The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,267

was everybody? Wasn’t it awful damn quiet around here? Nobody ever told him anything.

“What is it?” Peter said, and resumed his melancholy spinning. “Because whatever it is, I hope it’s good news.”

“Oh my God,” said Michael. He was struggling to get the words out. “You have to hear this.”

“Michael, do you have any idea what’s going on around this place? What do I have to hear?”

“Amy,” he said. “You have to hear Amy.”

THIRTY-NINE

In the Lighthouse, Michael took a seat at his terminal. The device they’d removed from the girl’s neck now lay in pieces on a leather mat beside Michael’s CRT.

“The power source,” Michael was saying, “now, that’s interesting. Very interesting.” With a pair of tweezers, he lifted a tiny metal capsule from inside the transmitter. “A battery, but not like anything I’ve seen. Given how long it’s been running, my guess is nuclear.”

Peter startled. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

“It wasn’t to her, apparently. And it’s been inside her a long time.”

“What’s long?” Peter looked at his friend, whose face glowed with excitement. So far he’d provided only the vaguest answers to Peter’s questions. “You mean like a year?”

Michael grinned mysteriously. “You don’t know the half of it. Just hang on a minute.” He directed Peter’s attention again to the object on the counter, using his tweezers to identify the parts. “So you’ve got a transmitter, a battery, and then—the rest. My first guess was a memory chip, but it was way too small to fit into any of the ports on the mainframe, so I had to solder it hard.”

With a couple of quick strokes on his keyboard, Michael called up a page of information on the screen.

“The information on the chip is divided into two partitions, one much smaller than the other. What you’re looking at is the first partition.”

Peter saw a single line of text, letters and numbers all run together. “I can’t really read it,” he confessed.

“That’s because the spaces have been removed. For some reason, some of it’s transposed, too. I think it’s just a bad sector on the chip. Maybe something happened when I soldered it to the board. Either way, it looks like a lot of it is gone. But what’s here tells us a lot.”

Michael called up a second screen. The same figures, Peter saw, but the numbers and letters had reorganized themselves.

AMY NLN

SUB 13

ASSTO NOAH USAMRIID SWD

G:F W:22.72K

“Amy NLN.” Peter lifted his eyes from the screen. “Amy?”

Michael nodded. “That’s our girl. I don’t know for sure what NLN stands for, but I’m thinking ‘no last name.’ I’ll get to the stuff in the middle in a second, but the bottom line is pretty clear. Gender, female. Weight, 22.72 kilos. That’s about the size of a five-or six-year-old kid. So I’m figuring she was about that age when the transmitter was put in.”

None of it was clear to Peter, and yet Michael spoke with such confidence he could only take his friend’s word for it. “So it’s been in there, what, ten years?”

“Well,” Michael said, still grinning, “not exactly. And don’t jump ahead, I’ve got a lot to show you. It’s better if you just let me walk you through it. Now, that’s all I can get from the first partition, and it isn’t much, but it’s not nearly the most interesting stuff by a long shot. The second partition is the real storehouse. Close to sixteen terabytes. That’s sixteen trillion bytes of data.”

He pressed another key. Dense columns of numbers began to fly up the screen.

“It’s something, isn’t it? I thought at first it was some kind of encryption, but it actually isn’t. Everything’s right here, it’s just all run together like the first partition.” Michael did something to freeze the rush of columns and tapped a finger against the glass. “The key was this number here, first in the sequence, repeated down the column.”

Peter squinted at the screen. “Nine hundred eighty-six?”

“Close. Ninety-eight point six. Ring any bells?”

Peter could only shake his head. “Not really, no.”

“Ninety-eight point six is a normal human body temperature, using the old Fahrenheit scale. Now look at the rest of the line. The seventy-two is probably heart rate. You’ve got respiration and blood pressure. I’m guessing the rest has to do with brain activity, kidney function, that sort of thing. Sara would probably understand it better than I do. But the most important thing is that they come in discrete groups. It’s pretty obvious if you look for the first number and see where the sequence remounts. I’m