xp_logs | V=IR: Part Five

Taking some time to try and decode the mysteries of Tesla's Theremin, Doug and Forge discuss math, cryptography, and geography - and find a solution stemming from all three.

After a short walk back to their hotel and a quick dinner, Doug and Forge had retired to their room in order to devote themselves to the mystery of the theremin and the countermelody it had produced when they'd played the music noted on the page from the Folio. Doug flopped backwards onto one of the two single beds in the room and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Ow. My head hurts."

Forge nodded as he drained another can of the local Red Bull equivalent and printed out another page of the transcribed countermelody, tacking it up on the wall and staring at it. "I've tried every standard mathematical relationship between the key and the countermelody," he explained. "Nothing's jumping out at me."

"There has to be something we're missing. It's just..." Doug waved a hand. "Frustrating." He grunted and stared at the ceiling, thoughts rattling around his skull like unpolished rocks in a tumbler. "I'm running out of ideas. I don't know, what if we ignore the melody itself and just concentrate on the countermelody? I mean, the melody was given to us already, maybe that means the countermelody is the important part."

Forge raised a pen and began crossing out various lines on the graph before him. "The countermelody doesn't have any unique traits of its own, it's almost like the specific translation for the key is what's..."

Quickly, Forge grabbed another blank sheet of paper, pinning it to the wall and writing mathematical formulae across it. "All ciphers have a mechanism they use to get from your encoded text to plain text, right? You put one thing in, you get another thing out depending on the mechanical encryption used." He stopped and looked at Doug. "We've been looking at this wrong. It's not the key or the countermelody we want, it's the code that Tesla hardwired into the theremin. The melody from the Folio wasn't a key, it was the ciphertext message itself! The key is in the machine!"

He slapped his hand on the photocopied Folio page, then on the countermelody. "Ciphertext, plaintext. Can you reverse-engineer the encryption dialog from this?"

Doug sat up and set the two pages on the bed in front of him. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees and hands cupped around his eyes almost like blinders to block out distractions. "Talk to me," he murmured to himself, his eyes narrowing. "I think..." he paused and grabbed another blank sheet of paper. "I don't think it's language at all. It's some kind of mathematical notation. It's a description of a line. Distance and angle, but..." He frowned. "There's no endpoints.

Forge raised an eyebrow and looked back at the papers of musical notations, wave function, and cryptographic tables tacked up on the hotel wall. "Distance and angle... if we can find a starting point, we can find an ending point. Wait... when did Tesla build the device?"

"The information on the display said...1909, as I recall," Doug supplied. "Why?"

Forge pulled his laptop over onto a small table and called up a biography page on his browser. "Turn of the century, Nikola Tesla is engaged in a number of projects. He invents the radio, although Marconi gets the credit and the Nobel. He's still engaged in the War of Currents with Thomas Edison, where Edison insisted direct current was superior to alternating current, and Tesla taking the opposite approach. But here, starting in 1902, Tesla throws his lot in with J. Pierpont Morgan, the financier, to build Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island. You see, Tesla's great experiment was wireless power transmission. The theory that electrical energy could be safely transmitted from a power plant to an end-use station without laying miles of cables or wiring."

Taking out a straightedge and compass, Forge leaned into the map. "If we take that distance and angle, and figure it from Wardenclyffe Tower as the start point... what if Tesla was trying to test his wireless power transmission? Holy shit, Doug, what if it works?"

"Stranger things have happened. I mean, we have wireless telephony and broadcasting, and people laughed when Tesla thought those were a possibility back then." Doug had purchased a biography of Tesla for the plane ride to Vienna, and it had intrigued him. "Who's to say that he wasn't right about wireless electrical transfer too?" He leaned over the map. "Where's the endpoint from Wardenclyffe?"

Pen in his mouth, Forge traced a series of arcs with the compass, then laid the straightedge along the proper azimuth and drew his line. He then stopped, blinking rapidly. "Oh, fucking hell," he swore. "I hope to god either we're wrong, or there's some error somewhere."

Forge stepped away from the map, showing where the line ended, stretching across the Atlantic Ocean and Europe to end up in the middle of Siberia. "North of Lake Baikal," he said. "Tunguska."