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“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I said to myself and to Vivian at the same time. I was standing before the Town Hall, before Constantine’s mobile HQ, but I was also still back in Vivian’s apartment, sitting at the breakfast table.
“A trigger,” she replied then took a sip of coffee. “Like all the Genies. Some mnemonic that kicks off Cain’s Geneing. It will be something ironic. You know how Dark thought.”
“It could be anything.”
“Exactly. But Dark left a clue. He liked to play games; we know that much about him. With letters and numbers and puzzles and ciphers. Somewhere, he encoded a cipher for us to decode, a hint to Cain’s trigger, you just need to find it. And before the sun sets.”
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Right here.”
“No, where are you?”
“Hidden. We’re waking up. Tebor and I. Cain has already risen. You don’t have long.”
“No pressure, no pressure,” I exhaled, trying to think. I turned a full three-sixty, looking around the destruction. “Dark would have hidden it in plain sight. Those were the kind of games Dark liked to play. Like checking PFC Elton into a nursing home for a century, without anyone noticing anything out of the ordinary. He’s looking down from heaven, right now and laughing at me.”
I turned my eyes to the heavens, in the futile hope that Dark might part the clouds and provide me with a little divine inspiration. No such luck.
“That fucker isn’t up in heaven, I can tell you that for free,” Vivian said across the breakfast table. She smiled. I smiled back. I was also grinning like an idiot, standing alone in the middle of the street.
“Wait,” I called out, as something about the tattered banners over the Town Hall doors caught my eye. “That’s it!”
“What’s it?” Vivian looked up from her breakfast.
“There,” I pointed at the banner. “Competence, Community, Compassion.”
“What about it?”
“C, C, C. It’s a Rosicrucian liturgy, right? Co-opted by the NeoCons but originally Corpus, Cruor, Civitas, right? The body, the blood, the state?”
“That’s right,” Vivian said.
“So, that came from Dark, correct? The three C’s? I thought it was his puckish nod to the Geneing virus: C as in the Roman numeral for one-hundred. C plus C plus C is 300. Batch 300. It’s encoded on the genetic marker of the Geneing virus. It was the decrypt code for Dark’s last novel.”
“Yes?”
“But, what if Dark encoded still another layer of meaning into that liturgy.”
“The trigger?”
“Exactly!” I exclaimed. In my mind’s eye, I could see that Vivian had climbed to her feet in anticipation. Now I had to deliver on the details. But the exact significance still escaped me. I stared at the tattered banner, frantically thinking.
“What is it?” Vivan asked.
“Just give me a second.”
“Sasha,” Vivian said, earnestly. “There isn’t time. We’re already on the move...”
“Dark was a science fiction writer, right? A speculative thinker. A cryptologist. He’d never have used something as backward as Roman numerals...” The answer was right at the edge of my consciousness. If I could just coax it into focus...but the pull of Cain’s will was blurring my mind. I had to fight against it. It was a constant strain. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on Vivian in her PJ bottoms with her mess of bed-head. If I just sunk back into Geneing for a few minutes...but no, there was no time. If I returned to Vivian’s apartment, I’d never leave again. I knew that. And the sun had almost set.
“C is the third letter in the alphabet,” Vivian offered. “So three plus three plus three is nine...”
That was it! The revelation hit me like a wave. Vivian was right. I mean, she was talking total bullshit, but she was right!
“It’s not C the letter, but C the number,” I whispered.
“You just said it wasn’t a Roman numeral.”
“Not C for one-hundred,” I added with excitement. “But C as in the hexadecimal!” O’Day had once bored me with an explanation of how computers count. In a base greater than ten, letters are used to represent the numbers we lack characters for. Dark would have known this intimately, encoding his whole novel by hand. “C isn’t the third letter of the alphabet, but the hexadecimal number for twelve.”
“Twelve?” Vivian said in shock. “As in the twelve apostles? The twelve tribes of Israel?”
“The twelve labors of Hercules, twelve months in a year, twelve hours in half a day, Twelve Monkeys, Twelve Angry Men, Twelfth Night.”
“The twelfth rib that Adam sacrificed to create Eve,” Vivian added. That made us both pause. Considering.
“MJ-12” I said ominously.
“That sounds like Dark’s sense of irony,” Vivian added. She was fading. Something was happening. I was losing sight of Vivian’s apartment in my mind.
I only had seconds left. “But it’s not twelve. It’s twelve times twelve times twelve...”
It’s hard to explain that feeling you get when you realize something you should have known all along. A creepy, spin-chilling shock but also a profound sense of your own stupidity.
“Twelve times twelve times twelve?” Vivian said, she was now a great distance away.
“1768,” I answered.
“Of course,” Vivian said wistfully, her voice almost lost in the great void between us.
“But it’s not 1768,” I answered, reaching for my phone in my pocket. “It’s hexadecimal, remember? C times C times C is...”
“What do you get?”
I paused, looking at my phone.
“Well?” Vivian squeaked. She’d almost vanished into the ether.
“Do you know the Bible?” I asked her.