Unknown 9 Read online

  At first she thought the object was a metal alloy, but as soon as she picked it up, she realized the entire thing was made of plastic, including the screen. She had the strong feeling it was a replica—but of what?

  At various points on the device, a number of circular depressions were indented a quarter of an inch into the device. They resembled dimples, and she counted ten.

  Odd.

  On closer inspection, noticing a seam, she gently twisted the object. It separated into two hollow parts. With a shrug, she set it down. After listening for footsteps again, she picked the lock on the bottom drawer and found more research papers, also organized into drop folders. But these were a far cry from peer-reviewed scientific papers in Dr. Corwin’s field. These folders concerned topics to which she never would imagine him giving a second thought, not to mention keeping under lock and key in his office.

  ASTRAL PROJECTION. NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES. PALEOACOUSTICS. AFTERLIFE MYTHOLOGY. DREAM STATES. REALMS OF HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS.

  A glance inside the folders revealed a range of documentation, from quasi-academic papers to articles printed off the web to photocopies of handwritten accounts from old journals. Much of the research paralleled her own forays into these topics, in connection to her bizarre lifelong visions.

  Why was Dr. Corwin interested in all of this?

  She had a sudden thought: Did her mother suffer in the same way?

  Yet the most profound shock of all lay inside a folder lying flat at the bottom of the drawer. Inside were a set of ink drawings with the same general image: a depiction of a shadowy realm, a darker version of reality, that made her hands clench against the paper. Though the actual location was vague, she recognized all too well the murky hues, the sense of drifting in a void the image captured, the otherworldly feel of the drawings.

  It was the same place she went to in her visions. She was sure of it. As if a very talented artist had been inside her head, or seen one of her visions for himself.

  Could Dr. Corwin possibly know about my affliction? If so, why did he never tell me?

  There were about a dozen drawings, and she took the whole stack. On impulse, she took the photo of her mother as well, sticking everything inside an empty folder. She wanted to take the strange nine-sided plastic model but didn’t want anyone to notice her carrying it out. Instead she put it together and replaced it, closed both drawers, and relocked them.

  On her way out, still shaken, she stopped down the hall at the office of Dean Varen, an octogenarian once known for her beauty as much as her intellect and stern demeanor. Andie had always thought the dean disapproved of her, but to her surprise, Dean Varen came around her desk to give Andie a hug.

  “I’m so sorry,” the dean said. “I know how close you were.”

  Andie looked away. “Is there anything I can do? Help catalogue his research?”

  “Perhaps when the dust clears. I just can’t believe . . . Did you hear someone robbed his hotel room? They took his computer, passport, clothes—everything.”

  Andie grimaced. “Any idea why?”

  “I assume it was a follow-up to the robbery. It sounds like something out of a movie, but James wasn’t . . . It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “None of this does,” Andie murmured, trying to process it all. A murder, a robbery, and a missing scientist from Quasar Labs. She debated asking the dean if she knew Dr. Friedman, then decided against it.

  Trust no one.

  “What will happen to the contents of his office?” Andie asked. “Since he doesn’t have a family?”

  “I’ll have to think about that.”

  “I was just in there and noticed his photo of the Ishango bone missing.”

  The dean’s brow furrowed. As in, why was Andie talking about this?

  “I know it’s a strange thing to bring up,” Andie said quickly. “I just noticed it for some reason. He must have taken it home.”

  How long before they rob his office and house in Durham too? Or what if someone’s already been to his office and taken the photo—or they’re on their way right now?

  Dean Varen moved closer, lightly touching Andie’s forearm. “Grief evokes peculiar responses. We want to grasp on to the familiar.”

  Andie shivered and rubbed her arms, then moved for the door. “Do let me know if I can help.”

  “I will. Oh, and Andie?”

  She turned back.

  “I think James moved the Ishango bone to the library recently. I remember seeing it in the Reading Room. If you like, I could put in a request for you to keep it.” She finished with a soft, sad smile that Andie could have sworn had an undercurrent of . . . something. Perhaps suggestion?

  Was Dean Varen trying to tell her something, or were her frayed nerves playing tricks on her mind?

  “Thank you,” Andie said, backing toward the door. “I’d like that.”

  Duke University’s West Campus is a rambling collection of neo-Gothic stone buildings tucked into a densely wooded forest, connected by a leafy maze of side paths. Andie had to admit the campus was beautiful, but she had always felt out of place. She did not wear privilege well. It made her uncomfortable.

  As she hurried through the main quad that evening, past ancient oaks and a lawn as smooth as a putting green, the panorama of stone towers and carved limestone was as invisible to her as the cosmic background radiation that permeated the universe. After entering the library through a side door, she paused to get her bearings. Overhead rose a ribbed and vaulted ceiling that would have fit right in at Oxford or Cambridge.

  The dean could only have been referring to one place. A staircase on Andie’s right took her to the second floor, and she hurried down the hall and through a door to the Gothic Reading Room, which everyone referred to as simply the Reading Room.

  This was one of her favorite places on campus. Tall arched windows provided ample sunlight during the day, iron chandeliers with clever faux candles hung from the apex of the ceiling, and built-in wooden cabinets with glass doors housed a collection of old manuscripts. Andie walked the length of the room as a generator hummed softly in the background. Since the semester had ended and the library would close in half an hour, the room was almost empty.

  The photo of the Ishango bone was nowhere in sight. Confused, she left the room and stood in the common space outside. Had the photo been moved again? Or had someone else found it already? That thought caused her to glance around uneasily and poke her head into the Reading Room once more. The few remaining students looked absorbed in their work.

  On the walls of the common space, a pair of interactive monitors and a line of plaques commemorated the history of the university. Andie padded down the carpet to the end of the hallway, turned right, and found herself in a narrow seating area at the rear section of the floor. On the far wall, hanging between a pair of windows overlooking the main quad, was the framed photo of the Ishango bone. She recognized the distinctive metallic frame at once.

  The seating area was tucked away in an isolated corner of the library. No one was around. No cameras in sight.

  Andie approached the photo of the Ishango bone. The man-made notches on the baboon fibula, dating to at least 18,000 BCE, signified primitive calculations, such as addition, subtraction, prime numbers, multiplication, and even a lunar phase counter. The Lebombo bone, a similar find, was estimated to be more than forty thousand years old.

  It was mind-blowing to think about the age of these artifacts. What else was out there, lost to the ravages of time? Had advanced cultures existed in the millions and millions of years of prehistory, the vestiges of their civilizations destroyed by an ice age or some other geologic event?

  The longer Andie stared at the photo, the less she understood her mentor’s cryptic message. What was she supposed to find? As advanced as the Ishango bone was for its age, there wasn’t much to it. A baboon bone standing upright in a frame. She paced the room, studying the photo from different angles. The frame was dark bronze with a silver border, an
inch wide on each side. On a whim, she tried to lift it off the wall, but it wouldn’t budge.

  That gave her pause.

  Most frames were attached to hooks or some other type of hanging apparatus. Her father used to drag her to antique shops, and she knew the frames of heavy paintings were sometimes recessed into the wall and had to be pulled straight out. She doubted this was the case here, but she tried it anyway.

  It felt glued to the wall.

  There were no signs of nails or pins on the frame. So how was it attached? A strong adhesive would ruin the back. She tried to run her hands behind the metal edge, but it was so tight she couldn’t even slip a fingernail around it. She applied a bit more pressure and still failed to budge it.

  She heard a door open in the common space behind her, probably to the Reading Room. Andie hurried to gaze out the window, onto the darkening quad, until the footsteps receded. Choosing a different tactic, she took a deep breath, took hold of the bottom of the frame, and pushed upward, soft at first and then hard. Still nothing. She pushed even harder, then caught her breath as the entire frame slipped upward, enough to expose a thin strip of metal attached to the wall.

  At first she was confused. Had she just broken the frame? Then she remembered the bonsai tree in her mentor’s office, and put two and two together.

  Dr. Corwin was fascinated by the phenomena of electricity, an elemental force which powered everything from the common light bulb to human life itself. The chief byproduct of electrical charges, the electromagnetic field, was brimming with mystery. Images Andie had seen from the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope had revealed an entire world of cosmic light and energy, much of it from unknown sources, and nearly all of it invisible to the human eye. The entire universe, the air around us, was quite literally seething with unseen activity.

  Now that she knew the secret, she gripped the underside of the frame and peeled it off the wall. It wasn’t easy, but she kept pulling, exposing another magnetic strip at the top and two long ones down the sides. Once the framed photo was removed, she found herself staring at a wall safe.

  Okay then.

  Roughly a foot square, the steel door of the safe had a digital keypad in the center. She tried the handle, just to be sure. Locked. Curious, she turned the frame over and noticed a metal plate attached to the back. A magnet strong enough to discourage a casual discovery if anyone tried to move the photo.

  But why had Dr. Corwin taken it to the library?

  Because he knew his office—and his life—were at risk?

  She could worry about that later. The library closed in a few minutes, and she had a decision to make. Should she try to open the safe now or come back later?

  After peering around the corner, she set the photo against the wall and examined the keypad. It contained only numbers, beneath a five-digit code. Trying to guess the combination seemed like a fool’s errand, and a safe like this was far beyond her rudimentary lock-picking skills.

  Yet she worried its contents—if not already stolen—would be gone when she came back. She remembered the dean’s eyes lingering on hers as she left. After giving the hallway behind her another nervous glance, she exhaled and returned to the safe.

  Hardly anyone used a random passcode. She started trying every combination personal to Dr. Corwin she could think of, from his phone number to his birthday and zip code. After exhausting her knowledge of his personal life, she moved on to common mathematical figures. Dr. Corwin had always loved puzzles and number games, and had even designed a logic toy for children.

  She tried the first five numbers of pi, a string of prime numbers, the start of the Fibonacci sequence. Still nothing.

  Think, Andie.

  She thought about the projects on which he was working. After running through them in her mind, she couldn’t think of a particular theorem that would fit. There was also Dr. Corwin’s career-long obsession with cracking the mathematical universe theory, or what he affectionately called MUT for short. MUT was an offshoot of what physicists call the theory of everything, a universal model that would unite the natural laws of the universe under one umbrella. So far, the two pillars of scientific theories governing the laws of physics at the macro and micro scales—general relativity and quantum mechanics—had proved incompatible.

  Yet at their core, both theories were simply math. Mind-blowingly complex calculations, of course, and in the case of quantum mechanics, they weren’t even truly understood.

  But they worked.

  Just math.

  And if they were just math, then a unifying theory that linked them, well, that should just be math too. Maybe the universe itself was just math, Dr. Corwin had suggested to her once, after one too many cups of coffee.

  She smiled. Just math.

  The MUT was a hobby of his. A pet theory, little more than a distraction from his serious work. Or so she had thought.

  Not long ago, he had asked Andie to perform a handful of calculations for him concerning speculative quantum effects on macroscopic objects. In theory, that would include human beings. It was an odd topic, though not unknown to researchers. He had never gotten around to telling her exactly why she was working on it, but hypothetical exercises to work out a sticky problem were commonplace.

  She took the piece of paper out of the backpack and read it again.

  I apologize for the bizarre circumstance, but there’s no one else I can trust. If this message reaches you before you hear from me, go immediately to Quasar CAM Labs in the Research Triangle, give the note to Dr. Lars Friedman, and tell him where the birthplace of mathematics is. Do not ask questions. Do not try to reach me under any circumstances. Do not call or send an email to Dr. Friedman—go in person, as soon as you get this.

  Should I fail to return from Italy, trust no one with this message besides Lars. Not the police. Not even your own family.

  No one.

  The underlined phrases had bothered her from the start. Dr. Corwin wasn’t the sort to overemphasize his prose. She assumed he had done so in order to stress the urgent nature of the message, but she read it again.

  Mathematics. Under any circumstances. Trust no one. It also struck her that if she had managed to pass on the note to Dr. Friedman, he would have had to know the combination to the safe as well.

  Give this message to Dr. Lars Friedman.

  Was Dr. Corwin trying to tell him something? Why had he wanted Andie to deliver the note itself? She assumed it was for proof of life, so to speak. A way to assure Lars the message came from Dr. Corwin.

  But what if there was another reason?

  She concentrated on the three phrases, wondering if there was a hidden meaning, perhaps a way to recombine the letters. Then it hit her. It was so simple. Mathematics. Under. Trust. The first three letters of each emphasized phrase.

  MUT.

  Dr. Corwin’s pet theory, staring her in the face.

  She snapped her fingers. The zip file in which he kept much of this research, and to which he had recently given her access, had a five-digit password. She rarely forgot a number that small, and she hadn’t forgotten this one. She might as well give it a shot.

  After clearing the keypad once again, she punched in the five-digit password to the MUT research folder. There was a short beep, and the door to the safe cracked open.

  Los Angeles, California

  6

  Before every live show, Cal Miller performed an old-school security ritual. First he walked the perimeter of his matchbox LA bungalow, checking for footprints or miniature spyware. Inside the house, he tapped light bulbs and inspected air vents, secured the doors and windows, and armed the security system. Last and probably least, he made sure his elderly Rhodesian ridgeback, Leon, was awake and paying attention.

  The new-school work had already been done. Installing the strongest virus scanner and full disk encryption on the market. Using a firewall and a highly complex password on his personal router. Covering the webcam on his Toshiba with black tape. Cal even disconn
ected his Xbox when not in use. Being hacked while playing a first-person shooter would be an embarrassing way to go down.

  A die-hard Generation Xer, raised on Atari and Colecovision and the Commodore 64, Cal had even learned to program in Basic as a kid and considered himself part of the “video game” generation. That said, once he went off to college and became an investigative journalist, he had mostly lost touch with technology. The rapid advancements had passed him by as swiftly as a Canadian summer.

  He loved his smartphone and the internet—who didn’t?

  But he didn’t understand them. He didn’t even understand his nonstick frying pan.

  And all that crazy tech out there, far more complex and insidious than a magic kitchen utensil, scared the shit out of him. He shuddered to think what the world would look like in twenty, fifty, a hundred years.

  By nature, Cal was not an overly suspicious person. In fact, he considered himself easygoing. He had never been obsessed with Big Brother or personal security—not until he had exposed a Bolivian black-site facility belonging to a global technology company, PanSphere Communications, through a source who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances right after the piece was published in the LA Times.

  Cal had met with the source himself, but PanSphere didn’t let it go. The company hired a powerful law firm to sue the Times for falsifying a lead, libel, and publication of an unverified story. The Times conducted their own investigation, but no record of the source could be found. It was as if the Bolivian scientist Cal had met in an empanada restaurant in La Paz had been a ghost.

  Cal had seen the man. Held his ID badge.

  How had they disappeared him so thoroughly?

  In the end, the discredited piece got Cal fired and blackballed from major journalism. The whole affair creeped him the hell out, and left him with the constant nagging feeling that someone was always watching.