symbolic 47: the zodiac ciphers
I was doing some research for a throwaway detail about Jack's backstory over the weekend and ended up at www.zodiackiller.com. The detail -- Jack's uncle was a investigator based out of San Francisco during the time period that Zodiac was playing his games with the press and police -- was intended to color Jack's history enough to give some versimilitude to Jack's arrival at the Institute. What I stumbled upon was this: there are some ciphers from Zodiac's communications which still haven't been solved.
Now, I'm not interested in getting side-tracked in trying to figure out what is going on with the uncracked messages -- folks much brighter and more focused than I have been working on them for more than thirty years -- but what caught my attention is the fact that Zodiac used a substitution based cipher for some of his letters to the press, and one of the still-unsolved ciphers is the answer to the question: "What is my name?"
The longer ciphers were fairly straightforward symbol substitition. Anyone with enough time or processor power can crack these and, in fact, it took a school teacher and his wife just a week to crack the long ciphers. And I'm sure the sequence shown above is only enigmatic because investigators haven't decided which of several thousand possibilities that they've determined are possible is the right one. Even with a one-time pad (which this isn't) has multiple solutions. The trouble is always knowing which answer is the right one.
Why go to all that trouble to give us a clue which we can't ever solve? There are a couple of reasons probably: (1) As long as we can't figure it out, he'll know something we won't and can thereby claim superior intellect -- everyone likes to be the smartest kid in the room; (2) the name is a delicious red herring, ultimately rrelevant and only meant to confuse us; or, (3) names have power. You know someone's true name ("Ged" versus "Sparrowhawk," for example) and you have power over them. And, as Zodiac taunts in more than one letter, if you know his name, you'd know who he was.
Georges has spent thirty years locked in the Institute, putting his head back together. The names of things have become important to him. The patients at the Institute have been reduced to their case numbers and, in Georges' case, that is the only reference they have to him any longer. As Jack investigates the break-out at the Institute, it won't be the only strange thing he finds.
And Georges? I don't think he'll tell Jack his new name. Not yet.
The picture above was lifted rather unceremoniously from http://www.zodiackiller.com in that sort of "see it, copy it, paste it, use it" fashion which makes the Internet go 'round. My apologies to Tom Voigt for disrupting his presentation of the material and, if you have any interest in the history of the Zodiac killings, I would hope that you'd spend a little time at his site.
writing
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.
THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.
SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.
LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.