23

Stonehenge

Binary was a deceptively simple word originating in the fifteenth century. It meant dual, or a pair. A light switch is a binary system because it consists of two options: on or off.

A question that can be answered true or false was binary.

Black and white were binary colors.

But when most people think of “binary,” none of that comes to mind. What we think of are computers, which run the most complex of data using a binary system of 1s and 0s.

In 1679, Gottfried Leibniz invented what modern humans know as the binary system. Leibniz was looking for a way to organize verbal logic into mathematics. It turned out that 1s and 0s were the bridge. His breakthrough was popularly credited to his Christian search to represent the concept of creatio ex nihilo: out of nothing, creation.

Less well known was his true inspiration: the I Ching.

The I Ching was a Chinese divination text dating to 1000 BC. The manuscript contained collected wisdom examining the ultimate binary choice—chaos or order—and created a method for seeking guidance on the most complex and philosophical of questions. Consulting the I Ching was so effective that it was used throughout history to answer questions of state, warfare, money, and love.

The first step of the method was to frame a focused question. Next, the seeker threw a bundle of yarrow sticks into the air and read how they landed. They could either fall as a broken line or an unbroken line, thereby, at their most basic reading, becoming the oldest known use of binary data.

At least, that’s what had been believed.

What Salem was looking at would shred that theory. Stonehenge had been built at least 1,500 years earlier than that. Her mouth was dry, her senses heightened.

Stonehenge was a binary code.

The circles, and there were two—the outer and the inner—were the zeroes.

The stones were the ones.

The ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, had assigned binary numbers to the letters of the alphabet. Lower case a was 1100001, for example. The builders of Stonehenge wouldn’t have used the same categorization, would not have even spoken English, a language which didn’t emerge in its earliest form until at least 550 CE. They would have their own language and code keys, but once Salem saw it, it was impossible to deny the binary nature of Stonehenge.

Charlie had seen it as soon as she’d pointed it out.

Neolithic humans had sent them a message in the most ancient of codes.

He’d whooped then run off to secure them this private room, some administrator’s cloistered office with a desktop computer he could use while Salem field-tested Gaea for the second time that day.

“I need you to find all the various iterations of the monument,” Salem said, unaware she was taking the lead. Her fingers were a blur of typing. “Include all possible variables: the Heel Stone, the wooden posts that could have been here, counting the trilithons as a single stone as well as three, everything.”

“I’ll send them to you when I get them.” Charlie was already firing up the desktop, circumventing the administrator’s password as easily as if it were a tissue paper wall. His cheeks were flushed. The excitement in the room was ionized.

“No!” Salem said, pausing. “Put it on this jump drive. We don’t have time to encrypt it, and I don’t want it accessible in the ether.”

“Of course. How foolish of me.”

Salem nodded and dug back into her work. She’d been disappointed to not have the time to expand on her quantum computing breakthrough, now more than ever. Every computer system running used the same binary system as the first computer invented. Quantum computing, once a reality, would be based in qubits, which were the 1s and 0s of the binary system on steroids. They operated as a 1 or a 0, but through the quantum physics principles of entanglement and superposition, those 1s and 0s could swap their identity. They could also do more than be on or off. They could be up, down, in, out.

If Salem had access to quantum hardware, she could quickly create a sophisticated algorithm that could access any document ever uploaded that contained the word Stonehenge, collate all visual and written records of the stones throughout the millennia, and look for any patterns that would break the binary keytext of Stonehenge.

It would take less than a second with a fully realized quantum computer. Salem could only guess at how long the B&C would take.

Charlie ran the jump drive to her. “They’re all here.”

“Good work! That was quick.” She plugged it into her USB port, feeding Charlie’s data to baby Gaea.

They peered at the screen, not unlike how ancient people must have stared at their campfires.

The administrator’s wall clock ticked audibly. How did she get any work done with such a loud noise?

“Is Gaea up for the task?” Charlie asked.

A rose bloomed on Salem’s screen by way of answer, hitching her chest. She really would have to come up with a better image. “That means she’s ready.”

Charlie glanced at his wristwatch. “Thirty-four seconds. Pretty goddamned impressive.”

“We’ll see.” Salem bit her lip. She tapped the enter button. “I asked her to run your Stonehenge data against any she found on the internet—sorry, she’s fast—and collate it into all possible binary constructions and then translate that into the languages most likely spoken by the Neolithic people, and then translate any recognizable words from that into English. She may come up with several possibilities.”

A single word appeared on the screen, centered, 12-point Arial typeface.

second

Charlie and Salem tipped their heads to the left, identical quizzical expressions on their faces.

“Well, fuck me.”

Salem glanced over at Charlie, whose arms were crossed. “Yeah,” she said.

“There must be more.”

She keyed in some commands. This result took half the time but was identical.

second

“What’s that mean?” Charlie asked. “Second?”

Panic was brushing the edge of Salem’s view. She would not give into it. “I don’t know. But I know someone who might.”