Ruby Redfort Take Your Last Breath (37 page)

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This is how Ruby cracks the code:

She first decides to ignore the synthetic music in the background, which she assumes is designed as a distraction, and to concentrate on the melodic fragments laid over it.

She starts with the principle that each note in the strange music must represent a letter.

But the question is, what notation was used to create the music? Even though Ruby thinks it’s unlikely, she starts by trying the Northern European note naming convention of A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H (where H is actually B and B is actually B flat). But this doesn’t get her anywhere. Nor does the twelve-tone system, or any of the other scale systems, such as Japanese, Indian, or Arabic (though since the Chime Melody music is very definitely in equal temperament she realizes this is a long shot).

Once those more esoteric options are ruled out, Ruby tries the English and American system of seven notes — A, B, C, D, E, F, G — and finally starts to get somewhere.

The first thing she realizes is that there are no flats or sharps used in the melody: there are only the seven plain notes: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. This means that the person setting the code had to come up with a way to use only seven notes to represent all twenty-six letters of the alphabet.

Eventually she realizes that the way they have done this is to apply effects to the notes that tell the decoder to shift the letters forward. She notes down all sorts of details that she notices — crescendos, articulations, speed changes — but works out that these are all red herrings. What DOES turn out to be important is the glissando that she can hear.

She quickly discovers that if a note is played with an upward glissando, it shifts the corresponding letter forward by seven places. Thus the musical note A, played with an upward glissando, becomes the letter H instead of A, and the musical note G, with an upward glissando, becomes the letter N.

Similarly, a downward glissando shifts the corresponding letter forward by fourteen places. The musical note A, played with a downward glissando, becomes the letter O.

Finally, the letters V to Z are represented by the notes A to D, played with a tremolo (though these letters don’t appear in the example code).

The best way to understand this is to look at this table:

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One of the most common codes used across the planet is binary, or digital, code. It is not a secret code, but is a powerful way to store and communicate information. Pictures, music, movies, the sound of a voice, in fact everything that is sent across the Internet is changed into a stream of zeros and ones.

Take a black-and-white picture. To see how to change the picture into zeros and ones, first you need to pixelate the picture. You draw a square grid over the picture, then you color a square black if the majority of the image in the square is black, and color the square white if it’s mostly white. Each colored square is called a pixel. The combination of the pixels produces a rough version of the picture. The finer the square grid, the better the representation of the picture. The pixelated picture can then be changed into code. The black squares are represented by zeros and the white squares by ones. Then 001110101000 . . . is code for: color the first two pixels in the grid black, the next three white, then black, and so on.

More complicated versions of this process can change a color picture, a movie, music, or even a voice into zeros and ones.

Now, if you want to make a picture or a message secret, there is a clever way to hide the message if it is made up of zeros and ones. You can take a pixelated black-and-white picture and pull it apart into two separate black-and-white pictures in such a way that the two separate images look like a random mess. But when you print them on transparent sheets and put one on top of the other, the original picture appears as if by magic.

To change the picture into the two random images: first, take the square grid for the original picture and divide each square into four smaller squares. In the encrypted pictures, these two-by-two squares have two squares colored white and two squares colored black. If you check, there are six different ways you can color a two-by-two grid where half the squares are white and the other half are black.

The first encrypted picture just consists of a genuinely random selection of these two-by-two black-and-white blocks. To create the second encrypted picture, you need to look at the original picture. Place the random picture over the top. Take each two-by-two block in the random picture you’ve created. If that block sits over a white square in the original image, then the two-by-two block in the same position in the second encrypted picture is chosen to be the
same
two-by-two block. If it’s over a black square, then make the corresponding two-by-two block in the second encrypted picture the
opposite
of the one in the random picture (where black and white squares are swapped over).

The second encrypted picture you’ve created looks as random as the first. But now when you place the two pictures on top of each other something magic happens. The original picture seems to appear out of the combination of the two random images.

The combination of a two-by-two grid in the first random picture with the
opposite
two-by-two grid in the second picture creates one big black pixel. If the two-by-two grids are the same, then although the combination doesn’t create a completely white pixel, nevertheless it is white enough that looking at the combined picture, your eyes see the same combination of black and white pixels that made up the unencrypted picture.

In the book, Ruby encounters a similar code using sound when the three static tapes combine to form the sound of a voice. This code would have been built using pictures too, in a very similar way to what has just been described. This is how the Count’s static code was created:

If, instead of a picture, you take a recording of a voice, you can translate that using binary code into a sequence of zeros and ones. Then translate
that
into a black-and-white picture. Then apply the same process as above to pull it apart into two random pictures consisting of black-and-white pixels. Translate these two random pictures back into zeros and ones. If you now translate this into sound again, the two messages sound like random static noise. But play them together and, like the two pictures combining, you will hear a message appearing from the static.