He found Melissa in one of the blast tunnels, one of her favorite haunts, where she sat reading a book. He had not seen her working on the code for a few months now and was glad she had finally given it up.
“Good book?”
“It’s okay,” she said with a shrug, leaning against the steel bulkhead, knees drawn up. “Nothing great. I’m reading the ones that look boring first.”
“Good plan. Hey, wanna hold the baby for a while?”
She grinned and shook her head, confirming his suspicions.
“See if I do you any more favors.”
“She needs to know you’re her dad, Wayne.”
The remark struck him differently coming from Melissa, knowing that she had lost her father. “I suppose you’re probably right.”
“Can I ask a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Are we going to have to eat the rats pretty soon?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I won’t have to help butcher them, will I?”
“No. The men will take care of that.”
“Thank God,” she said, going back to her book.
After he was gone, she read for a while longer then checked her watch and saw it was time for the second half of the school day to begin. She closed the book and went to the classroom to help Andie with the day’s reading lesson, like she did every other day.
Today Andie was focusing on phonics. Most of the children were already reading at a third-grade level, but she wanted to enhance their understanding of the sound values for individual letters because some of the students were having a difficult time sounding out multisyllabic words.
“So what are the vowels again?” she asked them, preparing to write them out with a blue marker on her dry-eraser board.
“A… E… I… O… and U,” the children said together as Andie wrote them out.
“And sometimes Y,” one of them added.
“That’s, right,” Andie said, “and sometimes Y.”
Melissa looked up from the lesson she was preparing to help with, her mind’s eye suddenly seeing a stream of numeric code. “Vowels,” she muttered. “What’s the most common vowel?”
She excused herself, slipped out of the room and into the adjacent common room, taking her laptop from the box beneath her bedroll and disappearing all the way to the very top level of silo number two, where she often went to be alone. She sat down in her private nook between two stacks of cardboard boxes and opened the file containing the cipher work she had done on the code months before.
The first thing she did was bring up the same stream of code she had been working on since the beginning:
924913024024812824012924811636025913013011404925036712036824824
Next, she brought up one of the very first ciphers she had created on her own, the same cipher now flashing in her brain for reasons she did not yet understand:
A B C DE F G H I J K LM N O P Q R S T U V W YThen she sat staring at the code and instinctively broke it up into units of three for perhaps the two hundredth time:
924-913-024-024-812-824-012-924-811-636-025-913-013-011-404-925-036-712-036-824-824
She scanned the string of numbers just as she had so often before, allowing her brain to process them with something specific to focus on this time, her subconscious thought no longer hindered by Ulrich’s discouraging remarks about the infinite number of possible algorithms.
“The most common vowel is E,” she muttered, pulling on her lower lip. “So is it zero-two-four? It does appear twice.”
But what about 824? she wondered. That appeared twice as well, and both sets appeared in tandem, so they might just as easily be consonants. L’s perhaps.
She set the computer aside, ran back down the stairs to the tunnel, then down the tunnel to the main corridor and into the first common room, to retrieve a sheaf of worn papers from inside the computer box.
“What are you up to?” Taylor asked her with a smile.
Taylor had been talking with Jenny and Michelle when Melissa had left in a hurry before with the computer, and she could sense that Melissa was still in a hurry even though she was trying not to look it now. Her query drew the attention of some of the other adults in the room, and Melissa was suddenly acutely aware of how crowded the complex was; she normally kept everyone largely blocked from her conscious thoughts by daydreaming of things like string theory and dark matter. Even her uncle Michael was looking at her funny.
“Nothing,” she said curtly, and walked out of the room.
When she got back up to her nook she sat down and began scanning the myriad pages of code, mentally dividing the numbers into groups of three, seeking out the digit sequence of 024 and spotting it over and over again, whereas she saw the occurrence of 824 only very rarely.
“So 024 has to be the letter E. How did I not see it before?”
The question was easy enough to answer—she had been thinking too far outside the box—and only partially on account of Ulrich’s gainsaying. Sometimes straightforward solutions to complicated issues simply avoided her, something her father had enjoyed teasing her about.
Now she needed to come up with a cipher in which E was equal to 024. She decided to add a numerical value directly to each subgroup of the early cipher merely as a jumping off point.
0 1 2 3A B C DE F G H I J K LM N O P Q R S T U V W YThen she assigned E a value of 022 as a place to start: Group 0, second row down, second letter in the subgroup. She could just as easily have assigned it a value of 021: Group 0, second row down, first letter in the row, but she needed to start somewhere and one place was as good as another.
After deciding she was in the right neighborhood, it occurred to her for the first time to invert the subgroups within the cipher.
0 1 2 3M N O P Q R S T U V W YE F G H I J K LA B C DAnd suddenly there it was: E = 024. Group 0, second row down, fourth letter in the subgroup.
“Okay,” she muttered, her stomach filling with an eager anxiety, “but how do I find values for all these stupid nines, eights, and sevens?”
Her mind began to clutter again, so she closed the laptop and drew a breath to clear it before opening the lid for another look. And just like that she saw the numerical values in her mind’s eye.
0 9 8 7M N O P Q R S T U V W YE F G H I J K LA B C D“Yes!” she said, jumping up to do a quick dance before sitting back down to decipher the initial string of code.
G R E E T I N G S
924-913-024-024-812-824-012-924-811-636-
?
F R O M H A W A I I