When we reached the end of the hall, we turned right into an almost identical hallway—same linoleum, same empty offices on either side, but there was one significant difference.
At the end of this hallway was a closed door.
It looked exactly like a private investigator’s door from an old noir detective film. The word STATIONERY had been stenciled or glued onto it using some variation of the Futura font. Directly below the word STATIONERY was the suite number. Twenty-three. Of course.
Chloe and I looked at each other. She raised her eyebrows and smiled, and then she tried the door. It was unlocked.
We entered the room and turned on the lights.
* * *
—
The room was small, about twenty-five feet square. Two large windows filled the wall to the left of the door. There were a number of things inside, but stationery definitely wasn’t one of them. The wall to our right, directly opposite the large windows, was covered by three dented gunmetal-gray bookshelves filled with old books, most on the subject of industrial design. In between the books were a number of small potted plants, which were all still alive.
Whatever was going on up there, someone had been watering the plants.
There was a small, low teak desk with matching chair positioned in the exact center of the room. Sitting on top of the desk was an old computer. There was no logo visible, but it looked like a machine from the 1970s, an 8-bit computer called a Commodore VIC-20. Beside the old computer on the left was a cassette tape recorder, and just to the right of everything was an ancient cream-colored cathode-ray monitor.
Chloe sat down in front of the computer, and I switched everything on.
The recorder was something called a Datasette—an archaic system that used cassette tapes to store data. I’d seen something similar in a vintage computer store in New York City, but this setup was different, the keyboard in particular.
From above it appeared normal, just regular letters and numbers, but there were two tiny symbols on the front face of each of the keys: One was a symbol in a language I’d never seen before, and the other was geometric. The VIC-20 had symbols on the front of the keys as well, but not like these. These looked like symbols you might find in a book on alchemy or the occult, but maybe they were simply part of an old computer-programming language; I had no idea.
Once the computer was up and running, I knelt down on the floor beside Chloe and the two of us were faced with a flashing cursor and the word “Ready.”
We tried typing the handful of BASIC programming language commands that we could remember, but nothing happened.
I decided to try a different approach. I typed in one word—“Hazel”—and hit return.
Nothing.
Then I tried the word “Rabbits.”
After a momentary flicker and hum, followed by a bright flash and jumble of images, the screen entered a boot sequence, and the tiny speaker atop the cassette player crackled to life.
Suddenly, the monitor was displaying full-color video, and we were looking at a press conference or something similar.
In the center of the screen was a lectern set on a low stage. A crowd of reporters were milling around, waiting for whoever was going to be speaking to arrive.
After a few seconds, a tall, thin thirtysomething woman wearing a white skirt suit waded through the throng of reporters and made her way up and onto the stage. She purposefully stepped up to the lectern, and her amplified voice, strong and clear with a thick British accent, filled the room.
“Minister Jesselman is going to make a brief statement, but we’re not going to be taking any questions at this time. We will, however, brief you again after tomorrow’s session. Everybody clear?” The assembled press grumbled and moaned; clearly they had some questions about whatever was going on.
For a moment, with everyone milling around, it wasn’t clear exactly what was happening or where to focus your attention. Was Minister Jesselman involved in some sort of personal or political scandal? Was he going to announce a run for office? Or were we waiting on something else entirely?
Finally, as if in response to those questions, a distinguished-looking gray-haired man in a blue designer suit stepped up to the lectern and cleared his throat.
“Good morning, everyone. I came here today to address the clean energy initiative bill’s initial failure and our desperate need to keep it alive in parliament, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to deliver another message instead.”
And with those words, Minister Jesselman calmly reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and removed a snub-nosed silver revolver.
The crowd erupted in a flurry of chaotic movement, yelling and climbing over one another in an attempt to get as far away from the front of the stage as possible, but Jesselman wasn’t concerned with them. He just looked directly into the camera, smiled a strange, sad smile, and delivered his message: