Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [102]
“Let’s assign each of those memories their ones and zeroes,” I say.
Bullseye’s already doing that. On a piece of paper, he’s written: “1111010.”
“Very elegant,” he says.
“Why?”
“Bits are written in chunks of eight ones and zeroes.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Let’s find out.”
On the laptop, he goes back to the binary decoder site.
Bullseye pastes Grandma’s ones and zeroes into the box. He hits “Enter.” Two new boxes appear. One box has the heading “Text.” The other box has the heading “Numerical.”
In the text box, is a single letter: “Z.”
In the other box is “122.”
Bullseye stares in silence.
“This string of ones and zeroes corresponds to either the number one hundred twenty-two or the letter Z?” I ask.
He nods.
“I’m underwhelmed. So we’ve traded one string of meaningless ones and zeroes for an equally meaningless number of 122 or a random letter of the alphabet.”
I close my eyes and search the inside of my head for something that would give this meaning. Have I heard anything the last few days that would make sense of this?
“You remember a few days ago the Pentagon computers got hacked into?”
Bullseye nods.
“Why did that happen?” I ask.
“Because the encryption scheme wasn’t good enough. Hackers penetrated safeguards and got to secret information.”
“Interesting.”
“You think your grandmother has something to do with that?”
“Not at all. I’m just wondering if she’s carrying around some information, something that someone would want—and want it off the grid, not in a server somewhere. But she’s carrying it in the form of her story.”
“Something encoded, encrypted?”
“Like maybe someone wrote over her fallow memory with a bunch of seemingly meaningless details. And this”—I hold up the piece of paper from Pete’s office—“this is the encryption key.”
He shrugs.
“Bullseye, there’s an important secret locked in here.”
I’m thinking of Pete’s cryptic scrawl: three weeks. Three weeks until what?
Bullseye’s begun looking at SportsCenter on the big screen television hanging over the corner of the bar. He’s losing interest or he surmises that even if we make progress in figuring it out, we’ll never be able to make use of the information. Or I’m projecting.
“Can I take your worksheet?”
“Can you buy me a beer?”
I order him an Anchor Steam. I’m out of cash and I hand the barkeep my credit card. As she processes the charge, I remember that my card, for some mysterious reason, did not work a day ago. I’m about to tell the waitress to forget about it when she returns with the tab. Just as mysteriously as my card failed, it is now working again.
“Someone thinks I’m no longer a threat,” I say.
I think of Grandma, Polly, our zygote.
Maybe I’m only a threat to myself, and them.
It is drizzling when I arrive at Magnolia Manor. The start of November marks the end of the Bay Area’s Indian summer.
At the front desk of the home, the attendant says he has a message for me.
“Mr. Idle, the director said he’d like to see you as soon as you stopped in. He’s in his home, not the office.”
“I’d like to see my grandmother first.”
“The director says it’s critical.”
Chapter 58
The Human Asparagus is up to his ears in cardboard boxes. He stands in his living room, wrapping his belongings in white tissue paper and setting them into packing boxes.
“Fleeing the scene of the crime?”
In his hand is a small brass goblet, cheap looking, like something you’d win at a carnival. He raises it up with one of his gangly arms. “Governor’s Chalice,” he says.
“The governor gives awards for allowing secret testing of old people?”
“It’s from my peers in the industry. Annually, we vote on which retirement home director in the region is most deserving and that person holds the chalice for a year.”
He’s melancholy.