Lucy swung open her bedroom door too fast and a framed poster of the periodic table of elements rattled over her bed, which was still unmade. It had been unmade since Wednesday. But really, what was the point of doing and undoing the same thing every day? Lucy reasoned that, like Schrödinger’s cat, her bed could be both concurrently made and unmade.
Her mom wasn’t buying it.
Lucy picked up a bra from where she’d flung it on her desk chair, tossed it onto the bed, and sat down at her computer. Okay, she was a slob. Everywhere except in the laboratory. She felt most free there, and most in control. Science thrilled Lucy like nothing else. Not even Cole.
She drained the last of the sugary goodness from the aluminum can as she scanned in the picture and launched the math software that Santa had brought her at Christmas. Only Lucy would ask the man in the red suit for a better way to model pendulums. She’d also produced some pretty cool animations of cannonball trajectories to simulate the laws of motion—if she did say so herself.
Toothless Lucy materialized on the screen. The photo must have been taken around the same time she experienced her first seizure. How differently would her parents have treated her if she’d never been diagnosed with epilepsy?
She wiggled the Coke can—empty—and pushed it to one side.
Tilting closer to the monitor, Lucy determined that since the scratch was mostly on the blue of the sky, the best method for repairing it would be to separate the image into layers. Lucy had been taking things apart to see how they worked since before she could talk. Toasters. Toy helicopters. Nothing was safe.
She loved anything to do with stripping a machine down to its basic components and building it back up again. She could build the perfect computer brain, an operating system that would never malfunction like hers.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard and the image divided into four channels: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black—the standard for most printers.
Lucy squinted at the cyan channel. She’d already been using the software to distort images from the web, creating formulas to make them bigger or smaller, Alice in Wonderland–style. All Lucy needed to do was determine the right equation to repeat the colored pixels over the scratched area.
She gave the image a horizontal x-axis and a vertical y-axis, like she would to solve a geometry problem on graph paper, and as she moved the four windows of the color channels side by side on the screen, her eyes caught on something odd in the yellow window.
Nearly three-quarters of the image was covered in irregularly spaced dots.
When she leaned back, Lucy realized they formed a gridlike pattern. It resembled braille or Morse code, but not quite. Strange.
One book opens another. It couldn’t be a message, could it?
A knock came on the open door, and Lucy jumped.
“Mom!”
“Didn’t mean to startle you.” Her mom extended a mug in Lucy’s direction. Peppermint tea was her mom’s cure-all. Lucy had far too many memories of waking up from a seizure to the fresh, wintry smell. “Here, I thought you might change your mind,” she said.
Professor Phelps wasn’t accustomed to taking no for an answer. Like mother, like daughter, Lucy supposed.
Relenting, she leapt up to accept the mug and block her mom’s view of the computer screen. “Thanks,” she said.
“Everything okay? I thought you’d be out with Cole or Claudia.”
“You want me to go out partying?”
“That’s not what I—”
“I know, Mom.” Grinning, Lucy took a sip of tea. “Everything’s okay. Swear.” She certainly couldn’t tell her mother that Cole had gotten her caught up in a cheating scam. “I just wanted to veg out tonight.”
Her mom nodded. “We’re heading to bed now. Need anything else?”
“I’m good.”
“Good,” she repeated. “Don’t stay up too late.”
“I won’t. Would you mind closing the door?”
Her mom hesitated a moment, lips pursed. “Sleep well, honey.”
“You too.” She took a big gulp of tea as guilt swirled in her chest. Lucy’s mom wasn’t effusive as a rule, but honey was the term of endearment she reserved for Lucy. Sure, her mom was overprotective and controlling, but it was only because she cared.
As soon as the door clicked shut, however, Lucy abandoned the tea on a bookshelf to go cold. She interlocked her fingers, stretching out her arms. Her knuckles cracked. Sitting back down, Lucy enlarged the yellow-channel window.
Could the dots be some kind of binary code?
Her eyes zigzagged across the screen. She needed a working hypothesis. Hmm. She drummed her fingers against the mouse pad.
If Lucy gave the dots a value of 1 and the blank spaces a value of 0, what did that give her? She opened up another text window and began transcribing the sequence of 1s and 0s. An hour ticked by but Lucy hardly noticed.
She pulled up a binary-to-text converter and input the string of numbers and … strikeout. Gobbledygook.
Maybe she needed to reverse the values?
Biting her tongue between her teeth, Lucy pasted the reversed text into the translator.
More gibberish.
Lucy rolled back in her desk chair, then rose to standing. Treading back and forth in the space between her desk and her bed, she nearly burned a hole in the carpet.
What was she missing?
She swiped the mug from the bookshelf and chugged the tepid tea. She rubbed her eyes, glancing at the clock. It was after midnight. Maybe she should give it a rest. No. A scientist didn’t quit in the middle of an experiment.
Lucy’s eyelids fluttered. Focusing on the screen once more, she noticed something about the dots she hadn’t seen before.
Some of the dots were a darker shade of yellow than the others.
Could that have any significance?
Lucy parked herself back in the desk chair and logged into a computer builder and programmer forum where she often whiled away the hours.
Starbuck01: hey night owls, anyone know about encrypting data into images?
Less than a minute passed before Lucy got a response.
phlebas: what kind of encryption?
Starbuck01: in the yellow channel of a photo—lighter and darker dots
phlebas: you’re looking at the metadata?
Starbuck01: no. not a digital photo. a scanned photo
phlebas: sounds like standard steganography but I’ve only seen it in digital images. sorry
Starbuck01: no problem
Lucy stood, pulling her shirt over her head to change for bed. The dots were just a red herring—something to distract her from Cole’s lack of communication. She didn’t need a psychologist to tell her that. Had he forgotten their fight already? Had he forgotten her? Lucy swallowed a lump in her throat.
Suddenly a new message appeared on the board.
Lovelace: human eyes are least sensitive to yellow
Starbuck01: huh?
Lovelace: don’t mind if I butt in?
Starbuck01: no! be my guest!
Lovelace: ;-) thanks. so if you wanted to send a message that no one would notice, you’d use the yellow channel in a photo
Unless you pull the image apart, Lucy thought.
Starbuck01: even in a scanned photo?
Lovelace: could be. like a QR code. if you took a picture of the photo with a digital camera—or scanned it in—the coded message would become visible
Starbuck01: sounds like spy stuff
And who would go to so much trouble?
Lovelace: or clever marketing lol. to get people to enter a competition or something
Starbuck01: huh. wouldn’t have thought of that.
Lucy’s dad was the least likely person she knew to get sucked in by an advertising campaign. And, anyway, this was a photo of her, not a billboard.
Starbuck01: what’s with the darker and lighter dots?
She tapped her foot on the caster of the rolling chair at an increasingly frenetic rate.
Lovelace: it looks like a grid, yes?
Starbuck01: yeah
Lovelace: ok, so if the square to the right has a higher level of yellow than the one to the left, it’s = 0. if the square to the left has a lesser level of yellow = 1
Oh! Lucy hammered her fist onto the desk in excitement. The mug bounced. Crap. The last thing she needed was to wake her parents.
Starbuck01: how do you know about this?
Lovelace: i could tell you but then I’d have to kill you …
LULZ, Lucy typed back as she took several steadying breaths. Cole wasn’t wrong about stress, annoyingly. It could bring on a seizure.
But it hadn’t for two years, Lucy reminded herself.
Lovelace: pro tip: check the center of the squares for the level of yellow. that’s where the data will be
Starbuck01: thanks
Lovelace: someone sent you a coded picture?
Lucy stiffened. My boyfriend, she wrote, unsure why she felt the need to lie to a total stranger she would never meet.
Lovelace: sounds like a keeper.
Starbuck01: yeah. thanks. night
Lucy logged off, a knot forming in her stomach. Cole wouldn’t have the slightest inkling how to encode a message. Was he a “keeper”? She’d thought so until this afternoon.
With a shake of her head, Lucy pushed thoughts of him from her mind and zoomed in even farther on the yellow color channel. She opened a new window and transcribed the dots according to Lovelace’s advice.
Tap, tap, tap went her foot.
When she was finished, Lucy exhaled, her shoulders curling inward, and plugged the binary sequence into the converter with nervous fingers.
01010100 01101111 00111010 00100000 01010011 01100001 01110000 01101001 01100101 01101110 01110100 01101001 01100001 00100000 01000111 01110010 01101111 01110101 01110000 00001101 00001010 01010011 01110101 01100010 01101010 00111010 00100000 01001110 01101001 01101011 01101111 01101100 01100001 00001101 00001010 00110011 00110100 01110100 01101000 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 00111000 01110100 01101000 00101100 00100000 01110010 01101111 01101111 01101101 00100000 00110011 00110011 00110010 00110111 00001101 00001010
Holding her breath, she pressed Enter, and closed her eyes. Just for a moment.
When Lucy peeked at the screen again, her jaw fell open. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but it certainly hadn’t been this.
To: Sapientia Group
Subj: Nikola
34th and 8th, room 3327
A shiver raced down her spine.
The Sapientia Group was the name of her dad’s venture capital firm. But Lucy’s name definitely wasn’t Nikola.
Who had sent this photo to her dad? And, why?
Thirty-fourth and Eighth must be an address. Eaton wasn’t big enough to have streets or avenues ordered with numerals. She typed it into Google. Bingo.
The New Yorker Hotel, smack-dab in the middle of Manhattan.
Was it the location where the photo was taken? Lucy had no recollection of ever visiting that hotel. But why would she? She’d only been two or three years old at most.
Nikola.
Why would anyone call her Nikola? Unless she had an evil twin … Stop, Lucy. That made no sense. Although it also made no sense that her dad would have been sent a photo of Lucy encoded with a message that called her by a different name.
Why had he kept it?
Questions whizzed around her brain.
She let out a monumental yawn as the clock in the corner of the screen blinked 12:59 A.M. Sleep. Lucy should sleep. She would need all her wits about her tomorrow.
Tomorrow, her father was going to have some serious explaining to do.