The Decipherment
By Rayan Ali
Copyright 2013 Rayan Ali
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Contents
PART 1
PART 2
PART 3
PART 4
PART 5
PART 6
PART 7
PART 8
PART 9
PART 10
Author’s Note
Salvador Dali & The Persistence of Memory
PART 1
Some say the power of Fire is the strongest and nothing can stand against it. Others say the power of Water is even stronger; still others claim the power of Air is the mightiest of all and nothing is its equal while many more claim the power of Earth surpasses all… but each of these is the equal of the other. The true power, a seemingly vast ocean in comparison of which these are nothing but mere drops of water, is the power whose spell we are all enchanted in, the power which makes us the way we are, a power so strong which takes us to worlds existing just in our wild imaginations, far from Reality. It shows us vivid colors and phenomena we call dreams, making us look far and deep into the darkest of realities, and that power is the immortal, power of Thought – a power whose seed has been planted in the mind of each one of us since the beginning of Time.
Everything we dream about, all we imagine, every bitter and sweet memory we cherish, every idea we create, every feat of intelligence we perform, everything we conceive as a mere impossibility or something out of our reach yet somehow manage to catch hold of – all these are nothing but mere wonders performed by the power of Thought. But as we are enslaved by Ignorance, we do not see these wonders and try to find, though in vain, living miracles, when one already exists within us – the thoughtful Mind itself! Indeed it is nothing less than a living miracle.
Since the beginning of Life, we have explored deeply the countless realms of this living miracle, but no matter how hard we try or how further we search, never will we come even close to the last realm and discover the full extent of its powers. We may never know how deep the realm of Memory is or till how far it goes; we may never realize the scope of our Imagination or what it can do, and we may never truly grasp the true potential of our Mentality.
Though many of us do not truly realize the immensity of the power of Thought, a few who are so mesmerized by the beauty of their own imaginations and ideas, by the memories they like to live with and most of all, by the thoughts they create vividly, forget if anything else exists or not; so lost they are in the magical world of the Mind that they get separated from what is in existence and what lies in their artful imaginations, separated from Reality. They are captivated by their thoughts and the places they take them, the faces they show them and the things they make them believe in, that they can no longer differentiate between what is in Reality and what is in their Mind.
Thus all the places their thoughts had taken them, all the faces they have seen and everything they believe in, comes blooming to life before them, in full and vivid colors, in what we call hallucinations. Still others, who think of the world as a mere ruin of the bloom that once was, start living in the caves of their own Thoughts and prefer to give no heed whatsoever to what goes on around them. We may call them ‘insane’ or ‘dreamy’ but as they are so captivated by the power of Thought, they do not mind as to what or how others think of them. So powerful is the control of their dreams and imaginations on them that they get lost in the void realms of the Mind which captivates them in its shadows.
No one can specifically point out the immensity of the power of Thought or what it can do with the way we perceive the world around us or where it can take us. Sometimes the Mind likes the idea of Thought itself, making us plunge into its depths. The Mind loses its grip from the colors of Reality, doing nothing but wandering into its own realm of Thought, giving rise to wild imaginations and ideas. Such was the mind of Isabelle Aimery – a 25-year-old Parisian working at the cryptology department for the French police.
At the age of 10, Isabelle lost her parents in a road accident, which she luckily survived and was later on raised by her aunt. Soon afterwards, at 20, Isabelle had completed her 3-year course and gotten her degree in cryptology from the American University Of Paris, when her aunt died from a severe fever. Isabelle wasn’t entirely left helpless, in fact her parents had left a considerable amount of money and a house for her near the outskirts of Paris. All this they had left under the care of her aunt who, in her will, had prescribed all means Isabelle needed to know to take in possession all that was to become hers.
Isabelle found the house her parents had left her an epitome of beauty; built of huge granite walls, marble stone floors, it was nothing much less than a palace for a single person to live in. There was a large living and dining hall the size of an art gallery, made of elegant yet splendid decor, a long corridor, like that in a museum, filled with famous paintings and huge tapestries and balconies with every room overlooking a vast yard rich in beautiful plants and trees. Isabelle could do nothing but marvel at her parents’ taste of design and how long such a beauty would have taken to be erected.
Yet more she wondered how her parents or aunt had never mentioned anything about this to her before. After settling in her new home, Isabelle had searched for a job, which she had found quite easily in the national cryptology department serving the French police authorities. She had given an advertisement in a newspaper to apply for a job, giving her educational background along with the mention of her courses and degrees in cryptology, hoping she would get lucky and someone would take her. She had received enormous acceptance letters - from banks to software companies and computing departments to software analysts, willing to offer her a job as either a minor technician or assistance, but she had rejected all the offers. They were not her taste and seemed too less of a work for her. She wanted to do something more. Some weeks later she had received a phone call from the French police headquarters in Paris, asking her if she was still interested in applying for a job at their cryptology department. She had accepted right away.
As a young child, Isabelle had always wanted to become a cryptologist. Though both her parents were archaeologists, they always kept Isabelle busy solving puzzles and crosswords; once they discovered how good she was at the task. They didn’t force her to study history books or go on expeditions with them if she wasn’t interested in it. They just wanted her to do what she liked doing best: breaking codes. Often her father gave her codes to break he created himself and over the years, Isabelle had grown fond of the world of numbers and codes and the methods of deciphering ciphers.
She made paintings hidden with numbers and simple figurative codes beneath the layers of paint. Unlike other children of her age, she never wished for a doll or a stuffed pet-animal, instead her parents got her large puzzle-boards and simple code-breaking games for her birthdays at which she worked at day and night.
When she was 9, her father had once told Isabelle about the magic square: a square containing numbers arranged in equal rows and columns such that the sum of each row, column, and diagonal is the same. Only when she saw the square in a famous painting, Melancolia I by the German artist Albrecht Durer, did she truly realize the magic of numbers that is un-noticed by many and this kept her wondering in awe of what other meaning some tiny figures
such as numbers may hold in them. Since then, she had made up her mind to find those meanings herself by becoming a cryptologist.
The world has a habit of calling someone, who finds peace and comfort in solitude, a ‘loner’; but what it doesn’t understand is the fact that these ‘loners’ have many other things which interest them and keep them happy instead of its plastic and un-realistic colors. Isabelle Aimery was one of them to fall under the title. Though she was liked by all of her colleagues, had a boss who always praised her for her work and exclaimed to have never seen someone with intelligence as that of hers, Isabelle always found the idea of friendship somewhat boring. For her, God was the only true friend and doing what she liked best pleased her. Now, at 25, leading a perfect little life, with a career she always dreamed of, earning a good pay, being liked by those who met her and living in a home which was perfect in every way, Isabelle wanted nothing more in life.
In work, there are always two classes of people: those who find some time off from work and those who find some time off for work. Many of us sometimes find the work we do tiring, no matter how good we are at what we do, while some of us just find peace and comfort in our work and tend to keep ourselves indulged in it for most of the time. Isabelle Aimery was one of them. She worked longer and harder than most of her colleagues. Everyone knew how skillful she was when it came to code-breaking and de-encrypting texts which would otherwise seem un-solvable to others.
She had shown her skills on the very first day of work. Upon entering the office, no one had seemed to notice her come; everyone had been staring at a small computer screen on which appeared strange looking codes, similar to numbers, looming on it in the form of shapes. At first glance, Isabelle had known how to de-encrypt the code. She had gone up to the spot everyone was gathered at, around the computer, and taking a piece of paper and pen, made five sets of numbers in the form of five different shapes and arranged them altogether in the Fibonacci sequence; a sequence of numbers, such as 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13... in which each successive number is equal to the sum of the two preceding numbers. As soon as she had typed the numbers in the sequence, the shapes had broken instantly and sentences had appeared on the screen. It had left everyone staring at her wide-eyed as to where they worked so hard trying to decipher a code; a stranger walks in and does the job, making everyone dumb-founded
It had been much of a start of an introduction for Isabelle and everyone had come rushing towards her, asking for her name and who she was and how she cracked open the code. After the usual introduction, it hadn’t been as hard as Isabelle thought it would be when it’s your first day at work – once everyone knows how good you are at what you do. Thus it was for Isabelle that she was always lost in her work. If there was a code the de-encrypting machines could not break or an encryption no one would be able to decipher, Isabelle was the one to find a solution to it all – and she always did, no matter how hard the consequences.
Her office was a small, comfortable place to work in, with simple yet elegant furniture and cocoa-colored walls, a small working desk, two leather armchairs and a computer table neatly put in the corner. She didn’t mind the size of the office. It was like a second home for her; a place she could work in any way she liked. She worked long hours in her office when everyone else would be having a good night’s sleep; receiving a dozen cryptograms from different police departments often found on the site of a crime, left by criminals or killers to confuse the police. So it was Isabelle’s job to decipher the cryptograms in time, submit them to the police and thus help them in their investigations. Often Isabelle took the files of cryptograms home, solved them out and submitted them to the office the next morning from where they were sent to the police departments. She had often gone a month or two without sleep during such times.
Isabelle didn’t think of her job as one serving her country’s police authorities in helping them in their investigations. Rather, she liked to think of it as being in a world of numbers and codes and all that lies behind them. She liked to spend long hours working on cryptograms and deciphering the meaning they held in them. It amazed her how the human mind, other than all the normal tasks we do in our everyday life, can even master in a world of symbols and numbers and actually create something hidden in them. She always thought the mind capable of so much more than it is known for. The only things she did like were ice cream and going to libraries. As a child, whenever Isabelle got sad over something, her father used to take her out for ice cream to cheer up her mood.
Though busy in practical life, Isabelle was always free in her mind. She was a deep thinker; going into the depths of something to understand it, looking into the realities of life further than just the ordinary possibilities which lie on the surface, being lost in her thoughts and the peace which overcame her and imagining deeply what only thrives in the imagery of our mind. With no one but herself to care for in life, she found the images her mind played in her thoughts entertaining enough to not make her feel lonely.
She often thought of how her life would be if her parents were alive, seeing her accomplish her dreams – dreams they had helped her built. She thought of what she would do without a job, how she would survive in this world where only someone who has accomplished something is given a place of respect and honor, and she thought of what she would do if her life suddenly ended without her even coming to the finish line of the race she had started in this world. In other words, she thought of what could be other than that which already is. Thus, Isabelle was a person of her own thoughts, wild fantasies, dreams and imaginations – a world she liked to dwell in.
It is often said that the deeper you search for something, the closer you get to finding it – but that is not always the case. Sometimes, searching deep enough into something brings us to even more depths, which may not even be close to what we’re looking for. Such is the case with the human Thought. The deeper we dig into its unfathomable realms to better understand it, the more we find ourselves plunged into crevasses with seemingly endless boundaries to Reality. This is the reason we seem so ‘lost’ in thought while trying to catch the essence of our ideas, dreams and imaginations.
So it was with Isabelle Aimery, who also got ‘lost’ while trying to find the core of what dwelled in her mind. Sometimes even deep thinkers never seem to grasp the true meaning of their own intelligence – they just want to ‘dig deeper’.
It was one of the usual long work-hour nights when Isabelle finished de-encrypting the dozens of cryptograms she had received on her computer from one of the police departments. She couldn’t remember the last time she had slept. Though she didn’t mind the load of work at her desk every night, she did sometimes feel like sitting in one of the huge leather armchairs in her study at home, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a nice book in the other.
Now as she was done with her work for the night, she thought now was the time to bring that feeling to life. It was midnight, and gathering her things from her desk, she left the office and headed for home. When she reached there, changing into her night-clothes and making herself a hot cup of coffee, she went straight into her study and picking up a small book which read The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Edited by Thomas H. Johnson, comfortably sat her in the black leather armchair. It was early dawn when Isabelle finished reading. She hadn’t realized how quickly the time had passed. Eyes filled with sleep, she didn’t have the strength to go upstairs and into bed. Instead, she put her head on the back of the chair and curling herself up, slept.