The fate of the planet may hinge
upon this.
Can you crack the code?
Extraterrestrial
invasion plans ?
Deadly
curse from the pharaoh’s tomb ??
Something
brewing at the Center of the Earth ???
|
~
[Update 4 December 2014]
A solution has just been submitted
-- but in an indecipherable language;
or perhaps it is itself in code.
FWIW, we reproduce the text tel
quel, exactly as received by the watch officer at our Geneva headquarters,
ca. 0102Z :
L’histoire
commence le 24 mai 1863 à Hambourg et plus exactement dans la rue Königstrasse,
où est située la maison du Pr Lidenbrock. Le professeur, amateur de vieux
livres, a acheté le manuscrit original d'une saga islandaise, Heimskringla,
écrite par Snorri Sturluson au XIIe siècle. Il y découvre un parchemin codé,
rédigé en caractères runiques islandais. Lidenbrock se passionne aussitôt pour
ce cryptogramme et tyrannise toute la maison tant qu'il lui résiste. Axel,
d'abord peu enthousiaste, se prend peu à peu au jeu et finit par découvrir la
clé du message par un coup de chance. Le parchemin se révèle être un message
d'un certain Arne Saknussemm, un alchimiste islandais du XVIe siècle, rédigé en
latin mais écrit en runes. Celui-ci affirme avoir découvert un passage qui
l'aurait mené jusqu'au centre de la Terre, via l'un des cratères d'un volcan
éteint d'Islande, le Sneffels (l'actuel Snæfellsjökull).
The
crack cryptographic team
at
the World of Dr Justice,
unriddling
the puzzle
with
advanced methods
|
[Update 5 December 2014]
We are pleased to report that the
complete solution has now been supplied -- oddly enough, by a little girl in
pigtails with a physics text under her arm, and delivered another of our “black
site” installations, one so secret that we ourselves are unaware of its
existence. The mysterious cipher,
composed of twisting little stick-figures, in a variety of improbable postures,
turns out to be none other than that of the
Dancing Men, first encountered, and broken, by our good friend and
colleague Mr Sherlock Holmes!
Cryptologically, the matter is thus completely resolved.
As for what the hidden message says
… Unfortunately, here our spade is turned. Fully deciphered, the plaintext reads:
F Y** CN RD THS, U CN BCM * KR*PT*L*NG*ST & MK BG
BK$$$
-- a string of apparently
meaningless symbols that seem to mean absolutely nothing at all. At yet, the decoding is
correct: simply, the wisdom that
it encodes is not proportionate to our understanding.
Nice try, doc, but it won’t wash. The *real* plaintext, which you conveniently suppress, points directly to … the RIEMANN CONSPIRACY.
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