bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2010) — Spring 2010 // Printemps 2010, pp. 44–48
Bugbyte O’ Nanotek pushed the bow! away with the tip of her spoon. “What flavour was this ice cream again?” “Chocolate rococo karaoke,” replied the hologram of ace logician Ludwig Liebnitz. She shook her head. “I’m not ready for a dessert that sings ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to me.” She turned to the elegant golden robot at her side, “Where did it come from?”
Before GEODE could answer, a flash of citrine light filled the room, clearing to reveal a human in a tight twentieth-century black suit, fedora and one white glove. Shuffling quickly backward, he tripped over a power cable, performed a triple reverse somersault and slid under the galley table before striking his head on a potted Arcturan leopard-fern. The fern lashed its tail, unimpressed.
“Haven’t see a moonwalk that bad in, oh, 500 years,” mused Bugbyte. “And what’s with the get-up?” The figure leapt to his feet. “Andromeda Jones at your service, ma’am.” She covered her eyes with a hand. “That figures. Strong genes.” He went on, “And this is the new uniform of Queen Michael’s diplomatic corps. Cloned from Jackson’s third nose, she has some very definite ideas about protocol.”
“Why are you here?” asked Liebnitz. Jones replied, “Unless you can help us, the Titanic will be rendered into fragments in about three hours, along with everyone aboard.” “The Starship Titanic?” replied Liebnitz. “But I was on her only weeks ago. Hashish MacBannock bought her to use as a conference liner. He had a contract with some scholarly association…”
“Exactly,” agreed Jones. “The Society for Interstellar Cooperation, Synergy and Organization in Canadian Studies and Allied Causes — SICSOCSAC.” “Sick sock sack?” queried Bugbyte, one eyebrow aloft. “Hey, they’re academics, didn’t notice the acronym until the name had been adopted. And it means ‘seven million super-model strumpets’ in the lingua franca of the Sagittarius Sector. It’s done wonders for recruitment there.”
Liebnitz said, “We were attacked on the second day out by pirates in plaid suits and white shoes. The captain ordered evacuation, but the ship was caught in a combine harvester ray, the next step up from a tractor beam. I slipped away through an open airlock, as my tesseract-transporter was too small to be caught in the net.”
“Those pirates were Steffi De Lyre, interim leader of our planet, and his caucus.” Jones explained. “By amalgamating the Reform and Progressive parties last year, he created a new political organization — the Regressives. Since then, he’s struggled with his arch-rival DisKount Ignitionoff, whose party combines socialism with short pants under the slogan “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his knees”.
“De Lyre was pulling ahead in the polls when everything went wrong. He lost his cool. Not that he had much to begin with, but suddenly he couldn’t do anything right. The accidental invasion of Khandahar 4, the carbon capture fiasco that drowned Omicron-beta, the aid on conception misconception — it was all turning to dross.”
“And the loss of cool was material, not just psychological. Some device that generated cool had been stolen. Rumour was, it had been smuggled out on this very spaceship, the Heart of Glod. But it doesn’t register on any sensors. And with your Infinite Impossibility Drive, he couldn’t just hunt you down.”
“So De Lyre figured that extortion was the only way. He captured the Titanic, knowing that you, Liebnitz, had friends on board, then made sure you escaped along a vector that would bring you close to the Heart of Glod. Meanwhile, he towed the Titanic to the nearest ship-breaking yard and put it into the line-up for disassembly. Only he can reverse the order and the price is getting his cool back.”
GEODE asked, “The automated ship-breakers don’t accept consignments with living species on board. How did De Lyre get around the crew and conference?” Jones replied, “He prorogued them. Logical step for a pro rogue. Suspended without function, they become formless and don’t register on the scene.”
“T avoided the prorogation ray because I had stumbled into a closet full of hyper-space brooms. I swept out to find the ship full of manikins and a message from De Lyre telling me what to say when you showed up. I survived on maple-screech martinis and stale cod-lips canapés from the SICSOCSAC reception until you came close enough for an inter-ship transporter beam.”
“What can we do?” asked Bugbyte. “We have no idea where De Lyre’s cool is.” “I can help there,” responded Liebnitz. “Before I left the Titanic, I, ah, made friends with the main computer there. She’s a politics junkie, great contacts with all the party animals. If anyone knows how to find De Lyre’s cool, she does.” GEODE interjected, “Two problems. Now that the Titanic has moved inside the shipbreaker’s shields, there’s no way to reach the shipboard computer. And the transporter can no longer take us inside.”
Bugbyte replied, “Then we’ll need to do it the old-fashioned way. In person. GEODE, manoeuvre the Heart of Glod as near as you can to the outside of the breaking yard, maximum cloaking, while I suit up. Liebnitz, get your tesseract ready to roll.”
Minutes later, just down-orbit of an industrial satellite the colour and shape of a kumquat but the size of Orson Welles’ ego, three figures popped into visibility. Bugbyte, wearing the sector’s only black-leather spacesuit, helmet by Ray Ban, pointed GEODE and Liebnitz toward the line of spaceships. “Which one is the Titanic?” she radioed. “The one with the carving of Leonardo DiCaprio panicking at the bow,” said Liebnitz.
Slipping through the same airlock Liebnitz had used to escape, the trio moved past a meeting room full of frozen academics (“Ottawa’s Military Takeover of Antarctica: Pointless or What?”), theme bars featuring zero-gravity 3-D rocket curling (with attached hospital facilities) and a restaurant featuring Canadian cuisine (ditto).
Reaching the bridge, GEODE linked into the ship’s computer and offered Liebnitz a portal. After a few seconds, GEODE blushed an odd shade and suggested Liebnitz get down to business. The logician said, “She’s already given me what she had. De Lyre’s techies have largely disabled her, so she can’t give the answer directly, but she has adapted a conference quiz.” A printer clattered and Bugbyte tore off a text and chart.
On the bridge in the Heart of Glod, Bugbyte explained. “On the back of the paper, there is a series of apparently random dots. Since the source is a computer, they’re probably a binary representation (dot=1, space=0). If so, they correspond to: ‘10-11-22-18-24 / 25-6 / 2-24-19-11-1 / 25-15 / 18-7-25-23 / 15-7-21-22-6-18 / 2-22-16-16- 24-7-15-19-11-10 / 16-19-6-25-24-13-12-11- 24’ … whatever that means.”
Liebnitz rubbed his hands. “OK, this shouldn’t be so tough, especially since the clues are from our era.” Soon he had the know all the answers. In some cases, you by the way, for the source of cool. And t can tell which clue and therefore which clue second part, the phrase hidden in the bine number correspond to which row on the text, gives a location and a procedure. T chart, using factors such as the number of place is easy, but I have no idea about t letters. The phrase that the puzzle calls the procedure.”
plaintext is clearly the code to unlock a Andromeda Jones read the decipher hiding place. Appropriate enough reference, text over the hologram’s shoulder.
The twenty-six clues relate to twentieth and twenty-first century Canadian films, directors, actors etc. The numbers at the end of each clue indicate the number of letters in each word of the answer to that clue. The answers (with no spaces) fit into the attached chart, so that the 26 letters of the alphabet in the vertical column are used in the answers. Note that the clues are not/not in the same order that the answers appear. Rather, once you have inserted the answers in the right places on the chart, you should enter the corresponding clue numbers in the first column. Matching the numbers column and the original alphabetical column will give you the decoding key — for example A = 23 or B =2, although these are not in fact correct.
On that basis, what is the plaintext for:
1-2-24 / 15-25-6-17 / 11-13-7-24-5?
1. Leslie Nielsen curling comedy with cameo by The Tragically
Hip (3, 4, 6)
2. Toronto-born Oscar nominee last year, playing Leo Tolstoy
(11, 7)
3. Indo-Canadian director of Bollywood/Hollywood, at work on
Midnight’s Children (5, 5)
4. London (Ontario) born youngest of four brothers who ran
eponymous major studio (4, 6)
5. Saint John-born star of M*4*S*H, Klute and Bethune
bios (6, 10)
6. Toronto-born brother of a Governor-General, played Abe
Lincoln in a 1940 bio-pic (7, 6)
7. Irene Adler to Robert Downey’s recent Sherlock Holmes (6, 7)
8. Edmonton-born star of Back to the Future and Parkinson’s
crusader (7, 1, 3)
9. Kapuskasing-born director of The Terminator and two recent
titanic hits (5, 7)
10. Bilingual comedy-thriller (2006) starring Colm Feore and
Patrick Huard (3, 3, 3, 3)
11. Toronto-born “body horror” director of The Fly and
M Butterfly (5, 10)
12. Born Harold Smith near Brantford, played Tonto but also in
Key Largo (3, 11)
13. Lebanese-Canadian star of Speed and the Matrix trilogy (5, 6)
14. Winnipeg-born Oscar winner for The Piano, at age 11 (4, 6)
[5. Organization that has received more than 70 Oscar
nominations (8, 4, 5)
(6. Toronto-born comic behind Austin Powers, Dr. Evil and
Shrek (4, 5)
(7. Iconic Japanese monster flick, recut with New Westminster-
born Raymond Burr (8)
(8. Named after Egypt’s first nuclear reactor, director of Exotica
and Ararat (4, 6)
9. Newmarket-born comic actor (The Mask, The Truman Show)
and pet detective (3, 6)
‘0. Toronto-born director of In the Heat of the Night and
Moonstruck (6, 7)
‘1. Cardston-born actress most famous for that scene
atop the Empire State Building (3, 4)
‘2. Toronto-born actress and “America’s sweetheart”;
co-founded United Artists (4, 8)
3. Born Geswanouth Slahoot in North Vancouver, Oscar-
nominated for Little Big Man (5, 3, 6)
A. Montreal-born star of Kamouraska and Anne of the
Thousand Days (9, 6)
5. Blacklisted London (Ontario) born actor in Cocoon and
Sunrise at Campobello (4, 6)
6. Born on Canada Day in Ottawa, starred in Ghostbusters
and Driving Miss Daisy (3, 7)
help on the procedure. It’s a playground dare where I grew up. If you will dial down the artificial gravity and get ready to chant the plaintext, I’ll just strap on this jetpack…”
Minutes later, Jones started his engines. Intending a discreet hover, he shot straight into a ceiling corner of the room, making a three-corner carom that threw him toward the far wall. A noisy collision with the food processor resulted in a stream of small rhubarb cupcakes that buried the captain’s chair. Ricocheting through the Liebnitz hologram, the hurtling diplomat headed straight for Bugbyte, only to be redirected by a mighty blow from the snarling leopard fern she wielded.
Jones disappeared into the impossibility drive hatch, then hurtled right out again without the jetpack but wearing full Zouave regalia and whiteface makeup, carrying a lurid Alpha Centaurid idol marked “made in Taiwan” and sporting a flamingo on his head. To the sound of the plaintext chant, he slammed into one of the few undented panels in the wall. Sliding to the floor, he murmured, “I meant to do that” and passed out.
A hidden panel opened where Jones had struck and a medium-sized cardboard cylinder rolled out, singing “Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the fandango?” Bugbyte blinked. “De Lyre’s cool is… the karaoke ice cream? That’s incredible. As well as inedible.” “Why not,” said GEODE. “If it had been something obvious, it would have been found long ago. Well, we have about twenty minutes to get this to De Lyre and save the Titanic, so let’s move.”
Bugbyte tapped her teeth with a long-nailed finger. “Do we really want to help this extortionist? Is there no way around giving him back his cool?” A voice replied from the floor, “Not to worry.” They stared down at the ice cream. “Well, I like Queen but there’s more to say than that. It’s been a nice rest, but those people on the Titanic need help. And all the ice cream in the world isn’t going to help De Lyre be cool. He is to cool as Madonna is to modesty. There’ll be another day, another flavour for me. Pistachio eel ripple, maybe.”
So it was that the Starship Titanic was freed, the crew and passengers restored to normalcy and CanCult respectively, and Steffi De Lyre re-inflicted on his beleaguered planet, at least until the next election.
Can you duplicate Liebnitz’s feat by providing the plaintext of the chant and the binary message? bout de papier will choose the winner by drawing one entry from all those with correct answers submitted by July 12, 2010. The prize will be a book autographed by A Aalto. Not necessary to solve the puzzle, but can you fill in the chart? Also not part of the puzzle, can you identify the unique sequence of Canadian-related Oscars awarded in the years 1929-31?
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2010) — Spring 2010 // Printemps 2010, pp. 44–48. Read the rest of this issue →
