Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1) by Mariana Morgan (essential reading txt) 📕

‘Stop!’ Eloise squeaked unexpectedly, and more than one person in the room flinched in surprise. ‘Go back!’

‘Back to what? This?’ Ingram swiped the opposite way and the previous screen returned.

Without acknowledging her, Eloise stood up and walked closer to the holo-display. Her eyes were fixed on the bottom-left corner, and a watermark that looked suspiciously familiar to her.

Watermarks acquired a far greater significance somewhere in the 25th century. Initially they were there to protect artists and their achievements, but soon the concept spread throughout the Afro-European Alliance and found uses in all aspects of life. It was a nifty way to make sure the identity of the maker of a given product was never separated from the product itself. It was primarily applied to works of art and valuable technological advances, but with time the usage spread to more ordinary, everyday creations, such as files, reports and even electronic messages.

In the case of valuable objects, like the VRPs Eloise created, the watermarks were carefully embedded in the code; in the case of simple files and reports, they were merely an automatic addition, a form of a stamp added by the machine on which they were created. Most of the time when a computer added a watermark it could be seen in the corner of every page, but it could also be enlarged and included inside a logo for advertisement purposes. Kind of like the old-fashioned QR code—it just looked more stylish and was more advanced.

‘You mean the watermark?’ Gonzalez asked, following Eloise’s line of sight. ‘What about it?’

‘Not possible…’ Eloise murmured. Her hand stroked the air in front of the holo-display.

The watermark she was looking at was superimposed over Cassandra’s logo on a poster advertising the company’s two-hundred-year anniversary. It could only be seen at a certain angle, when the light reflected it just right, but any computer could scan it with ease.

The logo itself looked completely normal. It was oval with elaborate borders in a colour trademarked as Cassandra Rusty Orange. Inside the oval was an exquisitely precise drawing of a woman in a dark blue dress with ginger hair that fanned out and merged with the rustiness of the borders. The basic design and the trademarked colour hadn’t changed since the day Cassandra was established, though the artwork had improved in quality and finesse.

‘It’s just Cassandra’s watermark.’

‘No.’ Eloise waved her hand impatiently. ‘It is Cassandra’s logo, but not their watermark. The squigglecode. It can’t be…’ Her voice trailed off again as she bent her knees to optimise the angle from which she was studying the display. The squigglecode was the actual lines and shapes that identified the work. A kind of infinitely more complex and detailed version of the barcodes that had once identified products available for purchase.

‘Care to elaborate?’ Ingram asked.

‘Tilly, whose is this?’ Eloise demanded, ignoring everyone. She probably hadn’t even heard Ingram, but that didn’t stop Palmeiro from snorting.

‘Searching,’ Tilly replied.

An outsider wouldn’t be able to tell the original Tilly that had been left at Chandler N-Suit Research Base from the Roc de Chere copy. They were both highly complex computer systems, capable of amazing feats that 21st-century programmers could only have dreamt about. To Eloise, they were entirely different.

The Roc de Chere copy was bland, professional and soulless. When she spoke, she used a pre-programmed speech algorithm to choose tone, speed and associated emotion. The original Tilly no longer needed that algorithm; she was capable of interpreting the atmosphere in a room and choosing accordingly. She was a friend.

‘No reference found in the Afro-European Alliance’s database,’ Tilly said, an odd sense of confusion in her voice as the speaking algorithm switched on. It wasn’t like Eloise to fixate on something that turned out to have no meaning. But nor was it normal for a watermark to be unregistered.

‘Enlarge the logo. Enhance the squigglecode,’ Eloise instructed, head cocked, eyes fully focused on a new challenge that had sparked her usual professional enthusiasm.

Maybe if she hadn’t been so entirely focused on the oddly familiar watermark she would have noticed something else. For example, how Ingram propped her hands on her hips and gave her a disgusted look the moment her presentation vanished at Eloise’s command. Or how Captain Palmeiro snorted disrespectfully yet again. Or how Gonzalez’s features hardened when he concluded that the snort had nothing to do with Eloise’s rudeness and was directed at Ingram instead. But Eloise saw none of that, her brain racing through various possibilities.

‘Extract my own watermark and visualise it as a squigglecode,’ she ordered. Two sets of squigglecode appeared side by side, no longer the faint silvery glow of a watermark but solidly highlighted grey lines. They looked identical. ‘Superimpose,’ she added, and even through her trance-like professional focus she heard Gonzalez gasp as he realised where Eloise was heading.

Tilly merged the two watermarks as instructed, the squigglecode black where it overlapped. Now more people gasped, noticing that hardly any grey lines showed.

‘Similarity?’ Gonzalez asked, and Eloise rolled her eyes theatrically. Numbers were irrelevant.

‘Ninety-nine point three per cent,’ Tilly replied.

‘Tilly, remove overlapped squigglecode, translate the residue into code and search,’ she ordered, her voice full of satisfaction. Human eyes weren’t supposed to be able to read squigglecode, but the mere point seven per cent remaining was easy enough for someone of Eloise’s calibre to recognise.

‘Reference found, eight points,’ Tilly said, suddenly in awe of Eloise’s brilliance, but the Elite woman paid her no attention. In fact, the algorithm that was swapping Tilly’s apparent emotional state every time she spoke was starting to annoy her.

‘Display references,’ she ordered, bestowing a look of pure satisfaction on Gonzalez. Finally it all made sense.

The silence that followed was profound.

Eloise turned to look at the holo-display. She could feel the familiar sense of success and accomplishment, but there was something else there too. She could feel herself swelling with pride, and that was new.

The eight points of reference Tilly had found were portions of code from eight different VRP copies. The first was the