by Conell, Zach
“Could I borrow your purse for a second?” he asked without explaining himself.
“Sure. Want to fix your makeup?” Rose teased as she handed Cillian the bag.
“Something like that,” he mumbled as he opened the bag and began rummaging through it.
“Go ahead, it’s not like I have any personal stuff in there,” Rose remarked sarcastically.
“Got it,” Cillian said, more to himself than to her, as he held up a small blue pack, opened it, and pulled out a tissue.
“Stuffed nose?” Rose asked.
“Dirty shoes,” Cillian murmured, as he dropped down on his right knee, put the purse on the floor on the right side of his left foot, and begin wiping the spotless tip of his left shoe with the tissue.
“I don’t see any…” Rose started, but then Cillian did something unexpected. In one fluent motion he used his left hand to lift up the left cuff of his pants, while instantaneously removing his ankle gun from the holster with his right hand—while still holding the tissue—and dropping it in Rose’s bag before continuing to rub his shoe with the tissue as if nothing happened.
“I thought it best not to take it out next to the lockers in the library,” Cillian confidently explained as he got back up, “where it might draw the unwanted attention of a security guard or be caught on one of the security cameras.”
There was a big question mark on Rose’s face.
“The other one,” Cillian carried on as he put his right hand on his hip to indicate the location of his second pistol, “I can easily move to my inner pocket before I take off my coat and put it in the locker.”
“Yeah, I get all that,” Rose whispered, “but why bring two? What the hell kind of danger were you expecting to encounter in the library?”
“You never know,” Cillian grinned awkwardly. “One can never fully rule out the odd Mexican standoff.”
The reply left her looking a little baffled, which in turn made Cillian feel uncomfortable. But then the lines on Rose’s face suddenly relaxed and she burst out laughing.
“You’re crazy! But you got some slick moves, I’ll give you that.”
A few minutes later they were stepping out of the elevator on the fourth floor of the central university library, unarmed and undetected. It didn’t take them long to navigate themselves to the political science section and locate the shelf devoted to the works of George Orwell. There were close to a dozen copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but none of them seemed to contain anything like a hidden message. A few versions contained some notes scribbled in pencil on a few pages, but none of these little messages contained anything striking, and Rose was furthermore quick to determine that the handwriting didn’t match that of her father.
“This one doesn’t seem to be hiding any secret messages either,” Cillian stated as he put the final volume he had inspected back onto the shelf. “What if we check the catalog to see if there are any versions being kept in a closed storage or if one or more copies have been lent out?”
“Sure. Can you give me your smartphone?” Rose asked. “I left mine in the locker because I don’t have any pockets.”
Her remark inspired Cillian to survey her from head to toe. She looked even more beautiful to him now that he could see top part of her casual yet elegant green dress that had been covered by her coat. The green color of her outfit made her look much livelier than she had the night before.
“Do you like my dress?” she asked as she noticed him staring at her. Cillian felt caught and instantly cast down his eyes.
“It’s really nice. I very much like this color on you,” he replied, almost shyly. Lifting his gaze back up, he was struck by her captivating smile.
“Thank you,” she said and held out her hand to him. Once again he had to fight an urge to take it in his own.
“Here,” he said as he gave her his phone. “And don’t worry, I haven’t put the SIM card back in yet. As you said, you never know.” She was still smiling when she took the phone from him. It didn’t take her long to find what they were looking for.
“There are three more versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four,” she concluded, still looking at the phone screen. “One has been lent out, one is an early edition that is kept in a closed archive, while the third is supposedly available upon request at the information desk on the other side of this floor.”
“All right, let’s check out that last one first,” Cillian suggested as she gave him back his phone. “Otherwise we can get the one from the archive.”
“As you wish, sir,” Rose replied in a semi-sarcastic and yet also semi-flirtatious voice.
Chapter Seven
The appearance of the lady behind the counter broke all stereotypes about female librarians. Not only did she not wear glasses, but her eyes, eyebrows, and lips were accentuated by thick black makeup, while she wore her long hair—dyed scarlet—pulled tightly behind her head in a knotted, Mohawk-like updo. Her punk-rock look was made complete by a tight, black faux-leather jacket adorned with silver colored studs on the broad, open collar. Cillian was the first to address her.
“I believe you have a copy of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four behind the counter…” he began.
“You believe correctly,” the librarian interjected apathetically. “But that one is reserved for someone specific. We have plenty more editions on the shelf though. Just check out the political science section over there.” She pointed behind them.
“Does the ‘specific person’ for which this edition is reserved happen to be someone by the name of Rosalie McCormick?” asked Rose. “Because then it must be my lucky day.” She took her ID card out of her purse and held it up to the black-lipped woman.
Cillian was surprised to hear that Rose’s last name was different from her father’s. He wanted to ask her about this, but he got distracted by the librarian taking out something from a drawer in her desk and nonchalantly flinging it on the counter. It was a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
“And so it is,” the librarian said in the same tone of indifference.
“Thank you kindly,” Rose replied as she picked up the book.
“Just get it back to me by the end of the day. Unless you have a library card, but your father said that you no longer study here.” The librarian had lowered her voice, which now for the first time betrayed traces of human emotion. Rose was taken aback by the mentioning of her father, but the punk princess hadn’t finished speaking.
“My condolences by the way,” she resumed. “I was sad to hear of his passing. He was about my favorite person here on campus. Even though my major is art history, I took one of his classes once, just because he was such a great storyteller, and not at all pretentious unlike the bulk of the academic staff here.”
“Th-thank you,” Rose stammered, flabbergasted as she was by the librarian’s unanticipated expression of sympathy.
“Yes, thank you, really,” Cillian emphasized, giving the scarlet-haired woman a nod.
“Oh, by the way,” the librarian said as she took a small, shiny object out of the same drawer and handed it to Rose, “your father also left you this. He didn’t tell me what it’s for though, so don’t bother asking.”
Rose took the object from her hand with a bow of gratitude. Cillian could see that it was a small metal key. He remained silent as Rose led the way to a quiet table almost fully enclosed by bookshelves at the far end of the library, away from the elevator.
“She was surprisingly nice,” Rose finally commented after sitting down.
“Yes she was,” Cillian concurred as he took the seat next to hers. He wanted to say something to her to express his sympathy, but he struggled to find words.
“Let’s see what we have here,” Rose said in a matter-of-fact tone as she put the book on the table and held up the key to inspect it.
“To me it looks like an ordinary flat key for opening the door of a house or a locker maybe,” Rose judged.
“Yes, the official term is ‘pin tumbler lock key.’ I learned that
in unlicensed detective school,” Cillian joked. “But it’s impossible to determine what it’s for without some other clue.”
“So let’s see what we can learn from the book,” Rose said, as she began examining the volume.
After they had both established that there were no visible marks of any kind on the cover of the book, she opened it. The initial pages containing the publishing information, table of contents, title, and a foreword were unblemished as well. However, when Rose opened the first page of the opening chapter of the first part of the book, she almost jumped out of her seat.
“Look,” she whispered with wide-open eyes, as she pointed at the bottom of the second paragraph. Cillian followed her finger and saw that the letter I in the phrase “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” had been circled with a pencil.
“That must be your father’s doing,” Cillian replied. He found it difficult to keep his voice down to a whisper, ecstatic as he was that they had found a new clue. “Let’s see what else is there.”
Rose opened the next two pages. The left one was unmarked, but at the top of the right page, the word “can” had been highlighted in the same manner.
“I can…” Cillian whispered. “Great, let’s continue.”
Rose turned the page again, only to find that the next two pages had been unmarked. The same was true for the two pages after that. She began flipping through the pages a little more rapidly.
“Finally,” Cillian sighed when a page a little further on in the first chapter contained another pencil mark. “I mean literally, ‘finally,’” he said as he pointed at the circled word.
“I can finally…” Rose mumbled as she carefully resumed leafing through the book.
“Count!” Cillian exclaimed, in what could hardly pass for a whisper, as he pointed to the middle of a page where “count” had been circled in the word “counter-revolutionary.”
“Shhh,” Rose shushed him. Both of them looked around nervously to see if anyone could have heard them, but there was nobody in their near proximity.
“Sorry,” Cillian whispered.
“It’s fine. It wasn’t like you shouted or something. I feel a little paranoid about everything, especially now that we’ve actually found something.”
“I understand,” Cillian replied. “I feel the same way. But what does ‘I can finally count’ refer to? I don’t get it.”
Rose shrugged. “I have no idea. Let’s see if there’s more.” She resumed turning the pages of the book slowly. In the first chapter there was one more page with two pencil marks on it: the O in “O’Brian” had been circled, as had the word “one.”
“I can finally count O one… It just got even less clear for me,” Cillian remarked as he scrutinized the page. “Is there any more to it?”
“Let’s see,” Rose replied as she commenced turning page after page.
It took them over an hour to inspect the rest of book. To their disappointment, they didn’t encounter any other circled words. And while they did come across quite a few pages with dog-ears, they were unable to discover anything particularly interesting about the content of the pages that had been thus marked.
“So that’s it?” Cillian asked in disappointment when they had reached the back cover of the novel.
“I guess so.” Rose’s reply sounded similarly dissatisfied.
“Do you have any idea what the O could stand for? Is it an abbreviation or something?” Cillian wondered.
“I can’t think of anything meaningful in this context.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Cillian said with a sigh. “I can finally count O one. O one… The O could signify a zero too, of course, like zero one, but then I still don’t…”
“That’s it!” Rose cut him off. Her shining eyes seemed almost bright blue at that moment, with hardly a trace of gray in them. “Zero – one! He meant binary.”
Her sudden exhilaration left Cillian puzzled.
“Binary? Isn’t that how computers operate?”
“In a way, yes. The binary numeral system is a system for conveying information that uses only two digits—zeros and ones—unlike the decimal system, for example, which uses ten, namely zero and one through nine,” Rose explained, speaking so fast that Cillian had trouble following her. “Computers use the binary system for storing data and processing information, but it can be used for other purposes as well. For example, you can count in binary. I am sure that’s what my father was referring to, because I once tried to explain it to him, but he couldn’t concentrate for long enough to get it. He was always in his mind, you know, thinking about his research, or that of others.” She smiled melancholically.
“Binary counting?” Cillian now vaguely recalled trying that in high school during computer science class. He had been terrible at it. “I’m pretty sure I had that in high school, but it really wasn’t for me. I always preferred letters over numbers; that’s why I ended up majoring in journalism.”
“That’s funny—for me it’s the opposite.” Cillian perceived a joyful sparkle in Rose’s eyes as she told him this. “Numbers have always spoken to me somehow, whereas words usually just confuse me. Especially poetry or prose written as an expression of people’s feelings—I can never make head or tails of such texts. That’s how I got into computers. There’s no risk of encountering complicated metaphors of someone’s inner feelings when reading source code.”
Cillian decided not to ask her to explain what source code was exactly, since he already felt like a fool for not understanding binary counting and didn’t want to embarrass himself even further.
“In any case, my guess is that my father left us some kind of message, which we can decipher only by using binary counting. But the problem is…”
“We don’t know where the message is,” Cillian finished.
“Exactly.” Rose let out a deep sigh. “So now all we have is two keys—an actual metal key and a kind of encryption key—but no locks to open them with. I don’t get it. Did we miss something in the book?”
“No, I’m sure we checked every page thoroughly. There were no other clues, except… What about those dog-ears?” Cillian took up the book and riffled through the pages. “Interesting. Nineteen Eighty-Four is divided into three distinctive parts, and the dog-ears seem to form thee different clusters, one in the middle of the first part of the book, one in the middle of the second part, and the final one in the middle of the third part. Could that be something?”
“Maybe. Let’s see, could you go to the first page with a dog-ear?” Rose requested with curious enthusiasm.
“Here, that’s this one,” Cillian whispered as he opened the page. “Although this one actually has two dog-ears.” He pointed out the folded corners at the bottom and top of the page.
“What about the next page?” Rose asked as she turned over the page herself.
“Just one at the bottom.”
“Same for the one after that. Do you have a pen? I want to write this down.”
“No,” Cillian said as reached into the right front pocket of his pants and took out a pencil and a small notepad, “but this should do the trick.”
“Great.” Rose took the pencil in her hand and put the notepad in front of her. “If you tell me the number of dog-ears for this first cluster, I’ll write everything down.”
After he had read out the numbers, Rose showed him the sequence she had written down on the notepad:
Part I
2111001100012111001100012
“What do you think these twos mean?” Cillian asked after examining the numbers. “I mean, I thought there were only zeros and ones in binary.”
“That’s right. So maybe they serve to mark the beginning and end of separate numbers,” Rose guessed.
Cillian nodded in agreement. “Yes, that could be, since all the pages before the first two and after the last two don’t have dog-ears, at least in this part of the book. But then it means that this is simply the same number twice, since the binary sequences are identical.”
/>
“I know,” Rose admitted somewhat reluctantly. “But it still seems like the most logical option to me. What if we do the other two clusters and compare?”
Once they had gone through all clusters, Cillian checked out the three sequences on the notepad:
Part I
2111001100012111001100012
Part II
2111001101012111001110012
Part III
210111000112
“So if the twos indeed denote where a number begins and ends,” he commented, “it means we have five separate numbers, of which one is repeated. What would those be in regular uh… decimal numbers?”
“Let me check,” Rose replied. She wrote down the five binary sequences that were sandwiched between two twos and began converting them into decimals. She seemed to do most of the calculations in her head but occasionally wrote down a few numbers. In the end she added everything up until she had five decimal numbers to match the binary sequences.
“All right,” she said when she had finished, “so the number of the first cluster, the one that is repeated, adds up to 1841. The two numbers of the second cluster are 1845 and 1849. The final number is 739. What do you make of that?”
“Can I?” Cillian indicated that he wanted to take a closer look at the notepad. Rose moved it nearer to him. “It’s easier for me to get numbers when I look at them,” he elaborated as he bent over the note. Rose appeared to be studying the numbers as well.
Part I
18411841
Part II
18451849
Part III
739
“Maybe the first four numbers are years?” Cillian suggested after a while.
“Yes, I also considered that option. But I don’t know of any special events that took place in these years.”
“I can’t think of anything either, but the way in which you wrote it down really reminds me of the denotation of start and end dates of historical events. Let’s see,” Cillian whispered, more to himself than to Rose, while taking his phone out of his pocket and opening a digital encyclopedia application. “1-8-4-1”—he listed the digits as he typed them into his phone—“In January of that year, Britain occupied Hong Kong. And in February the British Parliament unified Lower Canada and Upper Canada to form a single province. Also El Salvador proclaimed independence. Then in March William Henry Harrison became president… oh that’s right, I forgot about this.” Cillian chuckled. “He became president on the fourth of March only to die of pneumonia exactly one month later; then John Tyler was sworn in…”
