“That’s it! It uses the Fibonacci sequence. The first value is unchanged. The second and third increase by one, then two, and so on.”
Soter laid a hand on her shoulder. “May I?”
Jenna vacated the seat, and the older man took her place. He opened a new program and began typing, his fingers flying across the keys as if inspired. It took him just a few minutes to write a translation algorithm, after which he cut and pasted in the binary sequence.
Jenna held her breath as the start of a now all-too familiar phrase appeared.
This is th…
The rest was a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers, but Jenna knew that she had been right about the key to the cipher. “It resets to zero after ten characters.”
Soter nodded. “That makes sense. If the progression continued to follow the Fibonacci sequence, it would run to more than twelve places.” He made a quick adjustment, and then he ran the program again.
“‘This is the way the world ends,’” Noah read aloud. “‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’ That’s from ‘The Hollow Men’ by T.S. Eliot.”
Jenna flashed him a smile. Noah, it seemed, could still surprise her.
Cort harrumphed. “I’m supposed to believe that these aliens of yours are English lit majors?”
Soter shrugged. “I didn’t just make this up. It’s been clear from the start that the intelligence behind this understood our capabilities. They would certainly be familiar with our works of art.”
“I think the poem is part of the trigger,” Jenna added. “Like a hypnotist might use.”
Cort rolled his eyes, but said nothing more.
The rest of the message was mostly numbers, but Jenna felt certain that Soter’s program had correctly unlocked it. “Those are coordinates.” She recalled the emergency letter Noah had left for her. “Somewhere in the Southwest. New Mexico or Arizona.”
Soter recognized the rest of it. “I think this sequence is a Julian date. And I’d recognize these numbers anywhere. That’s the location of the Chi Sagittarii stellar group, where the Wow! Signal originated and this—1420—is the original frequency, the hydrogen line.”
He turned his chair to face Cort. “The VLA radio telescope is in Socorro, New Mexico.”
As she read it, Jenna felt her memory of the message stirring, but the voice remained silent. “That’s where we have to go. Someone — one of the clones — is going to send a signal into space. To those coordinates.”
Cort nodded slowly. “You said there’s a date?”
“A date and time,” Soter replied. He seemed suddenly ill-at-ease.
“When?”
He swallowed. “Midnight tonight.”
“Well that’s freakin’ wonderful,” Cort grumbled.
Something in Soter’s manner set alarm bells ringing in Jenna’s head. “You already knew this was going to happen today.”
Soter refused to meet her gaze. “For years, there was talk among the children of something important related to this date.”
“You knew,” Jenna repeated. There was no accusation in her tone. “That’s the real reason you sent Cray to get me, isn’t it? The deadline had arrived and you still didn’t know what the message meant.”
His silence was answer enough.
“So,” Cort said after a pause. “At midnight, something is going to happen at this place in New Mexico. We’ll get somebody there and shut the place down.”
Soter shook his head. “Julian dates start at noon Greenwich Mean Time. The date/time indicated in the message is midnight GMT. Eight hours from now.”
“I need to be there,” Jenna said.
“That’s not going to happen,” Cort declared, making a cutting gesture with his hand. “The only way you’re leaving here is in my custody.”
“Like hell,” Noah growled, raising the pistol again. The other agents tensed but did not go for their grounded weapons.
Cort waved them off but kept his attention on Noah. “If you try to leave any other way, you will be hunted down. Even you aren’t that good.”
“I guess we’ll see, won’t we.” Noah turned to the others. “Jenna, Mercy, we’re going.”
Soter stepped forward. “Take me. I have a plane waiting on the tarmac at the Arecibo Airport. It could get us to New Mexico with time to spare.”
Noah stared back, his face an unreadable mask. “You heard what the man said. They’re going to be hunting us. You sure you want to take that chance?”
The mathematician nodded soberly.
“The more the merrier,” Noah muttered. “Mercy, be a dear and collect those guns. And while I’m thinking about it, let’s have your phones. If you’re going to be hunting us, it only seems fair to give us a head start.”
Cort signaled for his men to comply, this time without threats or taunts. Jenna understood that they were past that stage now. Noah was not going to change his mind, and Cort was already thinking ahead to what he would do next. Jenna realized with sick certainty that the running and fighting was not over, not by a long shot, but now there was a lot more at stake than just her own survival.
She moved closer to Noah. “There’s no way we can make it to New Mexico without Cort’s help.”
Noah glanced in Cort’s direction before answering in a low whisper that only she could hear. “We aren’t going to New Mexico, but Cort doesn’t need to know that. I know a guy that can get us to Cuba. They won’t be able to touch us there.”
“No!” The forcefulness of her denial surprised even her. She had spoken so loudly that everyone in the room looked at her. “I have to go to New Mexico.”
Noah frowned in irritation. “Jenna, you’ve done enough. Cort can take care of this with a phone call. You don’t need to be there.”
“But I do. I have to be there,” she repeated. “I’m the only one who can stop it.”
“Why?”
She had no answer. There was no rational explanation for the compulsion she felt, but if she revealed her uncertainty, Noah would never agree.
“There’s more to the instructions,” she lied, except part of her realized it wasn’t a lie. While the coded message did contain some specific instructions, its primary function was to activate the implanted memories. Although that door had closed, Jenna knew that there was a lot more that had not been revealed to her. “I think I have to go there to unlock the rest.”
“You think?”
She gripped his arm. “Noah, you have to trust me. I’m the only one who can stop it.”
Noah’s frown deepened. “I believe you, but I’m not the one you have to convince.”
Jenna turned to Cort. “If you get me to New Mexico, then I’m all yours. You can ship me off to one of your secret prisons, throw me in a hole and make me disappear forever.”
Noah stepped between her and Cort. “Jenna, don’t be stupid.”
Jenna pointed at the computer screen where the message was still displayed. “You see that? How the message ends?”
Nobody had commented on the last line of the transmission, the final marching orders for each clone. Four simple but ominous words in plain English.
Wipe the slate clean.
“That’s what’s going to happen if I don’t get to New Mexico. What happens after that doesn’t matter, because if I don’t get there, there isn’t going to be an ‘after.’”
Noah stared at her for a long time, his expression twisted with emotions that he was no longer able to suppress.
It was Cort that finally broke the silence. “So I’m supposed to take you at your word? What, are you gonna pinky-swear to give yourself up when it’s all done?”