Be [Cipher: Part I]

Posted on 27 Dec 2015 @ 5:18am by Ensign James Langley

486 words; about a 2 minute read

So you want to know how I did it? How I cracked the code of that strangely beautiful sculpture which lead me into my love of art as well as intelligence gathering and cryptography? Well, to tell you the truth it was a combination of a lot of things. A can-do attitude. A lot of focus for sure. Gumption. Oh, and patience. A whole hell of a lot of that. I've been told I'm patient to a fault but it certainly isn't a problem for me.

But I think the most important part was the bet. One of my friends, Samson, the relentless little bugger, knew of my affinity for puzzles and patient activities. Crosswords; riddles; A good ole fashioned double sided three dimensional jigsaw puzzle. You name it. And anywhere, too. With friends; at home; in my sleep. It doesn't matter to me. I do puzzles all the time. It's my thing. And so when Samson heard of this special puzzle he knew he'd have me. “Hey, James! Try this!” That was all he had to say. I dove in immediately and was practically lost to all who knew me for months. They can blame Samson for that.

So anyway, I went to the puzzle that was housed at a nearby art museum and examined it. I was standing there staring at the thing. This beast of a puzzle with no name. It was said by the creator that giving the puzzle a moniker would possibly or possibly not give people the idea that the name was a clue. Well, of course, many people including myself thought that giving it no name was a clue. But of course that turned up nothing. I can tell you now that the lack of a name was definitely not a clue.

Most of the sculpture looked purely as art, but fortunately it started off with a rather obvious cipher painted near the center with plain-as-day text. Well, plain as day for a cipher. A code that only took a little patience to decipher. Did I tell you I am patient? Yeah, I nailed that part of the puzzle in no time at all. About a month or so. What? I was still in secondary school! It was only a standard Vigenére cipher which I was able to crack through the Kasiski method of decryption. It certainly proved a little more effective than brute force. I felt like I ran a hundred crosswords through a paper shredder and pasted them all together, but I got it. I guess the creator liked cats. So here it was unbroken:

“VHX XKRLL YOKV AON KGED AU BX LJE GWZT HFNY MZG BEAPD VSP SXW CNW GPLR AP CHMPTBFI BR LJRXWU”

Oh? Of course you need to know what it means. Well figure it out or flip to the next section!

To Be Continued...

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