Powerhouse part two
Charlie said nothing, bewildered by all the talk of aliens, wormholes, governments. An algorithm to break into a computer, that he could do. A secure terminal, that he could understand; he'd worked a case like that with Don, ages ago. Could he do it without access to software, with just a picture of the screen, a pencil and some paper? Now that would be a real challenge. Unless Brackett would let him have a dumb terminal without wireless access…
Brackett and Daniel were still arguing. Don and Jack were exercising, grimly doing sit ups in sync, counting down the numbers. Brackett was going to get out the remote control thingy in a minute and then Don and Jack were going to get hurt. Maybe just Jack? After all, he hadn't broken the rules, just Daniel, so maybe Brackett would just hurt Jack, not Donnie. The probabilities ran through his mind but the variables kept multiplying till there was no form or shape to the equations at all…
Paper. Pencils. He scribbed down the first line of his train of thought, and then the flow was irresistible. Factor in the possibilities…
"Charlie."
And then if Brackett was influenced by Don and Jack's behaviour and not just what Daniel and Charlie did, that opened up a whole new subset of possibilities…
"Charlie!"
Something hit his arm. He looked up, and realised that Brackett was still there.
"Sorry," he said quickly, lowering his eyes.
"That's all right, Charlie," Brackett said. "I'm glad to see you working. I'm going to leave you boys to it, and come back in a couple of hours…"
"No," Charlie said.
"No?"
"I mean… if we're going to solve this without a computer, it's going to be screen by screen."
"Which means?"
"Which means that, if I solve this screen, you're going to have to get access to the terminal, enter the data, and then come back and tell us what happens next so that I can solve the next layer."
Brackett stepped back towards the door.
"Don't worry about it, Charlie. We're going to be using a little local talent for that part of the operation."
***
It was burgers this time, tasteless and only slightly warm. But the paper bag also held ketchup and fries and there were paper cups of some good strong coffee and Charlie was asleep before he'd had time to put down his cup.
It was the banging noise that woke him up.
"Now we are three," Daniel's voice said sarcastically. "You OK, Charlie?"
Was he OK? He felt sluggish, but that was probably just the drugs again. He took a deep breath and tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes, the clanking chain reminding him of where he was. And then he sat up, and saw that Daniel was right, and while they'd been out Brackett had brought a third person into the room.
Only this guy wasn't chained to the wall like Charlie and Daniel. He was all squashed up in a metal cage - a cube with five metal sides and one made out of a criss cross of bars, like wire mesh only thicker. And inside the cage there was a man, a short-haired well-muscled man all squashed up to fit into the space, and the banging noise was him, banging his head on the bars as if he was doing a materials test and trying to determine whether his head or the cell bars scored higher on the Mohs scale.
"Would you cut that out!" Daniel said impatiently.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
"I SAID, WOULD YOU CUT THAT OUT! PLEASE! Hello? Do you speak English?"
"There's someone else with Don and your friend Jack," Charlie said quietly. "Look."
"Yeah," Daniel agreed. "But if Mr Local Talent doesn't stop that, he isn't going to have enough brains left to recognise him. HEY!!! WHO'S YOUR FRIEND THERE? ON THE SCREEN? SEE?"
That seemed to penetrate.
"My name's Charles," Charlie said quietly. "Charles Eppes. That's my brother Don up there on the screen."
That awful banging noise had stopped and now the man in the cage was just breathing heavily, staring at Charlie.
"And this is Daniel Jackson, and that's his friend Jack up on the screen with Don. There's a man called Brackett who did this to all of us - do you know him?"
The man blinked, then closed his eyes firmly, screwed them up like a little kid does when they're playing hide and seek. He seemed to realise he was breathing noisily and took a deep shuddering breath and held it, then let it out long and slow and opened up his eyes again.
"Are you OK?" Daniel said, matching his voice to Charlie's.
"Better now, thanks. I have…. allergies. Whatever Brackett gave me didn't agree with me. And it's Ellison."
"What?"
"Ellison. If we're introducing ourselves. The name's Jim Ellison. Detective, Major Crimes, Cascade PD. And that's my partner Blair Sandburg up there on the screen with your friends."
***
"I don't think I need you to translate it, actually. But there's probably a missing symbol… here. So if Jim gets to the terminal, I can tell him what to do next but there will be one symbol that he's just going to have to guess."
Charlie had been working on the first screen for a couple of hours. It didn't matter that the screens were written in symbols he didn't recognise any more than it would have mattered if it had been written in Greek or Chinese or Cyrillic characters - it was just another kind of code, and his mind automatically made patterns and from the patterns he could see pretty quickly what the shape of the solution had to be. But there was a missing factor: only eighteen symbols occurred in the pattern he had been given, and it was clear there was potential for there to be many more. Perhaps twenty six, like the Western alphabet, perhaps more, in which case Jim would have to guess one of eight or perhaps ten or more symbols. If Charlie had been designing the system, he would have designed in failsafes that meant you only got one or maybe two tries before you were locked out, so…
"I won't translate for you, Charlie. I mean, I won't translate for Brackett."
"I understand that. Really. But if Jim puts in this…" He quickly sketched the six symbols that were the solution to the first screen. "Then what would go here?"
Daniel looked at the piece of paper for a moment.
"Look, Daniel," Jim said. "I get it, OK. Standard operating practice would be for you to assume we're with the bad guys until proven otherwise. I get it that you don't want to give Brackett the time of day, let alone some kind of secret code. But unless you have a plan B, it's my partner and Charlie's brother and your friend Jack who are going to suffer…"
Daniel sighed and pulled the sketchbook away from Charlie, drew a squiggle on it.
"There," he said. "If Charlie's right, you're looking at an address. And that symbol is kind of the last line of the address."
"Like a zip code?" Charlie guessed.
"No - more like a… point of origin."
They were silent a moment, the three of them, looking up at the screen where their partners were talking together, Blair's hands working like dynamos as Don and Jack laughed over something he'd said.
"So what happens now?" Charlie asked.
"I don't know," Jim said. "I can't imagine Brackett thinks he's going to send me off to break into some top secret government banking facility and then come back again. I'm guessing he's got something else in mind."
"Do you know him?" Daniel guessed.
"Oh yeah. I thought I'd put him away once already. The last time, he used a canister of the ebola virus to blackmail me and Blair into getting him in to a top secret military base."
"So plan A would be, you let him take you to the bank, and then you grab a phone, call in the troops, take Brackett into custody and then come back and rescue the rest of us?"
Charlie snorted. Daniel and Jim were so different in some ways, but so alike in others. But if Jim followed Daniel's plan and double-crossed Brackett, what would happen to Don?
"We'll see," Jim said, and tugged at his ear, grimacing. "We'll just have to play it by ear."
Daniel groaned and lay back on his bench. Charlie looked from Daniel to Jim and back again, and then realised they were both looking at him.
"What?" he said.
They both rolled their eyes, and Jim tugged at his earlobe again. Oh. Brackett must be listening in, of course, he should have factored that in. So not only could they not trust each other, they couldn't even talk without Brackett listening in to everything they were saying.
***
Brackett came for Jim an hour later. No need for drugs, this time. He simply opened the door, unlatched a metal something, perhaps a bolt, from the base of Jim's cage round the side where Charlie couldn't see it, and then just wheeled the whole cage, and Jim, out of the room.
The cell door clanged shut.
Charlie looked at Daniel. But Daniel was sitting glumly on the bench, fiddling with the chain around his ankle. Only fifteen days and ten hours to go till the chain should give way. Probably. Give or take.
Charlie looped the chain back around his foot and started the rhythmic stressing again. If the rice and beans and burgers represented dinner, and they were only going to be fed once a day, then his time sense was probably pretty accurate and he could double check by taking his pulse and using an approximation from the number of heartbeats and so the amount of time needed to exert enough force onto…
There was a zone, a place he reached inside his head, where the numbers and diagrams and equations flowed and it was easy to see the shapes and the patterns and there were no words except the symbols, the language of math that was the language of the universe itself, the pattern that underlay the stars, and it was blue…
Blue?
Blue. He looked up, unwilling to leave the zone, but it was all there, all still within his grasp, the equations strong and clean and clear, outlined in fire, against walls that were coloured a deep ocean blue, only they weren't walls, they were leaves. Leaves and branches and trunks and trees, but blue. The numbers rolled across a blue jungle and it was the most natural thing in the world, the place he'd been, escaped to, been drawn to, every day since he was a child, the place of Numbers, where he was wholly at home.
Except it had never been blue before.
Or had trees.
Or…
"It's OK Charlie. You're dreaming, I think. I'm Blair."
He was the same height as Charlie, had curly hair like Charlie - it was Jim's friend who'd been locked up with Don and Jack, Blair, he realised. Only he wasn't sitting in the room with Don and Jack any more. He was standing in the blue jungle surrounded by a halo of numbers, numbers that danced and glowed and tugged at the corners of Charlie's understanding…
"No, don't drift off again. Look at me. You know who I am. Let's pretend it's real. Stay and talk a while, OK?"
"OK," Charlie said agreeably. Because there had never been anyone else there, where the numbers were, not before.
"I'm looking for Jim - is he there with you?"
"No, Brackett took him," Charlie said. He wondered, vaguely, why Blair wasn't wearing any clothes except for a loincloth and some paint, plaits and feathers in his hair. He looked down at himself and he was still wearing the blue paper scrubs, bare footed, but he wasn't chained, not here. The numbers started to sparkle and wiggle and move around in patterns that nagged at the edges of his vision.
"Charlie! Concentrate! Look at me. Brackett took him? Was he OK?"
"Sure."
There was a sine, and it made a sinuous loop as it danced around a P, pi and a prime that had joined hands and were dancing in a ring…
"Charlie! Charlie! CHARLIE!!! Tell Jim to meet me here next time you all go to sleep."
The prime stopped dancing and he saw it was eleven but then it shimmered and the two strokes of the eleven twisted and shimmied and it was two, but that was still a prime so what did it matter?
"Charlie! Blue jungle. He knows where it is. Tell him the blue jungle."
But the numbers were calling, and moving somewhere he couldn't follow, and Charlie tried, he always tried, but sometimes the numbers moved too far and too fast and he couldn't follow and he wasn't asleep, he wasn't asleep, he wasn't…
He woke up.
"Blue!"
Jim looked at him between the bars of his cage.
"What did you say?"
"Blue. Blue jungle. He said to meet him there."
But Jim was staring at him, Jim and Daniel both, and suddenly Charlie was properly awake, and remembered that Brackett was listening.
"Sorry," he said, smiling. "Bad dream."
***