All their language is careful, Curtis had said.
Every e-mail address in the message headings was a meaningless string of numbers and letters. Maybe the accounts had been created and discarded on a daily basis, out of paranoid caution. The digital equivalent of throwaway cell phones.
The messages themselves were a little better; they were at least made of words and sentences. But the language was carefully couched and allusive, an extra layer of security by the people who’d written and sent these e-mails.
Still, thumbing through the first of maybe two hundred pages in that binder, Dryden got the impression that there was real information to be gleaned from it. It would require reading the entire thing repeatedly, and scrutinizing key parts more carefully still, but there were probably loose ends to pick at, somewhere in the tangle.
He closed it for the moment, set it with the other four, and picked up the thin, stapled stack of pages. Curtis’s letter to Claire.
It was neatly typed, composed on whatever computer Curtis had used when he’d printed the stuff in the binders. Dryden pictured the kid sitting with a laptop in a cheap motel room, bags from an office store all over the bed. The binders, a few reams of paper, maybe an eighty-dollar inkjet plugged in on the nightstand.
The letter began:
Claire,
I hope I’m right about how to get this letter to you. I hope you’re alive to receive it.
I know Dale called you, right before everything went to hell. I know he told you some of this, but I don’t know how much of it he got through. So I’ll start at zero. Sorry in advance if the tone is a little bit Romper Room. Clarity is key. Here goes.
First, I know almost nothing about the people who took out Bayliss Labs. They might be a rival company. They might just be a circle of people with money and connections. Even on their secure server, they were very careful to not make themselves identifiable. In the messages, they refer to themselves as the Group—capitalized like that.
Maybe they were monitoring Bayliss before we even developed the machine, or maybe someone on the inside talked to them. Whatever happened, it’s clear the Group was involved from damn near day one, after we got the first machine working. They had their own version of it up and running within probably days, and they got very busy figuring out how to do big things with this technology, things we never even brainstormed at Bayliss.
You already know these machines hear radio signals from 10 hours and 24 minutes in the future. You also know there’s no way to tune the things, and they’re limited to frequency-modulated (FM) signals between 89.1 MHz and 106.5 MHz, not quite the full range used for FM radio broadcasting in the United States.
A person might wonder whether these things are really all that dangerous in the wrong hands. How much damage could someone really do? They could cheat at the Lotto, I guess. I suppose they could even mess with Wall Street … but only if they happened to hear something on the radio about a certain stock going up or down.
That’s the trick—there’s a limit to what you could ever learn using these things. You’re stuck with whatever happens to be on the radio ten and a half hours from now, and even worse, you’re limited to what little scraps of those broadcasts the machine picks up.
Pretty serious hindrances, right? But the Group found a way around them.
How to explain this? Let’s say you want to make money betting on a football game. Let’s make it easy: It’s the Super Bowl. I think a person could use one of these machines as normal for that. All you’d have to do is listen to the machine for three or four hours before the game. You’d be hearing radio traffic from a few hours after the game was over—you’re definitely going to catch a few seconds of some DJ talking about how it turned out.
Now let’s make it harder. What if you want to bet on a college lacrosse game? Duke against Baylor. Not even a championship game or anything—just some regular matchup in the season. Think you’re going to catch that score on the radio?
So what can you do?
Well, what if you’ve got a buddy who’s a DJ at a local radio station? You say to him, do me a favor—10 hours and 24 minutes from now, go online and look up the score for the Duke-Baylor lacrosse game, and just as a joke, keep saying the score on the air, over and over again. Do it after every song and commercial break.
Better yet, you bribe every DJ, at every nearby radio station, to do the same thing.
Now you’re going to hear that score. Or the closing price of IBM stock, if that’s what you asked them to look up and keep repeating on the radio. Or literally any piece of information a person could look up, 10 hours and 24 minutes in the future. Anything.