PART 5
Memories, ideas, imaginations, dreams, thoughts – what are they? We call them the ‘aspects mind is made of’ . . . but are they really what we think they are? Aspects?
Could they be feelings of the mind? Mechanisms the mind worked upon? Do we even fully understand them?
These were the questions bubbling up in Isabelle Aimery’s confused mind, questions anyone would think of once in a while. She could only think of one answer to all of them: miracles. These were what the memories, ideas, imaginations, dreams and thoughts were; miracles God planted in our minds.
And just as miracles can never be fully understood by mere mortal powers, these miracles can also never be fully comprehended.
Isabelle wandered how many others got the chance to actually see their mind, to witness all that went inside it – and she also wandered if they got out of it or were stuck there for God knew how long.
But how did I get here in the first place? HOW can my subconsciousness slip into my consciousness?
But you just answered it, didn’t you? These are miracles, things we can’t understand completely.
She felt too tired to argue with her mind. She was hungry, her throat was parched dry and she felt extremely cold, for some strange reason.
Guess the mind is cold from the inside.
She didn’t know how such bizarre things were coming to her. She didn’t know how much more she could take of this. She had to find a way out.
Follow your instincts.
She trusted her gut feelings since they always told her the right thing to do. But right now she was so spent out that there was no warmth or sensation left in her body – much less a gut feeling. It was like her subconsciousness was draining out all her energy.
However, the determination to survive this through to the end gave her strength to think properly.
She willed herself to think of something . . . real, since this was just her un-aware state of mind and if some conscious and realistic aspect morphed into it, maybe it could be the reality itself.
Real. Reality. Think of something real!!
She thought of the people from work, her colleagues, even her teachers from college, bringing up images of each one of them. Images of all the faces she envisioned in her thoughts came bumping before her out of nowhere, jumping into one another so fast they hit her form every side. Passing through her frame like thin air, they all dispersed in the surrounding atmosphere, just as she stopped bringing up the thoughts in her mind.
So this is how thoughts work, colliding into one another.
She was amazed at how distorted these things come to the mind which arranges them in proper forms we call thoughts.
Isabelle was clueless as to what to think. Why did it seem so hard now, when it was something so easy?
You can do this. You’re a cryptologist. Thinking is what you do. Breaking codes, solving problems, math equations, remember? This is what you do. You can do it now as well. Don’t give up on yourself.
There are times when we think of something too suddenly and at other times the thought comes slowly and dully. This was the experience Isabelle was having at the moment. One moment some thought came to her mind and the next it just disappeared, leaving blankness behind. Then the same old void washed over her, just like it did when she had been in one of her dream worlds.
Focus on something real.
Gradually, realization dawning at her face, she finally came up with something concrete to focus upon. How could she not have thought of the most realistic thing such as this before: life. It was the only reality that existed in the cosmos, a reality that gave rise to other realistic aspects within it. Everything that moved, breathed, and felt was a sign of life, was real.
Isabelle could literally feel every neuron of her brain working at its best to focus on everyday things in her life: her home, her work and everything else that was in the living, real world . . . and in her consciousness. Images of her home, office, art collection, books – it all came flashing by her and just as before, passed through her like smoke.
What appeared next was something Isabelle had not expected. She didn’t think of it, so why it came in the material form, she had so idea. All the portals before her gave way and from the back there appeared a small portal that had a different kind of glow around it, a rather faded one, unlike the others. What it showed inside it was a thought Isabelle never really had quite often. It showed a small piece of paper that was filled with numbers and letters – a complex code. She had the feeling she had seen it before, but couldn’t remember when.
She strained herself to recall where she had seen the code before. Had she seen it in some book? On some of the many encrypted files that she de-encrypted every day at work? Had it been one of the code-and-cipher games that she played when she was young? She came up with nothing. Then finally, out of a distant memory coming crashing to her mind, she remembered.
Back in college, when Isabelle was doing her 2-year course in solving projects and cases on encrypted analogues from all over the world, she had come up with a case which involved a failed robbery of from the Louvre.
A bunch of misfits living in the streets had tried to rob nearly half of the art collections from Louvre, including some of the greatest works of Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Vincent Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Picasso and the like. It turned out that the robbers were not more than teenagers, only good with codes but not with planning something good enough to rob a place such as Louvre that is guarded 24/7 by special security systems in every nook and cranny and covered by security officers covering more than 700 square meters of one gallery.
They communicated each day at midnight through local internet booths. The messages were in coded form, of course, mostly about the names, dates and artists of the paintings and artifacts they planned on stealing. The computers in the national police department detected any piece of data that was not in common text but in coded form, meaning that no matter from which part of the country the secretive communications were being carried out in codes, they would appear automatically in the de-encoders’ database.
As soon as the computers had detected the codes appearing between multiple users, the source was traced but came up blank. Most of the codes were de-encrypted and the whole plan of the heist was revealed to the cryptographers at the cryptology department who had immediately informed it to the police.
A team had been issued to the Louvre and the surrounding areas. The security at the museum had also been ready for what was thought to be a heist, but turned out to be a failed attempt at the part of the robbers. They didn’t even as much as pass through the laser detection points in the galleries and the alarm was sounded as soon as one of them stepped inside the vaults. They were caught, sentenced to spend a few months in jail, and hence the matter was hushed. No commotion was created and the museum’s dignity remained as spectacular as ever.
Isabelle didn’t see anything peculiar in this case since it involved the same old techniques used by people who thought they could create a ‘secret means of communication’ which no one else understood and thus spy on whatever and whoever they wanted. All these kind of maniacs needed was a better view of the world to make them realize that there was more going on than just spying on others. Code language was just the stepping stone for a complex system of mind control they planned on forming later on. Secrecy is the first concern.
Anyhow, after clearing the database of the code language the robbers has used for their silent communication, one of the cryptologists at the department had found an ‘anomaly’ in the clearing system on the de-encrypter machine.
All the codes that were broken into simple text were either stored in the machine, in case some other situation appeared where they might be helpful in encrypting other codes, or were completely destroyed from the system due to their un-importance, seeing that they were nothing more than failed attempts of someone at creating their own code language. But from this code language tha
t the robbers had used, one specific code was neither destroyed nor saved in fact, it was never deciphered. Either it was due to some fault in the encryption methods used by the computers or the program didn’t consider it worth looking at. However, it was not de-encrypted.
Isabelle had wandered why none of the members at the department had paid much attention to it. Probably because it didn’t pose any serious issue regarding the heist, and since the matter was gotten over with and forgotten soon, no one might have bothered to check this anomaly.
Isabelle had spent hours trying to decipher that code, but she had come up with nothing. Finally, she had given it up and never thought much about it again. Now, as that same image of the codes and numbers appeared before her, she started to think it was not as much of an un-important piece of code as she had taken it to be.
It was there in her subconsciousness, and it had come into her consciousness as she had thought of real things. Did it have something to do with reality? Why else would it be the only thing her mind was presenting her with when it was clear it wasn’t even one of her thoughts? Sure, it had been part of consciousness once, but that was so long ago she didn’t even realize her mind still held the thought of it. If it was her consciousness now, it was because of a reason. She just had to find out.