Notes from the Grey Tower

Andemund was excruciatingly attractive when he smiled. I had no resistance against him, absolutely none at all. 

I spent a week hacking away at the slip of paper, a slice of bread precariously slotted between my teeth as I rotated the single piece of paper around on the library table, upside down and right side up again. Though the paper continued to only be drawn full of seemingly random moon and stars, irritating me to no end. 

I remembered living with my parents at a public residence in London when I was young. On winter nights, my parents would always sit in front of the burner calculating with their notebooks and pens, just like how other families would with their newspapers in front of the hearth. One day, they sent me along with several boxes of their notes and other books to my uncle’s farm at Bedford. My mother had kissed me on the forehead, and promised to return for me when the times changed for the better. My father only patted me on the head, reassuring my mother that I was a young man already, and that I would be take care of myself on my own. That was the last I had seen of them, at the train station in London. 

Three months later, my uncle received a letter from London. The residence had gone up in flames, and my parents had both lost their lives to the fire.

My uncle treated me decently. Although he never personally taught nor raised me, I never went hungry under his care. He was strongly opposed to my learning of mathematics, but the more he forbade me, the more I was incentivized to do so. When I was still small, I often hid behind the huge wooden crates in the warehouse, back pressed against the wood as I flipped through my mother’s notes, half a pencil gripped between my fingers as I scribbled away at the floor. Eventually, when my uncle went to the warehouse to retrieve his axe, he saw the numbers scrawled on the floor, mathematical symbols wriggling across the floorboards like worms in the dirt. He then beat and reprimanded me harshly, and the day after sent me to a public school. 

Though at last, I still ended up here at King’s College. 

As a child, I couldn’t have known that the things written in my mother’s notebook were related to cryptography. I had only thought that it was an interesting game of alphabets and numbers, one that was endlessly intriguing, endlessly enjoyable. 

In any case, you could, quite practically, describe cryptography as a game. A game where a group of people tried their damnedest to hide something, while another group of people toiled restlessly to unearth it from its hiding place. If I were to tell you a secret, I would use a method only known to both of us to alter it, and you would transform it back into its original state once you got ahold of my encrypted message. The altered message was called ‘ciphertext,’ the decrypted message called ‘plaintext’, and the method of transforming it back into its original state called the ‘key’.

For example, if I were to tell Andemund that I loved him, I wouldn’t directly tell him in plaintext ‘I LOVE YOU’, and instead would give him the ciphertext ‘hknutxnt’. I would shift each letter backwards by one place in alphabetical order, with ‘I’ becoming ‘H’, ‘L’ becoming ‘K’, and so on…. And when Andemund received a slip of paper with the string of seemingly meaningless letters, he’d be able to shift each letter forward by one place and recover my message. This was the method Julius Caesar once used to encrypt his messages to his troops, the classic Caesar shift. 

Under the knowledge that the key was “shift all letters by one place”, anyone could easily decode the message from its ciphertext form. But under normal circumstances, cryptologists did not possess the key of the enemy. They’d directly attempt to guess the other party’s key, and attempt to decrypt the message with it. This was what I was doing now, trying to guess the message behind a bunch of meaningless moons and stars. 

Cryptography and mathematics were inseparable. Cryptologists often had a genius sense of mathematics. They had to find hidden patterns between tens of thousands of ciphertext, and recover the encrypted message from within. 

It was said that genius cryptologists were the perverts among genius mathematicians. Ordinary mathematics could no longer satisfy their interest, and thus they turned to the field of cryptology.

It was afterwards that I realized, Andemund was truly a pervert among perverts.

Andemund came thrice to the library to find me, and brought along the newspapers of these few days. The Czech wanted independence, the Germans writhed with ambition, but what did that have to do with me? I only cared about my Andemund. 

On the afternoon of the last day of the week, I slumped sleepily on the oaken library table, the scent of the apple tree flowers permeating throughout the empty library. I felt someone sit down beside me and flip through the notebook that I’d used in my calculations. I violently snapped my eyes open and saw Andemund looking down at me, eyes pleasantly narrowed.

He drew on my calculations with a red pen. “How did you convert the shapes into letters?”

I studied him languidly through half-lidded eyes, and sultrily replied. “Come closer, babe, and I’ll tell you.”

Then I reached out to grab his tie, pulled myself to his height, and kissed him.

I felt Andemund freeze up that moment, and he defenselessly let me kiss him for an entire minute. The spring breeze was warm and gentle, and on Andemund’s shirt I could smell the fragrance of privet leaves. Luckily, the corner where we’d sat had little to no people, because the next second he threw me onto the desk, my wrist sharply twisted and throbbing under his grip. His face was excruciatingly close to mine, and he studied me for a long while before straightening up again. 

His smile was still as irresistible as ever. He picked up the notes filled with my calculations and tore them into pieces, the scraps of paper fluttering to the floor as he loosened his grip. 

“I’ve changed my mind, Alan,” he told me. “I’ve decided not to let you decrypt it.”

I knew I’d gone too far. I pursed my lips and stood up. “I really do sincerely like you, you know.”

I explained as I trailed after him. “Listen to me, darling. On first glance it might be just a mess of moons and stars, but have you noticed? Some of the stars only have three points, while some have seven. Almost all the stars have a different number of points at different angles, but the shape of the moons are all the same. If each star represented a letter, then it would be almost impossible to have so many repeated letters in one sentence. Thus I considered the possibility of the key being an altered version of the Baconian cipher.”

Andemund stopped walking and raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “Oh?”

I said. “The different shapes of the stars have no particular function except to distract the decoder from the real key. I’m guessing that the murderer encrypted the message like this—“

The murderer used stars to represent lowercase letters, and moons to represent uppercase letters. 

He first randomly assigned to each letter of the alphabet, a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters representing that particular letter.

For example, we would use any three lowercase letters to represent ‘A’ (such as ‘ddd’), and two lowercase letters and one uppercase letter to represent ‘B’ (such as ‘ssT’), and so on. If the murderer wanted to write the phrase ‘AB’, then he could write it as ‘dddssT’, but also as ‘wasiuR’. 

Then he would convert the lowercase letters into different stars, the uppercase letters into moons.

I stared straight into Andemund’s emerald green eyes and shrugged. “That’s it. So that’s the reason why there’s only moon and stars filling the paper.”

“Have you successfully decrypted it?”

“No,” I sighed, “I managed to convert them into letters in accordance to their probability of appearance, but the plaintext deciphered turned out to be complete gibberish. I don’t know what went wrong in the middle.”

“Leave the rest to me.” Andemund nodded and gave me a warning look. “Alan, you shouldn’t think about this anymore.”

Andemund thought he’d be safe once he’d destroyed the paper containing the ciphertext. But I, who had stared at that sheet of paper for a whole seven days, had already had it completely memorized by then. 

I managed to find Andemund at the church. The church at King’s college was exquisite, its arching ceilings paneled with colourful glass that filtered light dimly into the main hall. He was standing in front of a statue of Jesus, eyes closed, his eyelashes that were trimmed with a hint of gold resting on his captivating face, trembling. His expression seemed to be painful, but his back was straight as he stood. 

I didn’t know what he was in pain over, and was filled with the compulsion to put my hand on his shoulder. Just as I raised my arm, someone grabbed my shoulder and hurled me backwards. Moments later I was sprawled on the ice-cold floor, abdomen having taken a hard hit from a fist. 

It was rare to see someone in full military uniform at Cambridgeshire. He wore a dark navy uniform, polished tall boots, and beneath his cap were a pair of icy blue eyes. He looked down on me from his vantage, ready to give me the second punch, but was stopped by Andemund who grabbed his hand from behind him.

“Relax, Peter. This is my student.” Andemund’s voice was soft, but had an authoritative air to it. He smiled at me. “Although he’s never thought of himself as my student, that is.”

I crawled to my feet and tried my best to stand straight. “I have to talk to Professor Wilson privately.”

Andemund made a gesture and the man went to stand at the entrance to the church. I asked him. “You’re acquainted with the military? I never knew.”

“You know very little about anything.” he said, the corners of his lips upturned. “You’ve come at the right time, Alan. I was about to bid you farewell. I’ll be leaving Cambridge for a research institute at Bletchley Park. Don’t look at me like that— I’m only continuing my work in academic research.”

“You work for the military.” I looked into his eyes, the tone of my voice quivering with anticipation. “I’ve deciphered the code. My path of thought wasn’t wrong, I just had to decipher it three more times after converting the shapes into letters. It wasn’t just any message sent to a press following a murder—“

Andemund put his forefinger to his lips, urging me to be quiet.

I had it memorized better than any textbook knowledge I possessed. “Speedily arriving at London to retrieve info on the five-day English military practice from General F, will hand over to Eaglet.” I leaned on the church pillar, arms crossed as I bounced my leg impatiently. “Darling, this is a status report from a spy. Who is Eaglet, exactly?”

Andemund calmly leveled his gaze at me, and finally exhaled. “Alan, I was only testing you. You shouldn’t be tempting me just after when I’ve changed my decision.”

“The reason why I made you give up on cryptography, was out of respect for your deceased parents.”

Translator’s notes: I thought I’d be in less pain translating something set in Not Ancient China ™, but little did I know I would be sent on a wild goose chase around google for the English of ‘Burlington Garden’. Disclaimer for any inaccuracies when regarding professional terms on cryptography or British places– I neither am an expert in cryptography nor live in Britain, so retranslating the Chinese translations of British places might come out a bit wonky. Please notify me if you notice any inaccuracies!

Translator’s notes, revised: Further research has led me to believe that the author perhaps meant ‘Bletchley Park’ instead of ‘Burlington Garden’ in their original work. As (according to my current knowledge, may be wrong) Bletchley Park was where all the decrypting in the actual WW2 took place, I’ve decided to change ‘Burlington Garden’ to ‘Bletchley Park’ in all chapters to keep up the historical consistency. For the record, the original phrase is ‘普林頓莊園’– pronounced ‘pulindun’ in Mandarin. I’ll have changed all the phrases mentioning ‘Burlington Garden’ in chapters 2 and 3 by the time you read this, so there really is no point in me leaving this note behind except to expose my past errors. Anywho.

[12/2/2021] Translator’s notes, revised: I know at this point my translator’s notes are becoming comparatively long but I’d like to draw attention to another translation I saw on Lofter that translated what I now refer to as Bletchley Park as “Plimpton Manor”. I’ll still be calling it “Bletchley Park” though, just because it rolls off my tongue better. I know making changes will be a nightmare in the future but as always, unconfirmed translations may be subject to change.