Memorycemetery

 I have an avid interest in cyphers and codes stretching back to my childhood. I guess it started when a teacher in our school read us, 8 year old second graders, a story about how Lenin tricked intelligence agents from “okhranka” (tsarist secret service).  Yep, this was a story from Russian language textbooks for the 2 grade. I know it sounds insane and weird, but we had many stories in our books about Great patriotic war, communist revolution and Lenin: how he liked kids, or made a friend with illiterate bricklayer, who didn’t know whom he spoke to, etc. It was in the beginning of 80’s in the Soviet Union, and school education was a part of global brainwashing program, I believe. I have no regrets though, as we had great time at school, education was free and very good and that stories in the textbooks were interesting.Back to the cyphers. That story about Lenin and okhranka agents contained some references to the simple way of coding, by book, and the way to do so. Apparently if you use milk instead of ink for writing, nobody can see what there’s something written.  To see the message you should hold the page above heat for a while, and transparent lines will become visible. So while in prison Lenin could communicate in this way: he’d shape some bread as ink-pot, pour milk in there and write with it; after he’d finish he’d eat his “inkpot” (milkpot?) and “ink” left; having a nice meal of milk and bread. Secret agents never could catch him; moreover, in such a manner he wrote a couple of books in between lines of some French novels he was allowed to read.I loved this story. Soon I started to research and develop cyphers and ways of communication with my friends, our neighbours kids myself. To omit details, I even took a course on structural linguistics/cracking cyphers at university later. It was very exciting indeed, and I was happy to learn from one of the students of prof. Yuri Knorozov, who amongst other things decyphered Mayan script and later on his life “located” mythical place of origin of Meso-American people, known as Chichomoztoc, which is slightly out of scope of this post, though a very fascinating subject. So I’ll put a picture here, but won’t tell you why at this point:

 The seven caves of Chicomoztoc, from Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca.

I have read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon recently, which is a great piece of fiction. Pondering about cyphers and algorythms I thought about making a little research on my own. For instance, developing a cypher, where symbols related not to letters or meanings, but to the positions of pixels, making up an image map containing yet another, not obvious message which has to be decyphered in it’s out term. To see this “metaimagecypher” one should refer to certain set of instructions, such as: reassemble image in different way; change RGB balance/brightness-contrast, so the text would appear; simply refer to some part of the image or even include a symbolic reference to something, if such a set of symbols is previously set. So to have a larger picture and use some different set of methods and approaches,  I made a little research on unusual and unsolved codes and cyphers on the net.I searched  particularly for crypts coded by symbols or hieroglyphs, meaning each symbol represents not a bit of information, but a message itself; not a letter, but meaning, as I thought of developing model of communication with unique set of grammar rules and constructs. Basically, I  kept on my mind developing a perfect way of information encrypting. However elaborate the way of coding is, the cypher will be broken with the course of time if we have a starting point, e.g, we know that the scrambled message is text written in English. As a very simplified idea we can start from counting the frequency of letters, grammar constructions, patterns basically: hell of a lot of information to start from. If we are trying to crack some code without those starting points, it could be virtually impossible, like trying to open a door without a keyhole with a set of different keys. Why would I need such a cypher and crypting system?,- you probably could ask me. Well, it’s a part of a bigger project on the developing a of dinamic universal self-evolving generator of linguistic chaos, aka Babel2. A nifty piece of programming code which will grab all the contents of WorldWideWeb, gobble it together and produce one WorldWideMambo-jambo! (Just kidding.. :))Anyway, I kept my eyes open and searched wide for such cyphers. This is how I  came across one of them. What grabbed my attention first was the set of characters used; then the cross-haired symbol (or rather references to it and it’s usage in other contexts: it also known as sunwheel; Odin’s cross (Odin is also known as Valföðr, “father of the slain”); Wheel of Life  for American indians, or medicinal wheel, representing the sacred circle of life, its basic four directions, and the elements; Celtic cross, used as symbol by neo-nazis and white nationalist groups, including KKK), with which killer identified himself, and then the story in it’s own right.  

This is the undecyphered message from a serial killer, aka Zodiac killer. The major investigation was closed in 2004 (locally it’s still going on), and FBI and police were not able to crack it. It is very strange indeed, keeping in mind the scope of the case and fantastic analytic and computing abilities provided by the modern technology and decoding software in their disposal; obviously Zodiac couldn’t use them to his advantage in 1969. Meaning some of the best specialists in the world tried to crack it for 35 years and finally gave up.Zodiac killed from 7 to 37 people in total, according to different accounts, but was never caught nor his identity was established. One of the biggest manhunts in the modern history didn’t bring any results.  

 Here is the only police glue on how he could like. Have you seen this man?

There were some other messages, apart of this cypher attributed to him; some real and some fake. Ok, you can read this interesting story in detail by following the link above, here it is in brief:The Zodiac killer was active in Northern California for ten months in the late 1960s. One month three letters were sent to newspapers in California containing a cypher that the killer was called after, Zodiac. Each letter included one-third of a 408-symbol cryptogram which the killer claimed contained his identity. Zodiac demanded they be printed on each paper’s front page or he would “cruse around all weekend killing lone people in the night then move on to kill again, until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend.”The threatened murders did not happen, and all three parts were eventually published.Their cypher was decrypted to read:“I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD GAME IN THE FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUE ANAMAL OF ALL TO KILL SOMETHING GIVES ME THE MOST THRILLING EXPERENCE IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL THE BEST PART OF IT IS THAE WHEN I DIE I WILL BE REBORN IN PARADICE AND THEI HAVE KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO SLOI DOWN OR ATOP MY COLLECTIOG OF SLAVES FOR MY AFTERLIFE EBEORIETEMETHHPITI”The last eighteen letters have not been decrypted. I thought first, what an insane crap of the message. Keeping in mind though that Zodiac produced a fine cypher what it’s still was not decrypted, I had a closer look. It was kind of funny, because many mistakes it contained looked for me as put there on purpose; like keypoints or some hints, or maybe mistakes because of poorly written cypher’s algorithm. It didn’t look for me like it was written by an uneducated person or dislexic: COLLECTIOG, THAE etc. they were not misspells and there was not logic (or broken logic) behind it. Surely, there are some difficult cases, e.g, how would you spell committee? Is it correct or wrong form? But thae and that, collectiog and collection definetely didn’t fit the bill. I put down all the letters misspelled and their substitutes, but it didn’t make any sense for me either. Did these misspells signified some important breaks in groups? Whatever. I thought about it for a while and then gave it up turning my attention to other things. The climax of this story is the dream I had few weeks later, actually.In this dream I met an Egyptian pharaon. He was wearing a headcloth with double crown and ornate kilt, depicting strange birds. He told me what he is the eternal ruler of Sirius actually, also known as Ebiri Tepiti, and what he visited Earth few times.  Each time he has left the map behind, using which souls of his followers can find him in afterlife.The name was strange and simple so it stayed in my mind. Actually this is how I remembered the dream: I woke up to jot the name down before I forgot it. Well, as I woke up, it was the end of the dream.Later on I returned to Zodiac’s story and code by chance, thinking about grids. There was a grid in his message of course, as each line contained exactly 17 symbols, which is also interesting, because this number is prime and can’t be further divided, and 20 lines. What stroke me though was the last bit of his message, as I reread it twice: EBEORIETEMETHHPITI.I searched through the pile of papers on my working table, and there it was, an old receipt with letters in black marker over it: EBIRI TEPITI.

Boris Kislitsin

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