For the first time since I met him, Archer looks shaken.
Not so much in his expression, but in the color of his skin. There’s a faint wash of gray under his normal color, like the sky before storm clouds start rolling in. As he leads me to the worktable where all the notebooks are spread out, I’m tempted to grab his elbow, ask him if he’s okay.
But I have to remain resolved. He owes me answers even if he does look like he’s seen a ghost. Several ghosts, actually.
I stop in the middle of the room, cross my arms. Might as well do it now. “What’s going on?”
He looks up in surprise. “What do you mean?”
I take a deep breath, then dive for the deep end. “Who gave you those notebooks? And what’s supposed to be in them?”
“I told you a friend gave them to me. And I don’t know what’s in them. That’s what you’re here to find out.” He sounds so weary as he says it, as if he’s sick of these half-truths too.
“Try again,” I say. “Maybe mention the will this time.”
His mouth drops open. “What the fuck? How did you find out about that?”
“Wills are public record.” I’m not going to bring up Lila. Let Archer think it was my own superior Google skills that uncovered all this. “Ira was the friend you were talking about. He left you these, along with a hefty sum of money.”
Archer sits down heavily, running his hands over his face. “I wish you hadn’t gone looking for that.”
“Why, so you could keep in me the dark?”
His hands drop. “So I could keep you safe. Sit down.”
“Why am I not safe?”
“Sit down.” He puts steel into that as he gestures to the chair next to him. “If you want the story, sit down.”
I do, crossing my legs and my arms as if to keep myself secure. And closed off from him, no matter how badly I want to touch him. “How are the oligarchs involved?”
“Excuse me?” He looks like I just knocked him on the head. “What oligarchs?”
“The ones at the bank.”
He actually smiles then. “There are no oligarchs involved. I swear.”
I uncurl a fraction. “Then what is it? Because I know about the car crashes. Both of them. And the break-ins. Both of them.”
He stares at me for a moment. “You did dig deep,” he murmurs. “All right, let’s start from the beginning. There were six of us Ira took under his wing. He mentored us, encouraged us to work on AI. He also liked to make puzzles for us, brain teasers to keep us sharp.” He gestures to the notebooks. “That’s what the code was about. One last brain teaser for us.”
“You miss him.” It’s so clear in his tone, his posture.
“I do. We… we were working on a self-driving system for a car before he died. Ira encouraged us to do it and, when we wanted to test it, let us put it in his car. That’s how much faith he had in us.”
His gaze is hollow, distant, and I can suddenly see where this is going.
I clap my hand over my mouth. “Oh God. The crash.”
Archer’s expression clouds. “It wasn’t supposed to be on. We only turned it on for controlled testing. We thought… we were so arrogant about it.”
His tone cracks near the end, splitting apart so hard I want to gather him up and seal him back together.
He and his friends killed his mentor. And Tynan. They didn’t mean to, but they did. It’s so horrible I can hardly believe it. And from that tragedy, they each got a massive windfall. Along with these notebooks.
I understand now why they didn’t immediately try to decode them. It must have been a terrible reminder of what they’d done.
“You used the money to start your business,” I say slowly. “All of you. But none of you touched self-driving AI again.”
His smile is bitter. “You’re very quick. Yeah, that’s what we did. Morgan works on it at Inspiron, but none of us ever could.”
I frown, sitting up suddenly. “But what about Cassian’s crash? You guys definitely covered that one up.” The first crash seems like a tragic accident. But that one…
Archer’s gaze flicks to me, then away again. “He was testing our old system out. To see if maybe we weren’t responsible.”
Oh God, and then the car crashed all over again and proved they definitely were. No wonder they had to cover it up. “Please tell me no one’s using or testing that system anymore.”
“No, of course not,” Archer says roughly. “And Morgan checked and double-checked the Inspiron system. It’s completely safe.”
“If it’s all completely safe, then how am I in danger?” In the very same moment, I remember. “The break-ins. What happened with the break-ins?”
The gray air has left Archer now and he looks like more like himself, if a touch irritated. But more at the situation instead of at me. “Someone’s trying to steal the notebooks. Gideon had his and Tynan’s—he was the executor and Tynan had no next of kin—and someone broke in twice trying to get them. That’s who you saw on the bank camera feed. That’s the closest we’ve come to tracking her.”
“You have no idea who it is?”
Archer shakes his head. “Gage has tried everything. She’s not in any system at all. Which should be impossible in this day and age.”
I don’t need to ask how she found out about the notebooks. She’s dug up the will, same as me, and for some reason decided she wants them. But why?
“So what’s in the notebooks? Because you have to have some idea. I mean”—I gesture wildly—“it’s not his famous, secret chili recipe or something. Or his illegal poetry. So what is it?”
“It’s…” Archer frowns. “Illegal poetry?”
“Yes,” I say primly. “It’s more common than you think. The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova used to compose poems, make her friends memorize them, then burn the paper they were on to prevent it from falling into officials’ hands. You go to that kind of trouble to keep something from somebody. Not for puzzles and logic games.”
“We don’t know, not for certain.” He gets up, goes to his desk. “But we did find a clue, just the other day. A tiny one.” Slowly he pulls out three sheets of paper protected by plastic sleeves. Even from where I’m at, I can see the fire damage, the line of black eating up the pages.
He brings them over, sets them down one by one. The lines on them read like a textbook, giving instructions and formulas that I don’t quite understand but that are composed in regular English. If I’d bothered to learn anything about computer programming, I might have understood it.
“Does this make sense to you?” I ask him.
“It’s fragments, but yes. Except there’s not enough there to say what it is beyond that it’s what Ira was always working on—computer-neuronal interfaces.”
I groan. “Then I really can’t help you. There’s no way I’d ever be able to translate that. Have you tried your translation system?”
“There’s too little here for it to crack them. I can’t even match these up to anything in the notebooks.”
I look at the pages again, reminded of Akhmatova burning her own works. But who would want this kept silent? There’s no secret police coming after any of these people. “Are you sure these notes came from whatever produced the notebooks? He might have simply been using the fireplace as his shredder.”
“He didn’t do that,” Archer says. “Not once for anything anyone ever saw. But he did for these papers.”
My fingers find one particularly opaque line about “spike timing” and “encoding.” I can’t even understand this in English. “This is going to be like translating Linear A into Elamite.” At his blank look I explain. “Both languages that have never been deciphered.”
“If you can just match these pages to one in the notebook,” he says, “my translation software can do the rest. But I need that wedge first.”
I don’t know if I can do it. There has to be some kind of hook, something to grab in this mess of random words, and I haven’t seen one yet. I could go mad flipping through these pages for the rest of my life, searching for what isn’t there.
I could also find the wedge and snap this right open. I’d bring a dead man’s words and ideas back to life, which is what most translation is in the end. Breathing new life into old words, transporting them into new worlds.
“What happens once it’s translated?” I say. “What are you going to do with whatever’s in there?”
“Give it to his daughters,” Archer says quietly. “They might not be able to do anything with it, but it belongs to them.”
“Even though Ira left them to you?”
Archer nods. “Would you like to meet them? Raven and Morgan?”
Morgan was the one who was running frantically through the Inspiron code, searching for the errors. And she’s still the one working on self-driving cars, strangely. Considering how her father died, I’m surprised she didn’t also give it up.
And I really know nothing about Raven. Lila didn’t seem to think she was interesting enough to go into her dossier.
“Okay,” I say. “Do they know what I’m doing with the notebooks?”
“Yes. And they saw the debate.” A ghost of a smile crosses Archer’s face. “They’d love to meet you. There’s a party in a few days, for Bishop’s birthday. Come with me.”
It’s kind of an invitation but also kind of not. Archer’s certainly not asking if I want to go, but he’s not commanding me either. Somehow that makes his offer even more compelling.
“I’ll have to check my schedule,” I say, holding back a smile. “I’ve been given this impossible translation, you see, that’s going to take up all my time. Really, it’s like something a troll in a fairy tale would give the heroine to stump her.”
“You think I’m a troll?”
“A fairy-tale kind, not a gross Lord of the Rings kind.”
“That’s supposed to be better?”
If I keep this up, I’m going to start laughing. Which probably isn’t appropriate considering everything he just told me. “Look, if you want me to do this, you need to stop distracting me with trolls and party invitations.”
“So you’ll come?” Again, it’s not really a question. And again, it’s way more compelling than it should be.
As if I’d really say no. I can’t meet the man who made these infuriating notebooks, but I can meet his daughters, which will have to be good enough.
“I suppose so. If my boss lets me off.”
“As if you’d ever listen to anything your boss says,” he mutters. But he sounds pleased too.
Which makes me pleased. We’re just in a tiny little bubble of mutual pleased-ness here. But still pretending to be annoyed by the other.
It’s nice. So nice that I’m glad I finally confronted Archer about everything and got some answers. Because now I can enjoy the niceness without worrying. At least not as much worrying.