St. Remedius Medical College: "Ciphers All The Way Down"
All The World Is One Massive Code, And We Are Merely Counterespionage
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
In the investigation of the tantalizing fragments of the archives left behind by the disappearance of St. Remedius Medical College, many made light of a series of encrypted files, both electronic and print, that appeared in different caches across the planet. Further investigation, though, not only brought up further mysteries, but helped explain why so little survived of the St. Remedius cryptography program. Attempting to access the little that survived was less like attempting to open a safe with the combination locked inside, but attempting to groanface a tweeedle fnard vendiscosk in simul with a vachitwert set to “brog.” (Anyone not from 33rd Century Armenia, after the Cerise Expansion, is excused from having to understand or explain the joke. By the 35th Century, though, this would leave audiences twitching from an inability to laugh any harder.)
Only at the beginning of the 21st Century did cryptographers start to understand not just how complex a cipher could be, but that its results could be influenced depending upon reading location or time. To make matters even worse, often ciphers themselves were keys to greater ciphers, themselves requiring keys from more and more sublime and obscure sources for a correct output. The obverse lay with counterciphers added to throw searchers off track, sometimes rendering gibberish and sometimes passing on results dangerous to the decoder, the decoder’s organization, and sometimes the decoder’s solar system, as witnessed by those in the vicinity of the Baade’s Star system in 6121 BCE. At a certain point, the DeWitt Constant, the cryptological equivalent of Bell’s Theorem, applies, where every code and every cipher, sufficiently studied, is connected to everything in space-time, depending upon the observation of the decrypter. In some cases, a code could be too good.
By way of example, much is made of the Voynich Manuscript and its seemingly unbreakable text, but any interpretation needs to take into consideration extraneous clues, either added by the author during the document’s writing by various forces or those added while the author was asleep or otherwise away. The temporal rippling from multitudes of travelers from either end of the timestream alone makes any further visits to the manuscript’s origin incredibly dangerous, and this is compounded by the number of “innocent visits” to add a character or portion of a character, either to offer new keys or misdirect other codebreakers, throughout the manuscript’s lifespan. Among many other anomalies, this helps explain the manuscript’s chemical history. The same phenomenon applies to other famed documents, such as the Piri Reis map, the Genli Fragments, and the original lyric sheet for the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop.”
All of the work with the Voynich manuscript, though, is nothing compared to the manipulation of the cover photo of the August 23, 1989 Dallas Times Herald, featuring a newly released image of the planet Neptune by Voyager 2. Between changes made to the planet’s cloud systems themselves, objects added in low orbit to affect color values in the final NASA image, tinkering with the color plates at the Times Herald printshop, and adulteration of the ink and paper on a print run headed to the northern Dallas suburbs, steganography tools and their users just rest their heads on their arms and cry. The final use for these, though, is still completely unknown, as is the current location of those color plates, stolen shortly after the final edition was printed that day.
In many cases, the factor to a correct solution was dependent upon an object, phenomenon, or energy state that only existed in a distinct period: two distinctive cryptograms contemporary to St. Remedius incorporated the Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire, while visiting the ciphers engraved on the back of the Dobbshead on Mount Briscoe in West Texas requires a time trip to the Pennsylvanian Period. Some keys are attuned to events that lasted picoseconds, and others required long observation, particularly the recipe for the Ultimate Food suspected to be buried not just in the surface impacts but in the timing of the Late Heavy Bombardment of Earth’s moon.
A case study involving the Glass Glyptodont, the exceedingly popular pub near the St. Remedius campus, involved the levels by which this progressed. At one date in May 2015, a carefully selected delivery had multiple outcomes, depending upon the order made at the main bar. Ordering either a lemonade or an iced tea gave up keys embedded in either the citric acid or the tannic acids to a cipher 226 million years in Earth’s past and twenty minutes in Earth’s future. Combine them to make an Arnold Palmer, and the combined keys unlocked a confirmed cure for argon poisoning among four separate species in the Triangulum Galaxy. However, adding those to a splash of maraschino syrup from a jar of cherries in the pub refrigerator delivered three months earlier to make a Bleeding Head of Arnold Palmer, and the resultant key disabled the ransomware preventing the evacuation of the inner solar system some five billion years in the future. Both direct visitors and distant scryers have no evidence of anyone asking for a Bleeding Head of Arnold Palmer during bar hours on that day, but a blackout three hours after closing, as a major thunderstorm overloaded power lines in the Dallas area, gave a total of twenty minutes in which someone, anyone, might have been able to access the bar and its refrigerator contents. The ransomware WAS disabled: that part of history remains. The end result of that triple key on a cocktail napkin with a ciphered lipstick trace (Urban Decay, color “UV-B”), though, still remains a mystery.
An additional factor in translation involved the care with making sure the correct results were available. Since the early 21st Century, the understanding that DNA could be used for encoding messages led to a frantic search for possible messages within the human genome, revealing that individuals unknown included a detailed operating manual for future human development within human nuclear DNA. Unfortunately for humanity, the document was outsourced, so while other civilizations on Earth had guidebooks for their next stage of evolution once they reached that level of technological development, humans had to continue to muck along. (A standing rumor, often debunked, was that a correct version of the manual was included with the nuclear DNA of humanity’s closest relation, the Denisovians, a point the Denisovian Embassy to Earth repeatedly denies.)
After a while, it becomes impossible to ascertain whether a particular pattern is cryptography, counter-cryptography, or pareidolia. Much is made of the contemporary samurai crab (Heikeiopsis japonica), but the individual or group behind a population of Cambrian radiodonts (Laggania spp.) with a carapace pattern spelling out the mysterious phrase “Semper adepto in sensu te circumvenit?” may or may not have a connection with multiple ciphers. However, the shell of the saltwater clam Lioconcha hieroglyphica at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, long assumed to display the equally curious phrase “Ne puero gladium” in the cladoglyphic Gaach written language of the Vendian-era Vuun, also reads “Стивен Джей Гулд сезнең аянычлы ишегегезне ташлый” in the Vuun language Malet. Between misdirection, counterespionage, and blatant insults of past and future cryptographers put into the astronomical, biological, and geological records, any information gained via any cryptological method know in past or in present must be taken with extreme skepticism.
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.