27. Actual Size

Mateo stared glumly at his partly disassembled phone sitting on the lab bench like that would make it give up its secrets. He wasn’t allowed to pick it up in case he dropped it. Science Guy was like a hen with an egg. He’d been proud to show off the charger he’d built from scratch, too. It was big and weird and chunky and genuinely impressive.

Science Guy — NOT a civilian, he’d clarified proudly, just allowed to wear civvies on this job — stared hopefully at Mateo.

“I don’t know what to tell you, man. I sure can’t tell you exactly how it works. I CAN tell you what those signals are.”

“Yes?” He leaned forward a little.

“Yeah. It’s pinging the tower. Only there’s no tower to ping.”

Science guy started writing, didn’t leave much of a mark on the paper, licked the end of his pencil lead, for some reason, and tried again. “Tell me about this tower.”

“Uh, sure. So cell phones get an ... FM radio signal from these big metal towers—“

***

Science guy — Nigel Bowyer, he’d remembered to tell Mateo eventually — looked at his notebook. It was a lot fuller now.

“But how does this work? Are your signals encoded so your neighbors aren’t forever listening in? Or do you just live with it?”

“Ugh, it’s ... complicated. Like I said, they’re little computers, they decode the signal. You can’t just listen.”

“But it’s so small!”

“I know, I know. Computers get smaller. Moore’s Law or whatever.”

“This small, though! And I don’t mean to be personal, but you don’t seem just terribly rich—“

“That’s cool, I’m not.”

“—so they must not be horribly expensive if you carried them around while working.”

“Right, they’re not. It’s the whole binary code thing. It’s where you have everything stored as on or off—.”

“We have that. Leibniz had that. Gosh, I think the ancient Chinese had that. And yes, we use it in computers.”

“Seriously? Wow. I had no idea. Uh, basically my point is if all your code is just on or off, all you have to do is make your switches really really small. They’re called, like...transistors. That was in the 50s.”

“It’s not that easy! You don’t know the design let alone the manufacturing process, and why would you?” He sighed when Mateo shook his head. “Maybe this wouldn’t even be relevant to the war effort. But we can’t give up yet. And it’s too far beyond us to reverse-engineer without help.”

“I’m sorry. I guess what you need is a computer scientist.” He sighed. “Well, you guys are already doing pretty good with the Enigma Machine and Ultra and all—“

“What? You know about that? You’re not supposed to know about that!”

“Well, sorry! There was a thing on TV about it!”

“...ah. Right. Sorry.” He sighed and leaned back, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. He must have been working Tineye-style hours without being able to call on his team to help. Even with his team and all the help Mateo could give he might have been handed an impossible job. “Have you finished the song list?”

“Yeah.” Mateo pushed a stack of paper across. It was something he could do without pulling Nigel or the two bigwigs and the boss cleared to see the Mp3 player away from their jobs. “I put the all the lyrics I could figure out, the band names, and the year if I could remember it, but don’t trust the year too much.”

The idea was to search the lyrics and titles for any future stuff relevant to them, and maybe jog Mateo’s memory if they really lucked out. It had taken him about three or four days working Tineye hours, sitting in the lab with the player fixed to the middle of the table. Nigel had built that rig, because he was scared to death of the thing falling off — or getting yanked off by the charging cable, which weighed about fifteen pounds — and breaking. He probably would have killed Mateo if he’d picked it or the phone up.

When it needed to charge, or when he nodded off at the bench, Mateo would sleep on an army bedroll under a lab bench, or snatch a meal. (Nigel wouldn’t allow any food or liquid anywhere near the electronics on pain of well...pain, probably. Even Tineye made zero attempt to cross him on anything in the lab.)

It turned out that even when you weren’t a spy the food still wasn’t great and there wasn’t that much of it. No fresh fruit or vegetables, tiny amounts of meat, no sugar, and not a spice in the lineup. It was normal civilian rations, Nigel had said, but he’d still lost some weight since crashing here.

The bread was good, though, apparently just to keep him guessing, and they fried a mean potato when they could (rarely) spare the grease. Nigel offered him cigarettes, apparently to say sorry for the food, and he’d been amazed Mateo didn’t smoke.

It was actually the best couple days he could remember in a while, transcribing lyrics down there in the lab. He’d missed music, and being able to have a little control over what he did and when he did it, having something to actually do, and being able to talk to somebody like a freaking human being with no strings attached.

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