You turn on the computer and check your e-mail at both the
public and the private address. You spit your gum out, put another piece in
your mouth, and all of a sudden at your private address you find an e-mail
consisting of a single line:
RZWIJWJWDTZWMFSIXFWJXYFNSJIBNYMGQTTI
You notice the sequence FWJ XYFNSJI. Frequency analysis
won’t take more than a few minutes. Each letter has its own personality, and
even though it seems to be out of place, it is betrayed, whispers, speaks,
shouts, tells its story, misses its place on earth — paper. Who could have
sent you this message? From where? You don’t recognize the address.
That’s strange — only about ten people know your private e-mail. Someone
has managed to get past the Black Chamber’s firewalls and is teasing your
heart with a crude message.
All messages from within the Black Chamber come encrypted to
your private address and your computer deciphers them automatically.
Perhaps something in the program failed. You hit a couple of keys to try to
decode the message. No luck. It isn’t encrypted using the Black Chamber’s
software, which confirms your suspicions: the message was sent by
someone unknown.
It is a taunt. For now, you had better do what you do best:
frequency analysis. The j has to be a vowel: a? e? o? Common sense tells
you it’s an e.
You soon know: it is a simple code ciphered by substitution, a
variation that, according to Suetonius, was used by the emperor Julius
Caesar. Each letter has been moved five spaces to the right, so that the j is
really an e, the g is a b, and so on. XYFNSJI spells stained.
MURDERERYOURHANDSARESTAINEDWITHBLOOD
Who’s the murderer? You? Why are your hands stained?
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
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