Category Archives: Cipher Fiction

“Geezer”, sighed the bald little man, “this is London, rip-off centre of the world. As they say, ‘Walloons devise, Londoners revise’.”

The long-haired man shifted awkwardly, twiddling his cheap codpiece. “It’s not just a matter of copying – my master has certain… unusual requirements.”

“Heh, this part of town’s full of pretty girls who for the price of…”

“No, you lecherous fool, his requirements are about the manuscript. He says it has to look old – really old, as though God’s own angels had written it.”

“Must… have… angelic… script…”, muttered the mordant midget as he scribbled notes on a scrap of paper. “Hold on a mo’, your master must have that spooky German abbot’s book in his library – padiel aporsy mesarpon omeuas an’ all that, eh?”

“As yet he has not – but if you hear of a copy…”

“…yeah, I’ll whistle, don’t you worry, geezer”, soothed the midget, mysteriously noting down ‘humpty bonus real russet’ in his notes. “Anything else about this ancient fake he wants us to make?”

Kelley’s eyes raised and narrowed, as if he was looking at a far-off object. “My master wants hundreds of pictures threaded through the book – plants, star diagrams, and small naked women to please the reader’s eye.”

“Phwoah, your man does have ‘unusual requirements’ after all!”, snickered the faker. “Well, I can’t promise you no works of art, seeing as it’ll be the boy what does the drawings, he’s only eight, and he’ll be using his pregnant muvva as a drawing guide.”

“Well… OK… but be sure to tell your boy not to use any fashionable hairstyles or clothes, as it has to look really old…”

“Ah, clever stuff, matey-boy! You’ve really been workin’ this out, ain’tcha?”

Kelley ignored his uncouth patter, and continued counting an imaginary feature list on his fingers. “Use whatever size sheets of vellum you can get your hands on: oh, and use Cardano’s clever grilles to generate text that resembles the patterns of language. It’s simple once you get going, I’m told.”

“Now I’m beginnin’ to see where you’re headin'”, chortled the little old guy, a shy grin smirking its way across his toothless face. “Howsabout we also make it look like loads of people have owned it? You know, shuffle the pages around, rebind it several times, flip the leaves around, add little comments in the margins, add fake wear-marks along various folds, overpaint it in twenty different paints and styles. If we leave all kinds of different fake clues for your buyer’s so-called experts, it’ll take them centuries to figure out how we turned ’em over, the suckers!”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous!“, snorted Kelley as he pushed the fake factory manager aside and marched off into the crowd. “What kind of a fool would go to that much trouble?”

“Hmmm… what kind, indeed?” mumbled the old man to himself. “Get me my quill, boy – I’m feeling inspired…”

“You do realize“, added the man with the tinfoil hat, nodding thoughtfully on the webcam, “that he’s completely mad. For all his qualifications, there really is no reasoning with him.”

“Dave, please rest assured that I fully take your point”, said the journalist, disconnecting as fast as she possibly could. She slumped back in her chair, increasingly desperate for a drink, any kind of short-term alcohol hit to prop up her dipping blood sugar level. Only two more days to the copy deadline for her 2000-word Voynich Manuscript Sunday supplement article, and all Katrina had for her efforts was a rapid succession of dull talking heads, each with basically nothing of substance to say about the manuscript itself, all the while bristling with shirty hatred for anyone who happened to disagree with their pet theory. And, as a general rule, the more entertaining the shirtiness, the less tenable the theory would be.

‘Star Trek Dave’ from Seattle certainly matched that template to a T: OK, so he didn’t actually say the Voynich was written in Middle High Klingon, but he was more than happy to demonstrate the extensive statistical similarities between the two, and positively ecstatic to be given the opportunity to trash anybody at all who thought it was some kind of hoax. He claimed that the shiny hat was to stop his head overheating in the sun: all the same, she couldn’t help but notice the overcast sky behind him in the webcam. What… a… mess.

Numbly, Katrina scanned through the rest of the list of Voynicheros she had planned to interview today: ‘Scatty Duck’ from Kansas City (who believes it was a Mexican encyclopaedia, transcribed by a Venetian missionary); ‘Secretive Squirrel’ from Rotorua (who is sure that Leonardo wrote the A pages, while Nostradamus wrote the B pages); and the white-haired ‘Hoax Hacker’ from Guernsey (who has a talent for spinning every single piece of evidence to make it support his hoax theory, and whom everybody else seems to hates passionately).

Would any of these enthusiastic nutters have anything to say about the mystery to catch the interest of Sunday morning newspaper readers? Being brutally honest, the answer was an overwhelming No: and for a brief instant, Katrina felt a terrible, desolate sadness wash over her. It felt as though the manuscript itself was no more than a pawn to be moved around, a secondary affair destined to never quite satisfy the malformed emotional needs of all these heavy-hearted humanists. She felt a powerful urge to try to shake them all up: but then, as that brief red tide ebbed, saw that this would achieve less than nothing – knocking yourself out to help those who choose not to help themselves is an eternal lose-lose game. She was a journalist, not their therapist.

This was the point when she decided to put it all aside for the night, and to get horribly, miserably, pathetically drunk. Even by up-town wine bar standards, her first bottle – an acrid South African Pinotage blend – had no right to be so expensive: but by halfway through her second bottle, it was doing the trick, and was even starting not to taste quite so much like stalky drain cleaner.

She was giggling to herself now at the foolishness of it all, sitting in the corner sending incoherent text messages to friends who had said they might meet up with her during the evening. And was that sexy young barman avoiding her? “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” she had tapped in: once the predictive texting had learnt “qokedy”, she was able to spool out great chunks of nonsense Voynichese at high speed – and the more qokedy‘s she texted, the glumly funnier it all got (to her, at least).

Still alone at 11.30pm (she couldn’t guess why nobody had joined her), and thoughts of getting a taxi home were slowly starting to edge into those few corners of her brain not yet utterly dulled by alcohol. An odd, shivering sensation ran up and around her back, like a sniper’s jerky laser-sight aimed at her: with what little finesse she could muster, Katrina glanced inelegantly behind her, but there was nobody in that corner of the room. Well – nobody she could see, anyway.

That was strange, as it was normally only Class B drugs that made her feel paranoid, which is why she didn’t do them any more (that, and being paid a pittance to type trash). I must have picked up some kind of freak overproof Pino-skunk-otage, she thought: time to hit the road before the road hits me. And then her dirtbag Nokia with its blinged-up birthday cover trilled up, announcing a text message from perennial network favourite Mr “Number Knott-Recognized”:-

u r so qokedy daiin, m8 lol

“daiin”? Diane? Was her friend Diane bouncing some kind of Voynich txt joke back at her? Scrolling down, the odd msg continued:-

v old + v ciphered, got it?
plants=noise, humans=signal
i/ii/iii spin my wheel
time=now, u r 2/12!
u will shine, peace 2 u! :)

That was roughly the moment when the table decided to rush up, her head decided to rush down, and the two met halfway with an alarming thud.

She came to in the back seat of a black cab, rattling over the Euston Road on its way north towards Crouch End’s diesel-encrusted fug. As her eyelids slowly peeled apart, she realized that sitting opposite was Diane, furiously French kissing that wine bar waiter: she must have turned up late, seen Katrina doing her maudlin drunk thing in the corner, and improvised some alternative entertainment for herself. Bitch. At least she shared the ride home – well, the cab part of it, anyway.

Unsurprisingly, not long after that it all faded to a murky black once again.

The next morning brought ibuprofen, black coffee, and self-pity aplenty: Katrina crawled into work a little later than she should, blocking out all thoughts of that ghastly manuscript until she sat at her desk to power up her laptop.

And then she started to piece together the previous night’s events in the wine bar. That was when it came to her: what had that bizarre text said?

She scrabbled in her bowling bag’s pleat pockets for the mobile, clicked on the message inbox and… nothing was there. Empty. Zero. Zilch. Not so much as a single qokedy. What was going on?

Oddly, as her laptop desktop awoke it revealed that it had acquired a new background: a stylized sun-shape she vaguely recognized from one of the Voynich Manuscript websites. But this didn’t disturb her – rather, she felt strangely reassured by it, even slightly warmed. Sure, something odd had just entered her life by a side door – but whether it turned out to be some spooky X-Files thing, or some kind of practical joke courtesy of Echelon and the NSA, she didn’t really mind.

Whoever it was, she was rather glad of the company.

And that’s when she knew exactly how the rest of the article would go…

Every night for months, Mary-Anne had pored over every shape, letter, figure, and line of the Voynich Manuscript’s 200+ enciphered pages, a pale brown vellum laptop glow lighting  up her flat until the small hours. The more she looked, the more she was certain the answer was “hidden in plain sight” just as cryptology experts always said, even if they themselves had no idea where to look or what to look for.

She, however, had a very special secret weapon, a righteous sword to slice through this cryptographic Gordian knot. It had come to her close to the Spring Equinox: at the very moment she had first seen the Voynich, she had had a searing headache accompanied by a vivid mental picture of Christ Himself on the Cross. For that briefest of instants, she felt like a blessed, cursed mystic, a modern St Hildegard of Bingen; and glimpsing something so wonderful, awful, and joyful changed her life beyond all measure.

In fact, Mary-Anne found herself transformed into a virtual nun, the first Blessed Sister of the Voynich – and with much holy codicology to focus upon. To mute the incessant noise of the world, she binned her mobile phone, left her answerphone permanently on (and never played the messages), and turned all her old friends away when they came knocking at her door. With every new day, her former life peeled just that little bit further away from her, a snake skin she no longer wanted or needed. She even shut the door on Joe and his flowers and love notes, never mind how much the “old her” had liked him.

Fast forward to November, and she had changed tactics, placing printouts of all the plant pages on the floor and spending time shuffling them around, looking for unexpected handwriting and colour matches.  Yet it was then that it struck her, might the Messiah be hiding there, for was He not the Tree of Life? On a constant adrenaline high and a sense of being desperately close to the end, she began working all night and forgetting to eat, leaving her weak and constantly retching. This, she rationalized, was surely the mystic’s lot – but she had no choice, for hunting down the Saviour inside the Voynich was the one true path that had been allotted to her.

And now tonight, late on Christmas Eve, with a pile of unopened Christmas cards blocking the flat door, the million-piece jigsaw had begun to come together. When she had finally remembered to add to the mix the herbal pages misplaced in the pharmacological sections, her months of fervent searching had finally revealed the key, the visual enciphering mechanism. She could now vividly see that the herbal pages, if you arranged them (just as she had done) in the correct pattern, formed a long-hidden picture of Christ crucified – exactly the same one as had first flashed into her mind’s eye all those months ago.

Having set up her webcam to record the perfect image of His suffering face laid out on the floor, Mary-Anne felt an odd glow inside her, and stood there gazing at the image that had been concealed for many centuries, appalled, amazed, aghast. And against all the meteorological odds, a light dusting of snow began to lightly fall outside her window. The time was ripe to show the world her amazing discovery – and how marvellous that that it was to be on Christmas Day.

But just as she set the live feed going, something suddenly wrenched around deep inside her – clutching her swollen stomach in dreadful pain, Mary-Anne collapsed on the floor, right on top of her reconstructed image of the Saviour. Great lurching waves of agony jerked and pinballed around her body. “My God!” she screamed. “I’m dying – help me!”

The Voynich webcam lurkers at first dismissed it all as a kind of performance art hoaxery: but after a few minutes, her very real pain was all too obvious – and she was too incapacitated to make it to the phone in the corner of the room. “M-A!“, one shouted, “I’ll call an ambulance – where do you live?”

Not long after, the watchers heard the crashing sound of policemen breaking down the flat door, followed by the paramedics’ shouting as they rushed swiftly in, scattering all her carefully arranged papers. And they took in every gory, magnificent detail, as Mary-Anne pushed and screamed and pushed and screamed and gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.

Wilfrid.