(Received: 23rd November)
Letter #60
Dear Eric,
As promised, this is the key to the locked room in the house.
You should reread letters #3, #4, #17, #44, #58 and #59 and follow all procedures before you open the red filing cabinet. The text you will find inside is ‘live’ and extremely dangerous.
With regret and hope,
The First Eric Sanderson
(Received: 30th November)
Letter #67
Dear Eric,
As far as I am aware, the conceptual fish do not see physical plants and trees and animals. They do not see the sky or the moon. They only see people, and the things that people make and say and do. The streams of human history, human culture and human thought are their environment. The Ludovician is always looking. I am careful to hide myself, but I am forgetful.
I’m telling you everything I know before it’s all lost for good.
With regret and hope,
The First Eric Sanderson
(Received: 9th January)
Letter #108
Dear Eric,
I just realised, it has been more than three months for you now. More than a hundred of these letters. I hope you can follow them, I am doing all I can.
Soon you will receive a package containing a light bulb, a videotape and two exercise books. It’s important that you open this package inside a Dictaphone loop because reading the enclosed information will create a strong scent in the waterways.
The light bulb has been carefully modified to flicker a double-encoded Morse/QWERTY text (more on this later) containing a fragment of your history. As you will see, one of the exercise books contains my work on identifying the type of encryption, the other contains the clean text I have been able to extract so far. There is still more to translate and that task falls to you. The videotape contains the light bulb’s complete flash cycle for decoding purposes, and in case of accident.
Be very careful with this text. It should be considered ‘live’ at all times. As with all other live documents, ensure it is stored in a post-filled box for safety.
Regret and hope,
The First Eric Sanderson
(Received: 11th January)
Letter #110
Dear Eric,
It seems so normal doesn’t it, the writing from my journal about Clio and Greece? I hardly recognise myself. I don’t think I could even write like that anymore. I’ve ended up as a collector’s egg, all the insides and egginess sucked out leaving just an intact and brittle shell, looking just the same, perfectly the same, but not really an egg at all anymore. I don’t know if some of the things I say make sense. When I get to the middle of something I find I’ve lost my grip on one of the ends. Like trying to hang a huge sheet out in the wind, I can’t keep hold of it all at once and parts are escaping, flapping away out of reach. Are you there? Is there even going to be a you after I’m gone? I’m trying hard not to lose faith. Don’t lose faith in me, Eric. If you are there, you will need this information to survive; I need you to believe in me. I’ve killed myself so slowly it’s taken years and I don’t really even know why. I don’t want to die. I’m scared of dying but even more I don’t want to not be. I remembered something Clio said and I wrote it down. We were coming out of a building like a pub or a cinema or a shopping complex and Clio said, “I’m going to have a smiley face tattooed on the underneath of my big toe.” I said why and Clio said, “So when I’m dead and they put a toe tag on me it’ll look funny in the morgue.” Memories like this one are like the coloured dust from butterfly wings coming off on my fingers and then blowing away. I think Clio liked the idea of the tattoo because it would be like her something, her sense of humour, would still be there for at least a little bit longer when her body was cold and dead. It would be like a little cheat. You see what I’m saying don’t you? Don’t lose faith in me, Eric.
Regret and hope,
E
(Received: 12th January)
Letter #111
Dear Eric,
There are two stages to the light bulb text encryption. The first is simple Morse code. The bulb flashes in short and long bursts, dots and dashes. These can be transcribed as letters using the following chart:
| A.- | H…. | O --- | V…- |
| B-… | I.. | P.--. | W.-- |
| C-.-. | J.--- | Q --.- | X -..- |
| D-.. | K -.- | R.-. | Y -.-- |
| E. | L.-.. | S… | Z --.. |
| F..-. | M -- | T- | |
| G -. | N.. | U ..- |
You will notice that the letters produced still appear to be random at this point. They don’t make any sense. That is because there is still more to do.
The second part of the code uses the layout of a computer or typewriter keyboard, as below (with rows two and three slightly realigned to make a grid):
Each letter from the translated Morse code sequence is applied to the grid:
The final, correctly decoded letter will always be one of those adjacent to the Morse code letter. For example, if you translate an ‘F’ from the Morse code, the actual letter you are looking for will be one of the eight adjacent to ‘F’ on the QWERTY layout:
The translation letters also ‘rollaround’. This is a way of saying if a Morse code letter touches the edge of the board, as B does
the
