« 097: Beaten To The Punch By Evolution | Main | 099: The Spire To Heaven » August 18, 2004

098: Dodging Research

I've bumped up against a point where I need to have some research done to properly write the next section. Of course, since research distracts me from actually writing, I'm probably going to leave a marker in the text and come back to it later. At least that was the plan. Unfortunately, it is a bit that is somewhat important: how Grandpa codes the notebook. There's another question floating in the wings: who is the intended audience for the notebook? Up to this point, I've been operating under the assumption that the notebook was a working book -- a volume which Grandpa updated regularly and referenced as he continued his work, and the trouble confronting me with that was the idea of a coded text which would be usuable as a reference manual while in its coded state. Grandpa would have to be able to convert the code on the fly in order to randomly read the notebook and use it. While not entirely impossible -- da Vinci had his own code to conceal his efforts from the eyes of his contemporaries -- the conceit is complicated by the fact that Grandpa was a spy during WWII. He knows how code systems works and, more importantly, he knows how they are broken. If he really wanted to write something that would be uncrackable except to those who knew the key, it would probably be a bit tougher than a straight-forward substitution code.

It's a minor point to get hung up on and maybe I'm letting it distract me too much. Maybe Grandpa's notebook isn't much more than a diary written in a simple substitution method based on the Enochian tables. The trouble with the tables is that the alphabet is scattered throughout the table and even a substitution cipher is a bit of a mental puzzle. At least for my pee brain. Doing the switcheroo change-up from memorized versions of the tables is even more of a stretch. Not impossible, just complicated.

I'm trying to avoid a complicated solution to a very simple problem. Most of us don't go all complex for the simple things, really. Occam's Razor and all that. When I bump against a wall, I don't always just keep bumping at it until the bricks come down; sometimes you have to rethink the problem, consider why you're at this wall and if you've arrived here by accident or design. If by design, is your design the right one? In the case of Grandpa's notebook: what function does it serve in the story?

Well, it's the dying orc actually. It's the piece of paper which draws a map for our heroes and says, "Bad guys over here." Well-- and here's the design flaw -- not really. It's the impetus for Grandpa's death and for Jack's fixation on the numbers stations. Maybe it's not the codex, but rather it is a series of light clues which point towards the bigger conspiracy. And here's what has been nagging me about this all along: why would Grandpa write all this shit down? Why would he write a notebook for his family to read and decode? Especially when he knows that the content may very well be deadly to him. Would you do that to your family? No, if the bad guys were coming to get you, you'd want to protect your family as much as you could. You wouldn't want to leave a trail for them that says, "Hey, kids, here's the way to the monster's lair."

Of course, if I take away the reason for the notebook then I take away the reason for the push to find Jack's mother and get the key from her. Actually, this means that Jack's mother can give them a different clue. She can point them towards the Army Corps of Engineers and the occult secret of their mission in Europe at the close of WWII.

Shit. Talked myself out of one bit of research for another. I'm not going to be able to escape it.

Posted by Teppo at August 18, 2004 07:46 AM

Comments

in WWII most codes were cyphered and decyphered by computers. Individuals couldn't decypher coded messages without a computer. The one exception to this was the Navajo codespeakers which were basically just speaking a natural language that most people didn't understand.

If Grandpa is using Enochian for his cypher, why not just write it in straight Enochian. Why does he need to code it even further? Hell, even if he's writing in Enochian, most people familiar with the language would have trouble reading it because he'd have to make up or discover Enochian words that aren't in print in any of Dee's writings.

I thought that most agents in the field didn't have access to computers and wrote their codes out by hand. I'm thinking more the one-time pads and the like. But, yes, the concern is that the deciphering team would have access to the number crunching power of a computer (even in '74 when Grandpa was writing this) and he wanted something that would be secure.

Using the Enoch script was just another layer of obscuration. He intended to use some sort of Indo-European language with a substitution cipher written in the odd script.