The Voynich Translation – Chapter 1

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Back in 2003, the (Paleo) Ideofact blogger (William Allison) reminisced about having once jointly compiled a list of meaningless dissertation titles, such as “The Semiotics of (En)Gendered Archetypes: A Contextual Deconstruction of the Voynich Manuscript.”  His pleasantly-meandering blog train of thought quickly sped on to the possibility of Voynich fiction, continuing…

Later, I thought of writing a few detective stories centered on a career grad student who promised for his dissertation a translation and analysis of the manuscript. Never got around to it, though — maybe in my retirement.

Now there’s a challenge, I thought… so, six years on, here’s my version of how Chapter 1 might go…
[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]

* * * * * * *

The Voynich Translation

Chapter 1 – “Lesser Fleas”

7.07pm: Mrs Kurtz tapped Graydon Warnes Harvitz II sharply on the shoulder, waking him from his open-eyed slumber. “Stop sucking the end of your pencil so loudly“, she wheeshed through gritted teeth, “it’s disrespectful”. Vaguely nodding in approval, Graydon looked around at the empty chairs beached by the day’s ebbing tide of students – disrespectful to whom, he wondered? Perhaps she-of-the-library could see people that he couldn’t, he mused, possibly the ghosts of dead Yale grads, haunted by their own unfinished dissertations – a virtual “Skull and Bones” society? And look, over in the far corner, might that be dear old Montgomery Burns himself? Yesssss.

As the fug of dead presidents began to fade from his mind’s eye, Graydon’s own awful situation lurched back into sharp focus – of how to decipher the murderously intractable Voynich Manuscript for his PhD. All of a sudden, the purgatory endured by the library’s wraiths, endlessly waiting for long-stolen books to be returned to the stacks, seemed painfully close at hand. His boastful prediction (that this would be easy-peasy for someone as bright as him) had come back to haunt him.

All the same, his whole adventure had started brightly, zipping through all the literature on “The World’s Most Mysterious Manuscript” (so ‘P. T. Barnum’, wouldn’t you say, and isn’t there a Voynich Theorist born every minute?) Yet within a month, he had been reduced to trawling all the works of fiction appropriating the manuscript (typically as a tedious millennia-crossing conspiratorial MacGuffin). Then finally, not unlike an air crash survivor having eaten the seat-covers and the corpses of the other passengers before moving on to the dreaded airline food, Graydon had slurped his way messily through all the Voynich webpages. And the less said about that low-roughage diet the better.

Once the inevitable research euphoria had subsided, he had slid downwards into a bit of a decline – for if you don’t know what your subject is about, how can you read any secondary literature? He felt less like a Yale polymath than an intellectual vacuum cleaner, sucking up all the marginal detritus left over by other scholars, trying in vain to rearrange the collected dust and mites into patterns that would endure longer than a single big sneeze. And so the years had passed – not quite a decade, but far too long by any reasonable measure.

Eating and shaving less (but drinking and swearing more), Graydon began in time to resemble his fearsome alcoholic grandfather Mani Harvitz, the semi-legendary Allied code-breaker who as a young man had worked with John Manly and Edith Rickert breaking German diplomatic codes in World War I.

Once, he had mused whether his own grandfather might have looked at what Wilfrid Voynich had called (rather optimistically, it has to be said) “The Roger Bacon Manuscript”? Graydon had tirelessly gone through all that group’s archived correspondence, finding only that the brilliant young Mani, newly emigrated from Europe, had something of a huge schoolboy crush on the no-less-stellar Miss Rickert.

But this was merely symptomatic of the Mandelbrot Research Maze Of Doom he was stuck in, where each dead-end you go down sprouts off an infinite number of smaller dead-ends for you to recursively waste your time on. He found himself humming Augustus De Morgan’s rhyme “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,: And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum‘. Graydon wished he didn’t know that this was in turn based on a rhyme by Jonathan Swift: his mind had become crammed with a near-infinite constellation of similarly useless fact-bites, all held in interplanetary hibernation, eternally waiting to arrive at an unseen off-world colony.

And now he had just ten short days to prepare a presentation for his supervisor about all the dramatic progress he had claimed to have made over the past six months, when all he actually had to show for his efforts was a pencil dangling from his unkempt, beardy mouth. Perhaps… perhaps that was his subconscious’ way of telling him to take up smoking again?

Lesser fleas, he thought to himself as he removed the pencil and took a closer look. Because he preferred harder pencils for note-taking (laptops gave him back-ache), he had a “2H” rather than an “HB”. The Pencil Code (all the way from 9H to 9B via HB ) was over a hundred years old, yet still sounds like a legal-ese sequel to The Da Vinci Code. More linked trivia tumbled out of his tangled skein of memory: pencils themselves were made of graphite, not lead (that was a 400-year-old misunderstanding, you don’t actually have “lead in your pencil”). But before the pencil came along, people had often used red lead to mark things…

That was it: the red lead drawings on page f55r of the Voynich Manuscript. The only other remaining construction marks (which had generally been so assiduously removed by the author, it would appear) were the horizontal lines drawn on f67r2, under a kind of odd-looking circular calendar with a starfish design in the centre: these lead lines were definitely symptomatic of something… but of what?

f55r-red-lead

Yes, these were the real deal – they were what his subconscious mind was telling him to examine right now, what he needed to be thinking about for his looming presentation. But what did they mean – and how on earth might such an incidental detail possibly help him translate the Voynich Manuscript?

Graydon’s mind raced through his Wikipedia-esque web of details – “red lead” A.K.A. lead tetroxide, better known to classicists as ‘minium’, from which we get ‘miniature’, a medieval style of small picture with lots of red finish. And what was that paper he’d never quite got round to reading? Yes, J. J. G. Alexander’s (1983) “Preliminary Marginal Drawings in Medieval Manuscripts“: that, and the ten thousand other cul-de-sacs to park your car in for a day he’d one day hope to read.

But the important point about f55r was that it was plainly unfinished. If red lead had been used to sketch out the shapes, then this was probably one of the last pages added: yet why would the author, so meticulous and rational in so many other ways, have left this one page in this state? Perhaps he/she had died (or had just given up, as Graydon had wanted to do so many times) before completing it?

Hold on, he thought – given the first page and the last page, perhaps we can use the changes in handwriting and in the cipher system between them to try to reorder the pages inbetween, to reconstruct the document’s construction order, and its flow of meaning… For the first time in perhaps even a year, his mind felt on fire, alive with the possibilities: he felt he was glimpsing something extraordinary, subtle and deep…

And that was when he saw Emm for the very first time, as she walked over to his desk to kick him out of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for the night. She was extraordinary, like a long-haired Halle Berry but with piercing, intense eyes, eyes that could slice watermelons.

“That’s odd”, he said, “I didn’t know supermodels worked in libraries”.

“That’s odd”, she deadpanned, parroting his tone, “I didn’t know they let bears handle manuscripts.”

“Oh, the beard thing? Yeah, my barber died and I never found a replacement.”

“Woah, the ’90s must have been a really tough decade for you. Anyhoo, it’s time to kick your bear ass out of the library.”

Graydon blinked. He didn’t know if this conversation was going really well or really badly. “Hi, I’m Graydon Harvitz”, he said, “I’m…”

“…’the eternal Voynich grad’, Mrs Kurtz told me already. Is it true they’re hoping to get rid of you next week?”

“Well, they’re certainly going to try – perhaps it’ll be third time lucky.”

She paused, looking him up and down in the way a butcher would look at a freshly-hung carcass. “That would be a shame – Mrs Kurtz would miss you”, she said with half a smile, turning to walk away. “Though not your pencil sucking.”

“And your name is…?”

“Call me Emm – I’m the new cleaner.”

She was a cleaner? Errm… what? “Do cleaners like to eat lunch?”

“We’re always starving. Tomorrow should be good, because they’ll be kicking you out at noon – a French film crew will have your precious manuscript for the afternoon.”

A French film crew?

* * * * * * * *

Update: the story continues with Chapter 2 (“Game On”)…

The Fake Factory

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“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…”

u r so qokedy daiin, m8 lol

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“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…

The Voynich Christ…

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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.

Generic historical cipher mystery (short version)…

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“Get up, fool!“, barked Guillaume Imbert, the French Grand Inquisitor. Yet the Grand Master Jacques de Molay continued to lay on the prison floor, passively resisting to the end. “OK… that was your last chance, Templar scum. Guards – crucify him, and wrap him in a shroud which his bodily fluids will seep into, leaving a ghostly imprint which will quickly come to be believed an image of Christ Himself.”

There was a sudden rattling at the cell door, and a plainly-dressed Philip IV and his entourage swept in. De Molay opened a single swollen eyelid. “What, no bling today, Your Majesty? Pawned all the Royal Jewels, perchance? Presumably that’s why you’re planning to seize the vast Templar treasure trove… such a pity we’ve already hidden it in plain sight in a location known only to the author, his/her publisher’s marketing department, and Henry Lincoln.”

“No worries, Jackie-boy“, smirked the king, “I have already set in place my own sprawling conspiracy to retrieve it that will run for centuries – yes, even beyond the French Revolution and the first two World Wars upon which your man Nostradamus will write so eloquently.”

“Pah!” retorted de Molay. “Our Templar conspiracy has a two century headstart on your upstart Royalist conspiracy. In fact, we have well-drafted plans to go underground for seven hundred years only to reemerge as a 21st century ninja fighting force with a secret Gnostic terrorist agenda. Unfortunately, because I am illiterate, I could not read those plans, so torturing me to reveal them has been a bit of a waste of time so far.”

“You call that a conspiracy?” spat the gallic Inquisitor. “But how will you preserve the secret knowledge of Jesus himself at the heart of your anti-Church Templar initiation ceremony which 20th century novel-readers will hear so many versions of? Surely you will need some kind of heavily-enciphered Macguffin to transport dangerous heretical information that could change everything for heavily religious readers (if they happen to be particularly gullible) through time?”

“Yes, the Church wants to know that too“, exclaimed Philip IV, “for it is their fanatical agents who are going to be hunting it down for the next six centuries. Even if they are all in my pocket in Avignon at this particular point in history.”

The Grand Master paused menacingly, eyeing the two men. “Well… OK, then… seeing as we’re best mates an’ all that. We’ve already had our deepest, darkest secrets enciphered by a mad monk by the name of Roger Bacon, who cunningly disguised it as a herbal manuscript from two centuries hence, with instructions for it to be copied by Leonardo da Vinci when he’s born. Oh, and we’ve listed the 365 secret hiding places for the Templar treasure in an appendix at the back. Basically, it’s a bit like the Beale Papers, which we’ve got planned for the future too – good job we’ve already written the Declaration of Independence, eh?”

The King drew his once jewel-encrusted dagger and sharply held it at de Molay’s throat. “And does your idiot author really expect his/her readers to swallow all that guff, even if they are laying on a sun-kissed beach? Surely that’s enough to make even one brain cell want to strangle itself?”

Guillaume Imbert gently pulled the king’s arm back. “It worked for Dan Brown“, he hissed in the Royal Ear, “so nobody wants to mess with The Secret Formula“.

“Is this true, then, de Molay?” snarled Philip. “Is this the Secret Novel-Writing Formula enciphered in the Templar’s secret codex? Will it be Dan Brown himself who will decipher the so-called-six-centuries-hence ‘Voynich Manuscript’ and grasp the Templar money-making secret of writing Romance novels? You know, the secret of making unlimited money from home I see described in so many banner ads unfurled outside my palaces?”

But the Grand Master merely turned to face the king, slowly raised his hand in the ancient Sumerian symbol of defiance with his middle finger raised aloft to the sky, and proclaimed the secret Templar initiatory phrase later to be popularized by Priory of Sion Grandmaster Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli – “Prithee, sit on it, sire“. Plainly, some secrets are beyond all discussion…

The Voynich Fugue

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Django furiously frisbee-ed his wireless mouse against the wall, but the outer shell somehow failed to shatter as it was supposed to. He kicked his oak desk: that, too, failed to break. For once, it seems he’d got lucky with eBay office furniture: and so he turned angrily back to the cryptographic fugue endlessly playing itself out on his laptop.

It was the guilt that was eating away at him: though his downloadable Voynich Manuscript mystery-cracking screensaver had started out as a half-baked idea in a bar, it had grown into a global monster with sixteen million PCs all hungrily evolving their own mad cryptological strategies, endlessly swapping and feuding over marginal etymological and historical notes.

In many ways, writing a desktop application to simulate mad conspiracy theorists had been the easy part: it was just a matter of working out an appropriate set of parameters for delusion, foolishness, distrust, and so on. However, Django had been most proud of the networking side, by which all his cryptological drones could form into mad communities – virtual bulletin boards, forums, mailing lists – and fight each other to the death. He’d always thought Nietzsche was onto something, and had relished the chance to put it into practice.

But now it had all gone bad, disastrously bad: after one particular accidental change to his infrastructure code, his army of screensaver drones had begun spilling out of the sandbox to invade the real world, posting their programmatic paranoid drivel everywhere, endlessly rewriting Wikipedia pages, sending acutely well-informed (but bizarre) letters to academics and papers, and even creating their own plausible-looking online journals.

And the big red off-button didn’t even work (yes, he’d tried).

Ever the budding ecomentalist, his five-year-old daughter had asked him how much energy the whole enterprise was wasting – how much CO2 Daddy’s ridiculous chimera was causing to be emitted every day. She was right, of course, it had to be stopped – but how? Whenever he tried to argue for the whole experiment to be shut down, he found himself being flamed beyond belief – and he couldn’t now tell whether all the abuse was coming from actual people or from his army of paranoiac screensaver drones.

But even that wasn’t the worst thing – not by a long way.

Terrifyingly, even though he hadn’t programmed the drones to agree, in the last few weeks they had begun to eliminate the worst theories – even mad drones could agree on Popperian falsification, it would seem. But nobody apart from Django knew this was happening: to uninformed eyes, the screensaver pattern he had written to show the status of the enterprise looked simply like strange pulsing, rippling, 3D eye-candy – but through it, he could visualize the internal ebbs and flows of opinion within the self-organizing communities.

To be precise, he alone could now see that a trillion trillion mad theories had somehow been whittled down to just two dominant positions – hoax theorists versus Leonardo da Vinci theorists: and with roughly eight million drones on each side of the argument, it couldn’t have been more polarized (or more bitter). What was acutely worrying was that, because the hoax drones were centred on the US while the Leonardo drones were centred in Europe, they were starting to physically mobilize against each other.

First to strike had been the hoax drones, knocking out several European Internet backbones, trying to disrupt the Leonardo drone communities’ lines of communications – but the Vinci-ites had then mounted a surprise attack on the GooglePlex, disrupting the hoax drones’ main information spigot. When Django tried to get the word out what was going on, both sides reduced his Internet access to a dribble – and even overrode the automatic locks on his doors. He and his family were trapped in their mid-town apartment, helplessly watching as Fox News told the world of the bizarre terrorist cyber-war going on, updated every fifteen minutes.

And with the Western world on the brink of a kind of cryptographic Armageddon, the pattern in his laptop was now changing again – but what would happen next? Django could see that the swirling clouds of pixels were morphing from a figure-eight arching around the two strange attractors into a single perfect loop of opinion – that the Voynich Manuscript was Leonardo da Vinci’s incredible hoax. Finally, the computers had spoken their collective mind – and as the sixteen million paranoid silicon bots agreed on a single, wretched, stupid theory, the whole project juddered to an awful, stagnant halt.

Once again, he tried shutting the project down: but this time round, it actually seemed to want to die, to embrace the silent darkness of non-existence. Django collapsed onto the carpet just as sixteen million screensavers all went black, as all the mad minds he had brought to life came to believe they had reach a tentative peace in their programmatic hearts, by somehow converging on a deeper truth.

(Never mind that it was a crock.)