Tomorrow Code, The.

by Brian Falkner.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Each year, I visit a lot of schools and talk to them about my writing. As part of my talk, I often run a compet.i.tion and the children who achieve the highest levels in that compet.i.tion win the right to have their name used as the name of a character in one of my books.

Congratulations to Rebecca Richards and Gemma Shaw, whose names appear as the names of characters in this book. Congratulations also to Lucy Southwell, whose name appears in this book by virtue of her father, Graham Southwell, being the highest bidder at a charity auction to raise money for Hospice New Zealand.

She yearns for things that once were.

He dreams of things that might be.

They must learn from the past to change the future.

But they are running out of time.

THE END

They took all the trees Put 'em in a tree museum And they charged the people A dollar and a half just to see 'em.

Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone They paved paradise And put up a parking lot.

-Joni Mitch.e.l.l, "Big Yellow Taxi"

The end of the world started quietly enough for Tane Williams and Rebecca Richards, lying on their backs on a wooden platform on Lake Sunnyvale. Which wasn't really a lake at all. started quietly enough for Tane Williams and Rebecca Richards, lying on their backs on a wooden platform on Lake Sunnyvale. Which wasn't really a lake at all.

Sunnyvale School was set in a small valley. A nice little suburban valley. A hundred years ago, it had been a nice little swamp where Pukeko and Black Stilts had competed for the best nesting positions, and croakless native frogs had snared insects with their flicking tongues. But now it was a nice little suburban valley, surrounded by nice little homes belonging to nice little homeowners who painted their fences and paid their taxes and never gave any thought to the fact that when it rained, all the water that ran through their properties also ran through the properties below, and the properties below those, and so on until it reached the lowest point of the valley floor. Which happened to be Sunnyvale School.

As a consequence, Sunnyvale School had to have very good drainage. When it rained hard, as it often did in Auckland in the spring, an awful lot of that rain made its way down from the hillsides and ended up on the playing fields and courts of the small but cheerful school.

And sometimes the water, sauntering its way down the slopes with a mind and a mischievous personality of its own, would playfully pick up odds and ends along the way with a view to blocking those very good drains that the council had put in many years ago after the first and second (and possibly the third) time the school had flooded.

Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't. It depended on what the water happened to find in its path. Little sticks and paper food wrappings washed right through the big metal grills of the drains. Small branches, stones, and other large objects generally just ended up at the bottom of the homeowners' nice little properties.

But light twigs and pieces of plastic sailed merrily down the surface of the water and blocked the drains beautifully.

That was what had happened this particular time, and the sports fields of Sunnyvale School were covered in at least four inches of water, high enough to lap at the doorsteps of the cheerful little cla.s.srooms across the way, but fortunately not quite high enough to get inside.

Tane and Rebecca lay on their backs on the small wooden viewing platform in the center of the two main playing fields and looked up at the stars, for the rain had stopped many hours ago, and the night was clear and beautiful.

Neither of them were pupils of Sunnyvale School; in fact, both of them were far too old to attend the school, and for another fact, both of them were in their second year at West Auckland High School.

However, when they were younger, they had both gone to Sunnyvale School, which was why they knew that when it rained really hard during the day and stopped at night, it became a magical, wonderful place to be.

The stars above shone down with a piercing intensity that penetrated the haze of lights from the suburban homes around the valley. The moon, too, was lurking about, turning the weathered wood of the small platform to silver. All around them, the lights from the sky above reflected in the inky blackness that was Lake Sunnyvale. The lake that sometimes appeared on the playing fields after a particularly heavy rainstorm.

There were stars above and stars below, rippling slowly in the light breeze, and it was like being out in the center of the universe, floating through s.p.a.ce on your back.

Tane and Rebecca thought it was the coolest place to be. On Lake Sunnyvale. After the rain.

Tane tossed a pebble into the air, and there was a satisfying plop plop a few seconds later as it landed. They both raised their heads to see the widening circles of ripples, shaking the foundations of the stars around them. Then, as if controlled by the same puppeteer, they put their heads back down together. a few seconds later as it landed. They both raised their heads to see the widening circles of ripples, shaking the foundations of the stars around them. Then, as if controlled by the same puppeteer, they put their heads back down together.

Tane's feet were pointing one way, and Rebecca's were pointing the other, so the tops of their heads were just about touching. If they had been boyfriend and girlfriend, they might have lain down side by side, but they weren't, so they didn't.

From an open window in a house somewhere on the surrounding slopes, an old Joni Mitch.e.l.l folk song reached out plaintively across the water to them.

Rebecca said again, "Time travel is impossible." She said it more firmly this time, as if that were simply the end of the discussion, and the judge's decision was final, and no correspondence would be entered into.

Now, ordinarily Tane would have given up at that point, because Rebecca was almost certainly right. After all, it was Rebecca, and not Tane, who had aced her Level One Physics exams the previous year, the top student in the entire country, at the age of just thirteen! Which had been no real surprise to Tane, who had been in the same cla.s.ses as his friend as she had confounded science teacher after science teacher and math teacher after math teacher by somehow, instinctively, knowing as much about the subject they were teaching as they did.

Some teachers enjoyed having Rebecca in their cla.s.s because she was very, very clever, if a little rebellious and uncontrollable at times. But other teachers found it stressful to have a girl amongst their students who took great delight in correcting them whenever they made mistakes.

So if Rebecca said that time travel was impossible, then time travel was impossible. But there was something about the stars that night. Something about their slow drift through the heavens above and below them, something about the beautifully random and randomly beautiful patterns they made.

Or then again, it might just have been that Tane liked to argue, and he especially liked to argue with Rebecca.

"I read a book once," Tane said. "I can't remember what it was called, but it was about these grad students who go back in time to medieval days to rescue a missing historian, and they fight-"

"Timeline," interrupted Rebecca, who also loved a good argument and especially enjoyed showing that she knew more than Tane. "Michael Crichton, 1999." interrupted Rebecca, who also loved a good argument and especially enjoyed showing that she knew more than Tane. "Michael Crichton, 1999."

"Yeah, that's it. But anyway, they manage to create this...like...pinp.r.i.c.k in the fabric of time somehow, and then they kind of transmit themselves through it."

"I know. I read it," said Rebecca. And then, perhaps because she realized that she was sounding a bit negative, she said, "I mean, the science was quite good in it, about the fabric of s.p.a.ce-time, and the quantum foam, all the way up to the part where they transmit themselves through this tiny hole into the past."

Tane twisted his head around to look at her, but it hurt, and all he could see were her shoes, so he twisted back again. He thought for a moment. True, he wasn't as good at math and science as she was. Tane's strengths were in art and music, and he was a school legend on the harmonica, but even so, the time-travel thing sounded at least feasible to him.

"Why?" he asked eventually. "Why couldn't they transmit themselves?"

"Try to think logically," Rebecca said firmly but not unkindly. "How could you transport a live human being through a pinhole of any kind?"

"What about a fax machine!" Tane said suddenly. "You put a piece of paper in at one place, and it gets sent along a telephone wire and comes out in another place."

"No, it doesn't."

"Yes, it does," said Tane, starting to get into the argument, even though he knew she was going to turn out to be right.

"No, it doesn't," repeated Rebecca. "A copy of the piece of paper comes out. The actual piece of paper you sent stays right where it was. All you are sending is an electronic image of the paper, just like a digital photograph of it. Fax Fax is short for is short for facsimile, facsimile, which means 'copy.'" which means 'copy.'"

"So...um..." Tane was losing and he knew it.

"We can transmit pictures, sound, even movies, through wires, or through the air in radio waves. But we can't transmit a solid object. Not even a piece of paper."

And that was pretty much the end of the conversation for the moment. They stayed on the platform for a while longer. Neither of them really wanted to go home, for reasons of their own. They talked about school a bit and made some jokes about some of the people in their cla.s.ses. It was about ten o'clock, after they had sloshed their way through Lake Sunnyvale back to the road, when Tane resumed the argument, as if they had never left off. Which just showed that he had been quietly thinking about it the whole time.

"Well, if we can't transmit people through time, what about sounds, pictures, and movies, like you said?"

Rebecca had to actually think about that for a moment, which was a small victory for Tane. He pulled out his harmonica and played a slow blues riff as they walked. "Nope," she said at last. "If I understand the science right"-and Tane thought she probably did-"then you could only send stuff backward. You couldn't transmit to the future because that hasn't happened yet."

"But you could send it to the past?!"

"Well...theoretically. But let's say we invented some kind of radio transmitter that could broadcast through time. Something that could transmit messages through the quantum foam. n.o.body could listen to the messages we were sending, because in the past they wouldn't have invented a radio receiver that could pick up the transmission."

"Oh," said Tane, thinking that Rebecca, as usual, made perfect sense.

They reached Rebecca's house and stopped.

All the lights were off, but one of the windows flickered with the blue glow of a television. Her mum was watching TV, which was no great surprise, because that was pretty much all her mum did all day and all night. At least since Rebecca's dad had died.

"Oh," said Tane again pointlessly, and glanced up at the sky just in time to catch the brief flash of a shooting star.

That was when the inspiration struck him. That was the moment when it all seemed so clear.

"So what if someone in the future had already invented a time radio transmitter and was sending messages back to the past, waiting for someone to invent a receiver?"

He wasn't sure if that sounded silly or not, so he just waited for the usual rebuff from his friend.

It didn't come.

"What's that again?"

"Well, let's just say that some time in the future, someone invents one of those transmitters you were talking about. And just say they are sending out messages, through that foamy stuff, just waiting for someone in the past to invent a receiver."

"Well, I...um..."

"What if we built a receiver and just listened. Just waited for a signal from the future."

"Well, the whole concept of quantum foam is not even proven. And I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to build a receiver," Rebecca mused. "But it's an interesting idea."

That may not have sounded like much, but it wasn't very often that Rebecca thought that Tane had an interesting idea, so it was kind of an important day, if only for that reason.

Although, in hindsight, it was actually an important day for much bigger reasons than that.

"You want to come on another march with me?" Rebecca asked, walking slowly backward up the driveway toward her darkened house.

"Of course," Tane said automatically. "What are we protesting about this time?"

"Whales," Rebecca said.

Tane shook his head. "I've got no problems with whales. They've never bothered me."

Rebecca laughed. "It's a couple of weeks away. I'll remind you."

She turned and disappeared into the carport and inside her home.

FATBOY AND HIS MOKO

It was a couple of weeks before the subject of the quantum foam came up again, and in all that time, Rebecca never mentioned it once, which made Tane think she had forgotten about it. weeks before the subject of the quantum foam came up again, and in all that time, Rebecca never mentioned it once, which made Tane think she had forgotten about it.

However, a lot of other things happened during those weeks, some of which were to have far-reaching and long-lasting effects, such as Tane's older brother asking Rebecca out to the movies or Rebecca getting arrested. Another thing that happened was that Rebecca and her mother were kicked out of their home.

Tane's older brother's name was Harley. Harley had been a chubby kid, and with a name like that, he quickly picked up the nickname Fatboy, as in the cla.s.sic Harley-Davidson motorcycle. He hated the name when he was ten, but by the age of fifteen, thanks to years of rugby, the weight had turned into muscle; yet the name had stuck, and Fatboy-Fats to his friends-kinda liked it. It was no coincidence that when he got his full motorcycle license, he came home the same day with a genuine Harley-Davidson Fat Boy.

Fatboy was a musician. The kind with dreadlocks and a leather jacket, not the kind who played in a symphony orchestra. And he wasn't a rock star about to be discovered and have number-one hit singles around the world. At least Tane didn't think so.

Fatboy was a session musician. He played guitar and he was pretty good at it. Good enough that he had dropped out of school before his sixteenth birthday to pursue it. ("Over my dead body," their mother had said, but somehow she had survived.) Fatboy had a kind of natural affinity for music, which must have run in the family because the same apt.i.tude flowed through Tane's veins.

Fatboy was seventeen, and although he wasn't particularly good-looking, he always seemed to have at least two girlfriends on the go at any one time, which seemed a bit excessive to Tane, who (in his opinion) was much better-looking but didn't have a girlfriend at all.

Rebecca, on the other hand, had had a couple of boyfriends, but they hadn't lasted long. She was quite nice to look at, quite pretty in fact, in her rebellious, punky way. But some boys were afraid of her intelligence and thought she was a bit of a know-it-all, which in fact she was. Other boys thought she was going out with Tane, which in fact she wasn't.

The day that Fatboy asked Rebecca out, she was at Tane's house playing chess. It was Sunday. The day after Lake Sunnyvale.

The lounge of Tane's house was huge and split over three levels, so it was almost three lounges connected into one. Up through the center of the three levels grew the ma.s.sive trunk of a hundred-and-fifty-year-old tree. It wasn't technically inside the house. It was more like there was a hole up through the center of the house in which the tree grew, with huge plate-gla.s.s windows on all four sides.

They were on the lower of the three lounges, nestled into the embrace of the native bush that surrounded the home. From the middle lounge, the house had million-dollar views out across the valley to the lights of the city, and from the uppermost lounge, a long balcony led off to a series of treetop-level rope walkways. This high in the mountains, you could walk out amongst the trees and surround yourself with birdsong on a warm summer's evening.

It was a very expensive house that Tane's father was able to afford because of his very successful career as an artist. Rangi Williams painted animals, usually New Zealand native animals, in their own environment. He often disappeared into the bush for days at a time, armed only with his sketch pads. His paintings sold all around the world. There was something especially appealing, apparently, about paintings of New Zealand's native creatures painted by a descendant of the Maori, New Zealand's native people.

The architecturally designed house was a stark contrast to Rebecca's home, which was old brick and tile and was nestled on the hillside that encircled Sunnyvale School.

Tane advanced his knight to attack Rebecca's rook. He liked to attack his opponents' rooks early in the game, as it weakened their attack later on.