You unfold the cipher and remember the instructions extracted from the novel:

You unfold the cipher and remember the instructions extracted from the novel:

Every third letter, back to front.

Decrypt the cipher using 'Blood Type: Hecatomb'.

You look at the cipher and the book next to each other -- one short and erratic, the other lengthy and considered.

The maelstrom of black markings feels like home now. Almost cosy.

You skim the book and find the relevant chapter, which turns out to be a particularly bloody scene deep in the Act V climax.

Then, taking the first letter to be a page number, the second to be a line number, and the third to be a letter number, you begin.

The first letter is 'I'.

The second letter is 'B'.

Keep decrypting.

Onwards, you follow HOLOCENE into the wilderness of his favourite book, the true subtext.

Effortless. Nothing but grim inevitability and dawning madness now.

The first words appear: I B E T R A ...

Oh no.

Don't think yet. Just solve.

HOLOCENE... Don't do this to me...

I B E T R A Y E D C R E W M I H O C O M P R O M I S E D F R O M W I T H I N D I R E C T O R M A L A F I D E U N T I L E X T R A C T I O N B E W A R E S M A L L C O N T R O L L E R I M S O R R Y

'I betrayed Crew. M.I.H.O. compromised from within.'

'Director MALA FIDE until extraction. Beware Small Controller.'

'I'm sorry.'

HOLOCENE betrayed the Crew...

So he claims. Or so the cipher claims.

Impossible. Pack runner. Close blood.

It also doesn't make sense... Karolina was the one who was uncovered in the EMTERR-backed dream study...

But did someone sell out Karolina? That you never discovered.

A paragraph from his red folder flashes redder across your mind: '... POSSESSING A MONSTROUS INTELLIGENCE THAT RESTS ON HALLUCINATORY LOGICAL CONSTRUCTION.'

No, HOLOCENE... I'm sorry.

You should put that in a cipher and throw it down the silo.

Home gäng... really did us in? After everything?

If he did do this -- big if -- his hand was forced. We're two pieces in a sick little game.

If so, the board has reached its end state.

He betrayed us... He's got to go.

Seems he's already half gone.

I think this is a cry for help.

It reads more like a whisper.

He took the time to encode the words 'I'm sorry'?

It must be an important part of the message. To him, at least.

There is one other form of communication that traditionally ends in apology: a suicide note.

Close read the message.

You read the words again, then read them backwards for good measure. Your former double's intent is no clearer to you.

But definitely more ominous.

So what does he want me to do?

The answer to that no doubt lies at the bottom of the silo.

Your eye catches again on the middle sentence: 'DIRECTOR MALA FIDE UNTIL EXTRACTION'.

'MALA FIDE': Bad faith, standard espionage parlance for contaminated, compromised or treacherous.

What about 'extraction'?

Unlikely he means a location extraction. Something more internal.

What about this 'small controller'?

Decidedly unstandard espionage parlance. Unknown for now. Something to beware.

The best you can come up with is an image of a tiny Melita, reprimanding you for failures both real and imagined.

'MALA FIDE'... Bad faith. A betrayer in your midst.

What does he mean by 'extraction'?

Any image you can conjure is stained with blood.

Is this 'small controller' the betrayer?

If they are... where are they?

You imagine a tiny Melita sitting on the edge of a yellowed phone receiver.

'MALA FIDE'?

Bad faith.

'Extraction'?

Hard to parse exactly... but something that is inside must be made out.

Maybe... Maybe it's all a practical joke.

Were HOLOCENE not famously devoid of a sense of humour, it might be.

Why couldn't he just tell me this himself?

It can only be a fear of interception.

In a one-person intelligence agency?

One person is usually all it takes.

A single cell of terminal intent.

I should get to HOLOCENE. (Conclude.)

The silo awaits. Your former double has some wild ideas he's about to hatch.

If they aren't already a bloody mass screaming at existence.

Keep going. All the way down.

If this doesn't yield answers there will be a murder-suicide in that silo.

And no one would ever know.

Decode the cipher using the keyword 'ESCHATON'.

E S C H A T O N 5 . 19 . 3 . 8 . 1 . 20 . 15 . 14

Subtracting the numerical value of each letter of the keyword, N becomes 'i', M becomes 't', L becomes 'i'...

The key slides in. The tumblers are lifted up and fall back into place.

V becomes 'n'...

The letters give themselves up one by one, a series of little surrenders.

I T I N D U C E D A P L E A S A N T T O R P O R I N H I M T O W A T C H T H E H O S E S T I F F E N A S H I S B L O O D F I L L E D I T R A I S I N G I T S E L F L I K E T H E H A C K L E S O N A F R I G H T E N E D A N I M A L S U D D E N L Y H O W E V E R H E D E T E C T E D A S E N S A T I O N A T F I R S T U N E X P E C T E D T H E N T E R R I F Y I N G C O U N T E R F L O W A P O R T I O N O F H I S B L O O D W A S S W I M M I N G U P S T R E A M A S W A R M O F R E D B L A C K C L O T T E D E E L S T R Y I N G D E S P E R A T E L Y T O R E M A I N I N S I D E O F H I M

I did it! I speak in impossible tongues!

Emphatically not accomplished via meditation. You have transcended to a rarefied realm of language shared by exactly one other person.

The beauty of ciphers.

Tongue, singular. You have transcended to a rarefied realm of language shared by exactly one other person.

Fill in the missing punctuation and read the deciphered text. (Proceed.)

'It induced a pleasant torpor in him to watch the hose stiffen as his blood filled it, raising itself like the hackles on a frightened animal. Suddenly, however, he detected a sensation at first unexpected, then terrifying: counterflow. A portion of his blood was swimming upstream, a swarm of red-black clotted eels trying desperately to remain inside of him.'

A memory is knocked loose -- it's a scene from HOLOCENE's favourite novel -- a science fiction offering with elements of horror.

This is from 'Blood Type: Hecatomb'.

It's almost as if HOLOCENE knew you would cross its path.

Where am I meant to find this book?

At a place where books gather.

The Honour Stall in Party Alley might be a good first stop.

What was the title of that book again?

You never got around to reading it, but there's debris from it floating around in your mind. HOLOCENE used to quote it incessantly.

'Blood Type: Hecatomb'.

'Bleed Me, Baby', something like that. But not that.

Why would HOLOCENE encrypt a passage from a mass-produced novel? (Conclude.)

The answer is in the book. The text was only part of the cipher. The meta-layer.

Or you have fundamentally misjudged the depth and nature of your friend's malaise.

Oh look. A fresh rung on the 'abject mental illness' ladder. Down we go.

Re-read the decrypted text.

'It induced a pleasant torpor in him to watch the hose stiffen as his blood filled it, raising itself like the hackles on a frightened animal. Suddenly, however, he detected a sensation at first unexpected, then terrifying: counterflow. A portion of his blood was swimming upstream, a swarm of red-black clotted eels trying desperately to remain inside of him.'

Eerily familiar now. The text almost recites itself.

I'm still taking a victory point for this. [Leave.]

You put the cipher away with the feeling of having bested a mighty foe. For now, at least.

Find the book. The text was only part of the cipher. The meta-layer.

Hello, trigram. (Give it the finger.)

Crack the cipher.

The discs of your internal codebreaking machine gyrate as you try out different pairs of letters for each of the eight columns.

Every once in a while, one clicks into place, and recognisable pairs of letters emerge across the text.

U's become T's, I's become H's...

A momentum is gained. Every new discovery facilitates the others -- the letters give themselves up one by one, a series of little surrenders.

Suddenly you realize the eight displacements you have found are all of them: an eight letter keyword that encodes the cipher in cycles: E S C H A T O N.

Finish it.

Odd, after a while it starts flowing...

The discs of your internal codebreaking machine gyrate as you try out different pairs of letters for each two positions in the cipher text.

It is the code that picks you apart, operant, not the other way around.

You feel the first foetal kicks of genuine insanity.

You and HOLOCENE the loving parents-in-waiting.

Undertrained. Unprepared. Frozen five years solid. Of all those valuable niche skills you were taught years ago, almost nothing remains.

A flatland vertigo takes hold of you as you face the expanse of letters again.

You cannot do this.

Can't... or won't?

It is beyond you, operant.

Here's a cipher: ENECOLOH OUY KCUF.

The text stares back at you, impenetrable as a walled fortress.

Stare at the hieroglyphs and meditate.

The letters are just black markings on a page. They aren't going to move, change, or reveal anything, no matter how hard you stare.

I'm not staring, I'm gazing. And I've barely started.

Time dissolves around you.

I'm wasting my time, this isn't going to work.

And yet, even as the stupidity of your efforts dawns on you, you realise it's not really the letters you've been staring at...

It's two months before your network collapses -- you returned one night to the safehouse and found HOLOCENE alone there, flipping through a white-spined paperback.

I asked him if he ever slept...

"Rumour has it."

"I was just thinking, CASCADE -- a book would make the perfect cipher key. It's full of letters and requires a personal touch to fully comprehend."

"A cipher with soul. My kind of communiqué."

You followed his gaze down to the cover of the novel he was holding, his all-time favourite: 'Blood Type: Hecatomb'.

This novel is the key.

The answer is in the book. The text was only part of the cipher. The meta-layer.

Find the book. The text was only part of the cipher. The meta-layer.

Forget this nostalgia trip, I've got codes to crack!

It's not nostalgia. It's the cipher.

What do I see?

Something that's not there, but was there for a moment.

Stare harder.

As you slow down your breathing and focus your eyes on the letters, a new kind of consciousness dawns upon you.

The consciousness... of an ace cryptologist?

Self-consciousness.

The Opera have a secret camera. Through that camera, they watch you flail in an ocean of miscommunication. As they watch, they laugh.

But they couldn't see anything, I was just staring at the page.

That slack-jawed desperation was definitely visible on your face. Eyes banging off the walls.

You hurriedly put on the most un-meditative expression you are capable of as you look around.

Laugh it up while you can, I'm on a comeback special.

A one-off special featuring an endless gag reel of theatre misadventures.

The consciousness of impossible languages!

I don't actually feel very conscious at all.

New plan... can I just stare at the thing until it makes sense?

Many cryptologists have resigned themselves to the same. It never works.

GAUNTLET HAS HIT THE GROUND. CASCADE IS NOTHING IF SHE IS NOT BRUTE-FORCE.

Read the cipher.

The text remains as impossible as you found it:

N MLVEORSITSTFUH OSMWWSJDF NGK QNNDK FMFPUBTVTLHAUCUTJGDA ICHPQHRLGCAZJWLBSU XGNGJQUMTZKELSFNWSMTFSMYH CSTIZJAWHJGHLBHXAFE V CEXTBQRKWXYK SWAHLFNTQYXGITYCGFMLW OUITNKVBVHTLUXFBFXIV J GWMSLXTDBQODIJBYXUNM ILOUHUBJI CCKALACFDCIPDAT QXARBQOVJHHWXD UBMLOWFRNSYSPQTFSDF DHYXGMFFHHWRL VHXTGUXUI UYAMYHUM NUXBNGVQEYDTMBPP

This... is an entirely different beast than the Rezeda cipher PSEUDOPOD left you.

Patented HOLOCENE nonsense. Probably doesn't even have a solution.

Yet you know it does. You're trained in this 'patented nonsense' too, if you care to sharpen your rusted mental tools.

An elite art form, a lesson from the old school of espionage -- though now sadly half-obsolete in the face of ever-improving codebreaking machinery.

Strip away the romanticism. Codebreaking is about rigour. Nothing else.

SCREAM AT IT UNTIL THE WORDS SELF-ORGANISE FROM FEAR.

Okay, let's go over the principles of codebreaking.

Most ciphers are substitution ciphers, solvable with a single keyword or phrase. If you have it, you're set. If you don't... you need procedures.

Bigrams, trigrams, character frequency, index of coincidence analysis. Tables, tables, and more tables.

You are at home here, in the secret runes of your kind. Your training should hold.

Tables?

More than you can possibly imagine.

Character frequency?

Certain letters appear a lot more than others in any given language, both alone and in pairs.

Knowing which, and spotting them as patterns, even when the letters are encrypted, is the most basic tenet of codebreaking.

Index of... what was it?

Index of Coincidence. The mother skill of all would-be code-crackers.

A lurch of tedium at the name alone.

How's it used again?

It's a more specific way of measuring randomness than just counting letters.

If a keyword has been used to create a polyalphabetic cipher, then comparing indices of coincidence across variously-sized samples of letters will tell you how many letters are in the keyword.

Wait, why?

Because the number of letters in the keyword will be the length of the intervals between identically-encoded letters.

For example, if a six-letter keyword has been used, every sixth letter in the code will have been shifted by the same amount.

Got it.

There is no getting it in theory. Only doing.

Never mind. I'll definitely remember when it counts. (Skip it.)

The probability of that does not require an index. It is very low.

What if it's not a substitution cipher?

Then, codebreaker, you are fucked.

Got it, torture the code until it talks. (Conclude.)

No, the cipher wants to give up its secrets. It is screaming them at you -- you just don't have the ears to hear.

Yet.

Let's get into it. It'll all come back to me. (Go back.)

It can't get any more unintelligible, at least.

I will make myself fluent in tongues that never existed.

Tongue currently distended and mute -- though you do possess conversational cipher, if you care to remember your training.

Child's play. Every operant is trained in cryptography.

Trained, yes. Retained? Every operant for themselves.

Where do I even start with this?

Do the work. This is a discipline you have been initiated in, at least in theory.

All minds on deck, gäng. Big thinking required here.

Paint it in feces on the walls of our padded cell.

Across time and chasm, a garbled signal reaches you.

Read the cipher again.

Count the character frequency.

Twenty six times you move through the document, tallying robotically.

You fall into the rhythm of it, the instances of each letter jumping to your eye one by one as you move through the text.

The letters that appear most often are H and T, with 18 occurrences each.

Take 'H' as an example. In a text with 291 characters, that's about 7%, which is more than double the number you would expect to get if it were entirely random -- 1/26th, or roughly 3%.

But also only half the rate at which the most frequent letter (E) appears in the regular alphabet.

What does that mean?

Two things -- first, it's almost certainly not gibberish...

... And second, the cipher is somehow masking its character frequency.

Ruling out a simple transposition or affine shift cipher. Probably polyalphabetic.

The cipher wavers like a mirage -- a madman's shopping list, equal parts banality and wonder.

Is everything code now?

25 15 21 1 18 5 7 5 20 20 9 14 7 23 1 25 20 15 15 9 14 20 15 20 8 9 19 8 5 18 19 8 5 12

Yeah, yeah. All sounds familiar from my advanced training.

It is not, in any case, a series of random letters. That much is clear.

It is a coherent message, hidden within incoherency.

You have not the remotest idea what you are meant to do with this information.

A swarm of letters, uncountable.

It takes you seven attempts to count almost every letter. The letters that appear most often are H and T, with 20 occurrences each.

Look for bigrams in the code.

Three bigrams appear three times: NG, JG, and YX.

Three in 145 character-pairs is 2%, which corresponds to the frequency for the most common bigrams in the regular alphabet -- TH, HE, and IN.

What does that mean?

Combined with your character analysis, this proves that parts of the text, at least, retain their internal structure.

The NG could easily be TH, for example. If you could find a third letter, you'll have found THE, and the code will open up before you...

Now look for trigrams.

You know from counting the letters that it's unlikely to be this simple. But it's worth a shot...

No set of three letters appears more than once. Dead end.

Look for a trigram starting with 'NG'.

NGK, NGJ, NGV... Nothing. Dead end.

There is a structure, but you can only palpate at its contours like a blind woman.

Enough about bigrams. (Go back.)

On the page, the letters gibber insanely, crying: 'NG! JG, YX!'

Examine the word lengths.

It's divided into 23 blocks, each between 1 and 25 characters long.

The median of the chains is thirteen.

Thirteen?

Thirteen.

Nice. Progress.

Indeed. Can't stop it.

How about the words, can I read any of those yet?

Words? No. You're still on medians here.