Chapter 27: Brainwave

Grace turned off the Trackimo, after another five-minute burst, that Mia would see. She’d be in Florida perhaps, looking for a boat.

Time to make breakfast.

While she ate she went back to watching the TV, with its nice people out there in the ordinary world, who didn’t know what was happening in this secret world, that might change everybody’s lives forever.

What could she do? What should she be focusing on?

There wasn’t any point focusing on Xenia and Boris, just because they were horrible. They were too big and powerful. Mia was coming, to rescue her mum and the aliens, that was the point and why she was here. Of course it was a bit late already, probably, now Xenia had worked out how to torture the Striteracians. With their telepathy it had quite likely been especially easy to make one alien empathise with the one being drowned, and give in.

What would Xenia be doing next? She’d have to do the translations with Claude’s laptop wouldn’t she? They’d’ve grabbed that from the little house too. Then she could send the secrets to anybody, just as audio files ... as long as the people listening didn’t mind about torture? ... the audio would have threats and pleadings...

At some point there had to be a cutoff, didn’t there. Or was it a ‘cutout’, in the movies? Anyway the CIA weren’t supposed to be operating in the USA, Paul said, and they weren’t supposed to be torturing British women and their daughters, or probably aliens either. So someone would have to transcribe the words into text, so they could pretend they’d got it legally.

But what would the aliens be telling? Obscure stuff. It’d take time to transcribe. The transcriber probably had to know a bit about genetic engineering to get it right, and also Claude’s translation program couldn’t have been done to cope with alien genetics technology - lots of the words wouldn’t even exist in English, so the translation would have to use lots of English words to try and describe each little thing.

Grace stood up and paced about. She got plenty of exercise normally. She looked out of the window. If only she could ask the aliens, instead of just waving! She looked at the door lock.

Apart from talking to the aliens, and her mum, eventually the door had to be opened so she could be rescued, and the other doors too, and it would be better if Mia didn’t have to shoot them up. It had a card slot on the outside, like a hotel room. On the inside was a slot and a keypad too, with four rows and columns of buttons, numbered or lettered. So if you didn’t have a card you could get out with the code.

Health and Safety. There were probably Army rules about it, to make sure nobody got stuck inside. In Cuba, in a hut with no windows that opened, if the power went off and the air conditioning stopped, you’d bake. And there was the huge fence round the whole place so it wouldn’t be a big crisis if someone got out of a cottage, more like just something they didn’t actually want. Perhaps they used to let the original occupants out during the day? Why not? The cottage was just made of wood after all.

She went and looked at the keypad. All the buttons were the same, not worn anywhere. Sixteen of them, so the number of combinations would be sixteen to the power of sixteen? With some small correction? Like minus the sum of fifteen to one. Of course they’d only use three, or more likely four. So that’d be sixteen to the power of four. What was that?

256, 4095... 65,500 possible combinations. At five seconds each that was ... about 5500 minutes, about ninety hours. So basically four days at twelve hours a day gave her a fifty percent chance of opening the door...

Could her finger stand that? Well she had ten of them. How stiff were the buttons? ... not too bad. She made a start. She couldn’t write down what she’d done, so she’d do them in sequence, spatially. What was the best way?

By lunchtime she was half way through all the numbers that could start 1, and half way through her fingers! She made lunch and watched TV for a bit. She wasn’t liking the button-pushing - as a way of solving a problem it was a bit crude and lacking in elegance. She had a feeling her mum’d be doing it better.

At half past one two soldiers came past, went into Emerald and Cyan’s cottage and came back out with them, one over each shoulder. Grace tried to shut that out as she worked away through the afternoon, till they brought the aliens back again, still carrying them, though at least they were still conscious, and even looked at her. She smiled and waved, but if only she could talk to them! They were clever, and Rose could probably communicate things to her mum, one way or another.

She made supper. The lock hadn’t opened and her fingers were quite sore by now. She needed to let them recover a bit overnight or they’d get worse and she wouldn’t be able to keep going. Also Xenia might decide to interrogate her again or whatever and notice if they were bruised and swollen.

She turned on the lamp as it was getting dark, wishing she could talk to her mum. Who was so close! If only she had telepathy like the aliens she could probably communicate through these wooden walls.

They thought speech was a bit primitive, the Striteracians: having to move air, make a set of sounds with frequencies of waves that the air had to carry. How much smarter to have hair that was like an aerial, with those six kind of tails, to bypass all that and do it with brainwaves, brain to brain.

She could so do with a brainwave for these buttons!!

... Brainwave?

Wait.

She looked at the lamp again ... oh?

Well ... it was something to do that wasn’t pressing buttons. Better than just watching TV. If it didn’t work at least she’d’ve tried and been a prisoner of war and not a victim. As her mum said: you don’t succeed by not failing, you succeed by trying and learning from failing.

She went into the kitchen with the lamp. She cut the plug off with the scissors, then cut the cord again at the lamp. Inside the cord were two wires, and each one consisted of a lot of thin little copper strands. She slit the outer cover with a knife, then one of the inner wire coatings.

She pulled her hair into six bunches, which it didn’t really want to go, being so curly, but with copper strands woven in and round she could force it. She had some strands touching her scalp, and some joined together over the top. As far as she could remember they were about the same length as the Striteracians’ tails or bunches or whatever they probably called them.

It took her half an hour, then her hair was done:

What time was it? Nearly ten. Rose should still be awake.

She turned off the TV and tried to think thoughts that might transmit. She went and stood up against the wall, by the window, as close to Rose as she could be. What should she think?

Brainwaves. What were they like? Perhaps they could be more intense or less, and transmit more or less? Perhaps they could be simple or complex? Focused. Maybe emotions would transmit best. Complicated things like language would be harder or more muddled wouldn’t they? And anyway Rose didn’t do English, much, she needed Claude’s laptop to do English. She’d used pictures in Wikipedia.

So, okay, obviously she had to think pictures. Intensely, like when her pupils went big. She took a good long look at the buttons on the door and tried to put a picture of the buttons in the front of her mind.