With Respect Always

October 1 - Spinwheel City, Paquin

It waited for me on my desk. A cube shaped box bearing the insignia of the Umbrella Corporation. These were the files I had obtained during my mission to their research and development facility



I unlocked the cube and paused as twenty-five slender disks unpacked themselves upon my desk.

Each file was encrypted, sealed with a string of uppercase and lowercase letters clustered to suggest words.

• a big zoron City
• cliMate clAMp Point gone or lap lan
• creDid Laim gun
• crino CloRine trap
• CyaN go bron
• Droopci iN tote
• Eec girl SeleNe cedes benign engine
• fifteEn Geld scaf
• God spoons a limo Taxi 
• Head ai hear Steve rEcon cipy tent
• Hoh storm peer
• i graph no SEcRet phage fad monopoly
• MerSi Destrui aeon DruG pitS racy tec disc
• neeL Drragi man
• No one likes AviaN muurtox build
• noni lOng Crag
• optios corN
• ProMs Tangu bilts Cnics
• Pronto sloc tree Toad
• raison sUeT cliNt purse pro void
• sailor Vic meet Zip bimoP
• Spreem nebUla
• temp nEA gemini Metal goiter Gone lux nude
• Tom like Zab
• woops i Lean tom init Naan

When decoding simple substitution ciphers, it is my custom to look for the most common letter. From frequency studies, we know the most common letters in any given language, the most common letter pairs, and so on. Patterns soon become easily recognized. Other factors such as the length of the passage, use of familiar phrases, also play a role.

With unscrambling my process is different. I look instead for the least common letter and build the pattern from there. As the letters are out of order, the patterns in the plaintext are not so apparent.

Having some sense of the context and the associated jargon is useful in either case.

For this analysis, I decided upon three initial assumptions:

1) the unscrambled text was in English,
2) each upper case letter represented the first letter of a word,
3) there were no letter substitutions or false inclusions.

I chose one of the shortest letter strings to begin.



Tom like Zab

This string contained four vowels and six consonants. Of the consonants, two were the capital letters T and Z.

There were few words that began with the letter Z. Fewer still using only the letters from this string: Zoe or Zombie.

I removed the letters for "Zombie" and T k l a became "Talk."

Tom like Zab = Zombie Talk

---

I set aside the first unlocked file for later review and selected two more files.

creDid Laim gun

neeL Drragi man

These two strings had nine out of thirteen letters in common, including capitals: DLreiamgn

The additional letters in each string were:

cdiu
eran



I matched the initial letters to each set yielding this result:

D.... cdiu
L.... cdiu

Lucid

D.... eran
L.... eran

Learn

From the common letters came the word "Dream" and the -ing suffix.

I now had two more file names:

creDid Laim gun = Lucid Dreaming

neeL Drragi man = Dream Learning

---

I worked throughout the morning and well into the afternoon, stopping only to collect a tuna salad sandwich, an apple, and a medium sized coffee from the cafeteria. I unlocked a total of six files before turning my attention to other business.



A few days before while I was still under medical observation, a message had arrived:  two static images with voice.

**From a 'concerned citizen'  ".....Thought you aughta know that Niska's 'round. Left a callin' card and a couple of his bombs.... Might be 'nother attempt on Xoxo. Other'n that nothin' much to say...."  Transmission ends**

The images showed a note pinned to a wall with a small knife. The text on the note was written in Russian.

It read:

My dear Xoxo,

So sorry to hear about the explosion in the plant but glad to hear that production is not affected. I think people in glass houses should be more careful where they throw sarcastic stones.
 
With respect always,
Niska

---

There was no name attached to the transmission itself. However, I recognized the voice of the 'concerned citizen.'

It was Cody Winterwolf.

I collected my files and summoned a shuttle.