The Ciphering
0686wlbtsos?SL24
0686Wlbsos?SL24
Damn it.
0686Wlbtsos?SL24
There it is. Pixel flash. Password accepted. The link up. A few bread crumbs tossed into the void of a digital hunger that Spenser isn’t aware of until after it is satisfied.
0686 — June, 1986. The cover date of the most treasured comic book from his childhood.
Wlbtsos? — “What Lurks Beneath the Sea of Shadows?” The title of that comic.
SL24 — StarLost, Issue #24. Morgan Darkstar, interstellar adventurer, accompanied by his cyborg pilot, Lady Grey, explores an oceanic planet in search of the photonic crystals that can repair his ship, The Basilisk (a catastrophic failure in the chronodrive of The Basilisk in issue #1 slingshots the duo into an unknown galaxy rife with Ben-Day dot terrors and alien locales). After Lady Grey short-circuits from the humidity and Morgan is forced to abandon ship in a makeshift raft of oxygen canisters, issue #24 ends with the raft being destroyed by waves and an exhausted Morgan slowly drifting down into the blackness of the sea over the course of nine harrowing panels, bug eyed, arms flailing at the dying light. The final page was entirely black. The hero had vanished. Next Issue: The End? burned in red letters at the bottom of the page.
0686Wlbtsos?SL24. A strand of his life, encrypted. Yes, this is the right word. It’s the crypt — Spenser likes how crypt is embedded right in the centre. A life entombed in passwords. I am the sum of my cryptogrammatic history.
His password always receives ratings of “Strong,” or “Maximum Effectiveness” when he enters it in new systems. He takes pride in the seemingly randomized combination of not just letters (upper- and lower-case) but numbers (there’s something cunning about his exclusive, comprehensive use of even numbers, scrambled throughout). The question mark breaching near the end is his favourite element — this signature flair is surely what puts it over the top, renders it impenetrable, unguessable.
And yet. Secretly, Spenser wants someone to discover this password. He wants someone to see him type it or to steal it in a massive data breach and then marvel at its mystery, wonder at its origins. The effort that went into imagining and constructing something so intensely personal, so uniquely a product of his own experiences — it’s a bit like an invisible diary, a little snippet of an immaterial memoir that he carries with him and writes, somewhere, each and every day. The unbounded summer days he spent reading that comic, the glossy sheen of its cover beneath his fingerpads, the cadence of the turning pages, the white wrinkles creeping along the stapled spine, the pulpy, chemical stench of the ink-drenched final page, and the story itself, so intoxicatingly horrifying to his young, unbruised mind. Morgan Darkstar terribly alone in the black, black water, the whites of his eyes fading, then gone.
Perhaps a cyber-archaeologist of some unknown future will stumble across his password and sense the life pulsing behind the code. This was, he knows, the purpose all along, the wish he conjured in the making.
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