretches. “Well, I have been sitting here for ten hours.
I need Internet access. I’m going to work from home.”

“Get a shower,” Sami advises with a grin.

“Be happy to,” the mathematician says dryly.

“I’m down with that,” Gary Charlebois says, getting out of his chair. “Maybe we can catch Jerry at the restaurant, get a beer to wash my sandwich down.”

Strand turns to Sami. “I have a random notion. What if these whale messages are not necessarily separate? I mean, we are getting meaningful decodes on them, but what if we removed the blank between two messages, and attempted to decode that?”

“Yikes,” Carl says, shrugging into his jacket. “You are talking about way more data than we thought at first.
There are one hundred and seven adjacent pairs, which gives us that many more possible messages. Doubles the amount of data.”

“Sure but why stop there?” This from Gary. “How about permutations? Ordered and unordered? Without working it out, I’d say we’re into the billions of unique messages. Chris, you really do need our help with this.”

“I do,” Strand agrees. “I need you to cut through the Malibu-Annetka stuff first and get something that Solberg will love us for. And Tommy Kites for that matter. Sami and I will test some concatenated Whalesong, see if we get anything sensible. If we find decodable strings, we’ll call you in. Meanwhile take a break. But give me some answers by morning. Solberg is all over me.”

Carl turns in the doorway, laughs. “Good one, Chris, take a break and answers by morning. What part of that does not compute?”

In the wake of their departure, Strand finds Sami staring at him.

“What?” His innocent look at full wattage.

“My bullshit detector is redlined, boss. Kindly tell me WTF is going on?”

Strand laughs. Of course. Sami’s intuition has read him like a tweetglypt. He stands, takes a quick lap around the room, draws a glass of water, leans against the kitchen counter.

“I wanted you on this with me, just us. The ante has gone up. The chain of secrecy has to be tighter. I can trust you with this. Also you’re the only right one.”

Sami sits back in her chair, a half-smile playing in her eyes. “Flattery is bullshit too, boss. Spill.”

Strand tells her about the article decoded on Jerry’s machine, Whalesong 5023, about DNA molecules storing massive amounts of information.

Sami nods. “Yes, it’s a known field in synthetic biology. Results are developing quickly. What’s the buzz that makes it so secret?”

“First, there is a non-mechanical form of access.”

“Non-mechanical?”

“Living organisms can receive the data directly.”

“Living organisms like…”

“Whales, for example? How about humans? Any vertebrate with a neocortex.”

“How?”

“By thinking about it.”

“Ah. Sure you didn’t miss your nap?”

“Cut it out,” Strand says.

“But I’ll grant there is established science. They are working on
biological computers interacting with living cells in the body. DNA-based computers combatting disease at the level of cell division. Cancer. Chemotherapy targets all rapidly-dividing cells, so it’s not very specific. Hair cells divide rapidly too, so chemo kills them. A DNA computer could identify and kill only cancerous cells.”

“Good. But Sami there’s something else. I found the description in a research paper, a professional report of technical findings.”

“So?”

“The article is dated. You’ll see for yourself.” Strand passes Sami the flash drive containing
decoded Whalesong 5023. “This is beyond hot. Read and shred. It uses a type of mathematics I have never seen. It will be published on March 5,” he takes a deep breath, “in the year 2158.”

Not twenty-four hours after his first newsglypt about the Annetka murder, blogger Carrion Gray hits the web with his latest, the insider information he’s found on the Malibu murders. He begins, however, on a personal note.

Malibu Angels Given Bloody Sendoff

by Carrion Gray, NYC Fashion Critic

Let me begin with news from my
‘hood. Since publishing the article on Annetka’s murder, this reporter, your faithful servant, has faced many personal attacks and a whole shitload of stress. (Apologies to all my readers under the age of nine who don’t know words like
stress
.) My house was torched – random or targeted, the police can’t be sure – but I assure you that my current location will remain undisclosed for the foreseeable future.

In my trendy-kewl NYC neighborhood there have been riots. A good many of the homes and apartments are now boarded up. The Pole Shifters have all left town in their loaded SUVs headed for the hills, literally, to scurry inside their 20-ton blast-proof steel doors and hole up safely until things sort themselves out. Good luck with that.

Could it be some people don’t like me telling the truth? Or is it that humanity has reached such a flashpoint that any irritation, real or perceived, becomes a target?

But it has happened again. Another gristle-y murder scene, this time in Malibu, California, where a singer, a dancer, and a rock promoter lose their lives in a gruesome crime that’s been termed the Fleshpots of Malibu. Again, peeled skeletons adorn a superstar’s bed, trysting th
eir way into the hereafter in a dancing symphony of awkward bones.

The LA cops and the NY cops have been talking, and find that the same high degree of surgical skill, the same mad but unknown purpose, have found their way to another bloody intersection and ended the lives of three more… Angels?

Yes, fashion fans, the coroner’s reports on all three skeletons read nearly line for line as did Annetka’s. Enlarged scapulae, over-developed sternums, observable regrowth on anterior scapular ridges. But we have contacted a surgeon who admits to operating on one of the individuals, Alicia Varsha. A hyper-glam aerial dancer from Omaha, Nebraska, Varsha had visited a UCLA osteopath by the name of Dr. Otto Sturgeon three years ago for a series of treatments to remove bony spurs from her scapulae, which readers of this blog will recall are the shoulder blades, bones which in childhood we called ‘angel wings.’

Alicia’s was one of the skeletons found in Katy’s bedroom, and Los Angeles CME reports indicate clear marks of bone removal on both scapulae. These removals are long bony ridges traversing the length of Varsha’s shoulder blades, a growth of such massive size that it could support, according to Sturgeon’s op notes, “considerable weight, being robust enough to
carry many times the weight of the individual.”

When this reporter contacted a member of clerical staff at the CME’s office, I asked if anyone had considered the possibility that Alicia’s surgery could have been a removal of angel’s wings. Real ones. I did not get a printable answer.

There is loud knocking on the door of my undisclosed location at this moment and I am going to push SEND so this can go live. I hope to complete or add to this story in upcoming hours. Keep yourselves safe out there, Fashionistas.

ninj98
: set up a neural net for annetka web and voice traffic – 51000 tangible entries so far not enough

charlebois
: model depends on our question – chris said who else might be at risk

jer65536
: dumb question – we’d need deep data on every individual to test

ninj98
: plus solberg wd be interested in military brass – where the H wd we get deep data

charlebois
: yep I think something is weird

jer65536
: know something way weird? nat. marine fisheries svc flew spot counts of north atlantic + north pacific blue whale pops – numbers normal for time of year but they detect ZERO with any markings

charlebois
: so the navy faked these photos

jer65536
: no – markings were temporary

ninj98
: so whales have a temp tattoo parlor?

jer65536
: or they just manifested the markings

ninj98
: no weirder than anything else about this

charlebois
: what’s weird is chris – pulling us off the hunt

ninj88
: how about the 100 tagged ones?

jer65536
: they located 16 of the tagged ones no markings visible from the air – in the navy images those animals were covered with numbers

ninj98
: i did get some threatened ppl tho - pulled a list of movie actors and singers, found 3 threatened but just skimming atm

charlebois
: so do we warn somebody?

ninj98
: idk who i’d tell