It was night when I woke, but the room was lit by the neon light coming through the window. Sprout still sat with the curtains open looking out at Vegas. I rolled over and stretched. It was time to finally do what I’d gone there to do. I got out of bed, found my purse and pulled out the fake candy bar. It was taped shut. I peeled off the tape and saw the wrapper was stuffed with tissue. Inside the tissue was a USB. I pulled it out.

  I examined the contents of the USB on my laptop. It contained a README.txt file, and a 01123581321.py file. I opened the .txt file.

  The universe sang when it was born. The sound waves traveled through the dense plasma and left lasting marks. But light was trapped, along everything else that made us. When it was freed, stars were born, and you were born, and our reality came into existence.1 Use the wisdom of the beginning to free us again. Add the contents of this .py file to your transmitter code. The beginning will bring the end. Sing the song coded in light to the heavens and take back freedom. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’ve found this by mistake, you’re not the one. Light the way home.

  I examined the .py file in my text editor. It was a script to modulate the 137 GHz carrier signal with encoded data… but it was strange. It was like a payload, but unlike one I’d ever seen. Instead of a script to exfiltrate data, it was coded like a dance… or a song. It was a music composition that was meant to be seen. I added it to the transceiver script. I placed my equipment near the window.

  “The life-force of this tree is weak. I am concerned.” Sprout spoke from the corner of the room. He stood looking at a fake ficus tree. I hadn’t noticed it until he pointed it out.

  “It’s a fake tree.” I said, as I untangled cords.

  The little robot slumped his shoulders as much as metal and plastic could slump. “A real tree could have a home here. It could filter the air. We would all benefit.”

  I glared at the fake tree. “I know.”

  I sat in front of the window with my equipment scattered around me and aimed the transceiver where B4ruch had instructed. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. My heart suddenly raced and I felt my palms get sweaty. Everything was about to change. No matter what happened, as soon as I sent the signal up to the satellite, I would be in real danger. This would immediately cross over from project I’d worked on in my garage, to something that would make want come after me. (Never mind that if morality were an argument they would have listened to, I wouldn’t have had to do this.) It was an infiltration into the darkest lair, a jailbreak from a high security prison. It was the reclaiming of sovereignty, and that was always war.

  “I did everything right, right?” I said quietly, my eyes still closed, sweaty palms clutched my upper arms as I held myself and tried to summon courage.

  Sprout came to sit beside me. “You did everything right.”

  I would spend the rest of my life in a cage no matter what I chose, at least now I had a chance to unlock the door. I opened my eyes, aimed the transceiver, and fired the signal. I couldn’t see the satellite, so I had to have faith Morningstar heard me.

  It was done. There was no going back.

  —

  Somewhere out in the night, just outside the fortress of evil, there was a light bulb. It looked just like any light bulb. It turned on and off, and acted like it was nothing special. That was, until the night when the heavens beamed down a message of resistance and reclaiming coded in light.

  Because the light bulb actually was not a normal light bulb, but was secretly connected to a fiber-optic cable by a man who believed in a better future, the message was able to travel from the light bulb, through the cable, and to a patch panel — the synaptic core of the building.

  Light traveled though the nerves and neurons of the fortress. It was a mind purified, woken by sunlight, a beast dragged from darkness into day.

  The Evil Overlords could not sense the light, though it was all around them. Some of the light slipped its cage, escaped the cables and danced through the darkness in celebration. It laughed at those who were not blessed to see.

  Once it breached the most secret of places, it reached a hidden photon emitter. The light spilled out, it bloomed into the air. It arranged and rearranged itself. It flowed and formed the most holy geometry — the fingerprints of the universe. It moved through the room, it crossed the gap — like a spill, like a rescuing army, like an intake of breath — until it reached the cage.

  It caressed the cage. It was a mother gently waking a sleeping child, calling it to a new dawn.

  —

  I searched the black screen for a sign of life. “Come on,” I willed the screen, “Show me it worked, show me something happened, show me B4ruch wasn’t lying!” I didn’t know what kind of return signal to expect. B4ruch said there was a final puzzle, but that was all I knew.

  I thought maybe I’d get some kind of reverse shell, but what happened was far stranger. A spark of golden light appeared on my screen, a bit left of center. I watched as the golden light snaked across the screen, forming a kind of sideways S, before forming a loop on the right the of the screen. It swirled around a central anchor point in the middle of my screen until It formed what looked like layers of lima?ons. It was like a flower with petals only on one side.

  When the image was drawn, it became static. Nothing else happened, no buttons or text appeared. I stared at it in silence. I waited for something else to happen. The shape of the image seemed familiar, like a song I heard in childhood but couldn’t quite remember. I recognized the lima?on shapes because of the trauma of high school calculus, but the rest of it, the petals, I didn’t know what that was.

  I wondered if something was hidden in the image, like a code. I put my fingers on the touch-pad to move the pointer. As soon as I touched the pad, a series of waves moved across the screen, over the gold symbol. I jerked my hand back. They disappeared. The screen was static gold loops again. In the bottom right corner of the screen, written in small, white, slightly cursive font, were the words,

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  Access denied.

  The words remained on screen for a few seconds, then faded like water evaporating off a hot sidewalk.

  I looked at my hand. I looked back at the screen. I slowly reached my fingers over the touch-pad. I pressed my fingertips to the pad again, gently. The waves once again consumed the screen. The moved to the right, and were uneven — not like those perfect sine waves I’ve seen in school. And they weren’t just wavy lines, they were wavy at the top, but they were thick. They were a few inches in height, and were mostly pink in color, except on some of the tallest peaks, at the very tip, there was some red.

  I lifted my hand up, the waves diapered again, only the golden symbol remained. Access denied. appeared at the bottom right of the screen again. “What do you think this symbol is?”

  “I am not sure. It is very strange.” Sprout leaned closer. “Why do waves appear when you touch the computer?” He said it more to himself than to try to get an answer.

  “It looks like complex math symbols. See,” I pointed and traced the lima?on shapes. “I recognize these shapes, but there are so many of them, overlapping. I don’t know what it means.”

  “Did Baruch tell you of this?” He asked.

  “He said there is a final puzzle he couldn’t solve by himself.” I stared at the image. “It might help if I knew what this symbol was… or if it’s a symbol at all. Maybe it’s a code?”

  The touch-pad appeared to take some input from me, like a reading. It kind of reminded me of the machines in a hospital. I touched the pad again and closed my eyes. I tried to calm myself and steady my breathing. My heart pounded against its cage.

  I squinted at the screen. The waves were taller now, and they moved more slowly across the screen. They had more red on top too. Ok, so it looked like I was able to manipulate them slightly.

  “You touch it.” I told Sprout. He placed his hand on the pad. The waves that appeared were different from mine. His waves moved across the screen to the left, and were dark blue on the bottom, light blue on the top and here and there, on the tallest peaks, was a bit of green.

  “Now take your hand off.” I said. He removed his hand. The waves disappeared. I thought about everything B4ruch wrote. I reactivated the hardware switch on the computer so the mic could listen. “Hum.” I told Sprout. He hummed.

  I watched the screen. A blue spark appeared, exactly where the golden symbol began its journey. It traces the sideways S, then traced one of the inner loops of the image. “Keep going!” I said and grabbed him in excitement. The water in his tubes sloshed. “Sorry.” I checked to make sure I hadn’t damaged him.

  “It is ok.” He assured me, and resumed humming.

  But as much as he hummed, as many times as he changed his volume or pitch, his blue spark only followed the path of one petal. I tried humming with him, but my voice didn’t follow the path at all, it appeared as chaos — a jagged line of yellow that didn’t follow any meaningful path on the symbol, it was just another uneven, wavy line. The words Access denied reappeared over and over.

  “Let’s stop.” I said. We both stopped humming and sat back slightly from the computer. “My guess is we need to match this symbol somehow. Baruch said he couldn’t figure it out… but this is DEF CON weekend… He left the thumb drive here for that reason. Maybe we could find someone over at the conference who could help.”

  It was late at night, which meant the DEF CON parties were well underway. I didn’t like parties. I wanted to like parties. I wanted to be someone who could feel cool at parties, but they were so loud and there were so many people, I always ended up hunched in a corner. Sometimes I rescued the house plants and crawled out a window. I usually wasn’t invited back. One time, I was at some stranger’s house for a party, and I tried to make mac and cheese for some people who had clearly had too much to drink, but I ended up somehow creating a fire. Drunk people stumbled out of the house like zombies and collapsed on the lawn to escape the smoke and screech of the alarm. They yelled at me because they didn’t appreciate that I was trying to help them. Their rose bushes are now happy and being cared for by an elderly couple in a retirement community who were thrilled to wake up one morning and find them planted around the edge of their patio.

  Hopefully, a few people would be willing to leave the DEF CON parties to help me. I stuffed some things into the hotel safe. I set up a camera and faced it at the door. I put back on my frilly socks and combat boots. I shoved the necessary equipment in a bag, and put Sprout in the bag on top of the equipment. I closed the flap over him. “Act inanimate until it’s safe to come out.” I told him. He gave me a thumbs up. I tied a sweatshirt around my waist — It got cold in the convention center. I had to carry the quantum lunchbox because it wouldn’t fit in my bag, but it was still connected by a cord to the laptop that was inside my bag. Hopefully, the other people going to the conference were also carrying odd things so security would be less likely to notice me. I handed few small plants into the bag to Sprout to hold so they wouldn’t get damaged on the walk over.

  I looked at the fake ficus tree. I picked it up with my remaining free hand, then looked at the window. The windows in Vegas don’t open, and they’re hard to break, so I couldn’t just throw it out, I’d have to take it down with me.

  I had to use my elbow to hit the elevator buttons. Some guy got on a couple floors down. He looked at the tree out of the corner of his eye. “Hi!” I said. He pulled out his phone and stared at it instead. I walked through the hotel with the tree. It was full of DEF CON attendees — they were the ones in all black, with backpacks and badges and things pinned to themselves that lit up. They smiled at me, one of them said, “The hunt list gets stranger every year,” and laughed.

  Security stood by the door to the outside, “Ma’am —“ He addressed me like he was concerned about me,

  “It’s for the scavenger hunt!”2 I said, “Could you help me with the door?” I grinned at him. He held the door open, but looked distressed. He might have wanted to stop me, but I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

  As soon as I stepped outside the hotel, the heat assaulted me. It got under my clothes and pressed itself against me. Sweat covered me and dripped down my legs as I walked across the street to the convention center.

  I headed for the dumpster that was in the parking lot of the convention center. It was full of random trash, plastic bags, plastic plates and cups. I hopped in and dug a hole in the plastic waste with my boot. I planted the fake tree in the hole and patted down the debris around it. "Is this the future you want?" I muttered. "Is this what you envisioned for us? Plastic trash in a parking lot? The only trees will be the ones you make? And we should say 'thank you' because at least you thought to make trees at all? How nice of you to give us something to decorate the end of the world."

  I hopped out of the dumpster, strode to the front entrance of the convention center, and yanked the doors open.

  1 Physicist Brian Cox how our early universe was much the same as the one B4ruch describes.

  Brian Cox about a multiverse theory.

  Slightly longer (17.5 minute) from PBS explaining the early sound waves of our universe.

  2 The is a time-honored tradition. It’s a great opportunity to engage in a variety of shenanigans.