CHAPTER 1 - PREVIEW
“I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity” - Eleanor Roosevelt
Thursday 4th January, Catskill Mountains, New York
The laptop screen glowed eerily blue in the darkened room, the flickering light from the scrolling pages throwing ghostly shadows across the walls and ceiling. The figure hunched over the computer was motionless except for a sudden flurry of fingers across the keyboard at regular intervals. Finally, with a sharp intake of breath and a ceremonious stab at the enter button, the computer view blacked out completely and all light seemed to vanish into a single blue pinprick in the middle of the screen. A few seconds later it erupted back into life, much to the satisfaction of the boy, whose pale face was now wreathed in a wide, confident smile. He leaned back in his chair and vigilantly watched the screen now awash in a tumbling sea of unintelligible symbols and numbers. For many minutes this silent tableau continued, the only movement in the room coming from a black and white cat stretching on the unmade bed behind the boy’s chair. The cat finally leapt down onto the carpeted floor and sinuously rubbed itself back and forth around the boy’s legs before jumping, uninvited, onto his lap. He automatically began to stroke the cat’s fur and a low rumbling purr gradually filled the otherwise silent space. That was, until a loud knock on the door caused him to lose his balance and, in a tangle of paws, claws, arms and legs, he crashed to the floor.
The door opened and the concerned face of a woman appeared. “Tom! Are you alright? I wasn’t sure if you were in your room.”
Tom, or Thomas as he preferred to be called, gingerly rubbed at the claw marks on his neck where the aptly named Zorro had left his trademark scratches and frowned at his mum.
“I’m fine mum, just working on some stuff for school.”
“You should be playing with Greg and Sally - it’s a nice day outside you know,” his mother admonished.
Thomas squinted at the daylight streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows behind her and grimaced. Although he loved nothing more than to explore the great outdoors, the thought of spending precious time in the company of the neighbours’ kids almost made him groan out loud.
“I’ll come out soon, I promise,” he replied, as he got up off the floor and righted his chair. He had a quick look for Zorro under the bed but, like his namesake, the cat had silently disappeared into the shadows.
Thomas’s mum, Sue, sighed heavily and studied the slim frame of her son. Thomas had an unnervingly pale face framed by a swathe of unruly black hair. His eyes, when they took the time to meet her own, were the same deep blue as his father’s. As usual, however, when he was busy, they were unreadable and, considering the effort needed to bully him outside, she hesitated only briefly before quietly closing the door behind her as she left. Sue leaned back against the door and smiled ruefully. The older Thomas became, the less she felt she knew him. As a young child he had been so eager to share all of his discoveries and often frighteningly accurate insights on the world with his parents. Now it seemed that everything he did was secret, not even to be shared with his once two greatest allies.
It took a while for Thomas’s eyes to readjust to the dimly lit room, just in time to note that the program he’d launched a few minutes before had now come to an end. Again, the screen went blank and then a login and password page appeared. He sat back down in front of the computer and quickly typed in his access information and was redirected to the website’s private home page. He had successfully broken into the CERN Level 3 Project and now knew he had less than five minutes to access and download the information he was looking for before the internet trail would be traced back to his computer.
Thomas smiled as he frantically typed in the codes and keys needed to break the security. It took him only three minutes and twenty-five seconds to do so and then he sat back, counting down the final seconds of the download. Four minutes and thirty-five seconds, forty seconds, forty-five seconds - at four minutes and fifty-six seconds, Thomas disconnected the live feed and, letting out a deep breath, opened the file he had just “borrowed” from one of the most tightly-guarded organisations on the planet.
To anyone but a few of the world’s brightest minds, the document would have been indecipherable. But Thomas, although he had no formal training in particle physics and was only fourteen years old, could see and understand things in a way that no other person could.
CERN, also known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was only one of many global organisations that Thomas regularly accessed. Since the first day he’d learned to use a computer to break a code, he had doggedly found his way through every important security system on the planet. Now he easily and regularly accessed top level classified files, learning some of mankind’s most heavily guarded secrets.
After scanning the document in front of him, Thomas carefully saved the information onto a memory stick and deleted all evidence of the upload on his computer’s hard drive. He then threw himself back onto his bed, closed his eyes and blissfully immersed himself in every intricate detail of the particle accelerator he had just studied, as it assembled itself, atom by atom, in his mind’s eye.
Not many people liked Thomas. Adults found the adolescent somewhat unnerving (“that stare of his”) and others his age found him just plain boring, including Greg and Sally next door. As a young boy, Thomas had preferred to play alone, staging experiments in his backyard with very live subjects; initiating bloody battles between warring ant colonies and creating miniature watery worlds for frogs and elvers. In fact, he found nothing more enthralling than looking at how nature moved in all its variation within the large plot of forgotten garden by the back steps, and he cultivated and guarded its wilderness as ferociously as a bear guarding its lair. Once, to Thomas’s horror, his mother had suggested pulling out the old stone steps in favour of levelling the area and creating a neat and tidy courtyard. Thomas had managed to halt any further thoughts on the matter by hacking into the Council’s computer system and secretly inserting outrageous regulations and fees into their website in an effort to put his mother off the idea. It had worked, and the stone steps remained his untouched wilderness sanctuary.
Thursday 4th January, Catskill Mountains, New York
The laptop screen glowed eerily blue in the darkened room, the flickering light from the scrolling pages throwing ghostly shadows across the walls and ceiling. The figure hunched over the computer was motionless except for a sudden flurry of fingers across the keyboard at regular intervals. Finally, with a sharp intake of breath and a ceremonious stab at the enter button, the computer view blacked out completely and all light seemed to vanish into a single blue pinprick in the middle of the screen. A few seconds later it erupted back into life, much to the satisfaction of the boy, whose pale face was now wreathed in a wide, confident smile. He leaned back in his chair and vigilantly watched the screen now awash in a tumbling sea of unintelligible symbols and numbers. For many minutes this silent tableau continued, the only movement in the room coming from a black and white cat stretching on the unmade bed behind the boy’s chair. The cat finally leapt down onto the carpeted floor and sinuously rubbed itself back and forth around the boy’s legs before jumping, uninvited, onto his lap. He automatically began to stroke the cat’s fur and a low rumbling purr gradually filled the otherwise silent space. That was, until a loud knock on the door caused him to lose his balance and, in a tangle of paws, claws, arms and legs, he crashed to the floor.
The door opened and the concerned face of a woman appeared. “Tom! Are you alright? I wasn’t sure if you were in your room.”
Tom, or Thomas as he preferred to be called, gingerly rubbed at the claw marks on his neck where the aptly named Zorro had left his trademark scratches and frowned at his mum.
“I’m fine mum, just working on some stuff for school.”
“You should be playing with Greg and Sally - it’s a nice day outside you know,” his mother admonished.
Thomas squinted at the daylight streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows behind her and grimaced. Although he loved nothing more than to explore the great outdoors, the thought of spending precious time in the company of the neighbours’ kids almost made him groan out loud.
“I’ll come out soon, I promise,” he replied, as he got up off the floor and righted his chair. He had a quick look for Zorro under the bed but, like his namesake, the cat had silently disappeared into the shadows.
Thomas’s mum, Sue, sighed heavily and studied the slim frame of her son. Thomas had an unnervingly pale face framed by a swathe of unruly black hair. His eyes, when they took the time to meet her own, were the same deep blue as his father’s. As usual, however, when he was busy, they were unreadable and, considering the effort needed to bully him outside, she hesitated only briefly before quietly closing the door behind her as she left. Sue leaned back against the door and smiled ruefully. The older Thomas became, the less she felt she knew him. As a young child he had been so eager to share all of his discoveries and often frighteningly accurate insights on the world with his parents. Now it seemed that everything he did was secret, not even to be shared with his once two greatest allies.
It took a while for Thomas’s eyes to readjust to the dimly lit room, just in time to note that the program he’d launched a few minutes before had now come to an end. Again, the screen went blank and then a login and password page appeared. He sat back down in front of the computer and quickly typed in his access information and was redirected to the website’s private home page. He had successfully broken into the CERN Level 3 Project and now knew he had less than five minutes to access and download the information he was looking for before the internet trail would be traced back to his computer.
Thomas smiled as he frantically typed in the codes and keys needed to break the security. It took him only three minutes and twenty-five seconds to do so and then he sat back, counting down the final seconds of the download. Four minutes and thirty-five seconds, forty seconds, forty-five seconds - at four minutes and fifty-six seconds, Thomas disconnected the live feed and, letting out a deep breath, opened the file he had just “borrowed” from one of the most tightly-guarded organisations on the planet.
To anyone but a few of the world’s brightest minds, the document would have been indecipherable. But Thomas, although he had no formal training in particle physics and was only fourteen years old, could see and understand things in a way that no other person could.
CERN, also known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was only one of many global organisations that Thomas regularly accessed. Since the first day he’d learned to use a computer to break a code, he had doggedly found his way through every important security system on the planet. Now he easily and regularly accessed top level classified files, learning some of mankind’s most heavily guarded secrets.
After scanning the document in front of him, Thomas carefully saved the information onto a memory stick and deleted all evidence of the upload on his computer’s hard drive. He then threw himself back onto his bed, closed his eyes and blissfully immersed himself in every intricate detail of the particle accelerator he had just studied, as it assembled itself, atom by atom, in his mind’s eye.
Not many people liked Thomas. Adults found the adolescent somewhat unnerving (“that stare of his”) and others his age found him just plain boring, including Greg and Sally next door. As a young boy, Thomas had preferred to play alone, staging experiments in his backyard with very live subjects; initiating bloody battles between warring ant colonies and creating miniature watery worlds for frogs and elvers. In fact, he found nothing more enthralling than looking at how nature moved in all its variation within the large plot of forgotten garden by the back steps, and he cultivated and guarded its wilderness as ferociously as a bear guarding its lair. Once, to Thomas’s horror, his mother had suggested pulling out the old stone steps in favour of levelling the area and creating a neat and tidy courtyard. Thomas had managed to halt any further thoughts on the matter by hacking into the Council’s computer system and secretly inserting outrageous regulations and fees into their website in an effort to put his mother off the idea. It had worked, and the stone steps remained his untouched wilderness sanctuary.
