LONOE

I must admit to being slow to recognise the significance of this map, I saw it a few days ago from a comment by Tonzi in the Cipher Explanations page and didn't realise what it was.

If you haven't finished the book yet you may not want to read on.

Then last night @MyTheseus on Twitter pointed out a new blog post on WhoIsStraka.WordPress.com which had the same conclusion, although arrived at via a different thought process.

Firstly the map is quite important as it explains the relationship of the coordinate system to the codes used, they are linear as you can see and these aren't locations from the book, these are all coordinates that can be found when LONOE is in the wheels window.

When you look at the map you can see that Maraú in Brazil (blue pin) is close to this line, on the postcard dated the 20th of April (insert on page 201) Eric writes that he is near this place.



So the conclusion is that the missing letters L O N O E are actually a pointer to the location of FXC should Straka have ever picked up the message hidden in the footnote cipher.

Tonzi very kindly created this as a Google map for us all to use and see this linear relationship.

Cipher Explanations

I thought it would be a good idea to try and explain the ciphers used in the book for those that are not too familiar with how the ciphers work. I want this page to act as a reference specifically for the ciphers.

If you have read the book you will know that in each chapter there is a code in the footnotes, some Jen and Eric solved, some we have solved and I am sure there are a couple we have yet to solve.

Most are solved by Jen and Eric and the answers appear in the margin notes, but apart from mentioning the cipher used and some key words there is not much extra explanation so to the uninitiated it may be confusing.

Just a quick warning, that the full post here contains information that you may not want to see until after you have read the whole book.

Friday Catchup

First of all we have a possible / probable solution to the footnote code in chapter 10 of the book.

In the comments "The Fourth" gave a solution, followed up by some extra info from ObFuSc8.

As this is something in the book that isn't explicit in the book I will put it in spoiler tags just below in case you don't want to read about it just yet.

Click here to see the possible answer

In the first footnote for Chapter 10 the words "Spinning Wheel" and "locate" are in italics, so this points us straight at the Eotvos wheel contained in the book.

If you work out the locations referenced from the footnotes and write down the 5 letter codes in a grid you get a message -

Which if you read left to right top to bottom is

I HAVE LOVED YOU FROM THE BEGINNING. I WILL LOVE YOU TO THE END.

There is still the question of the location of the 6th column, as the footnote mentions Calais but the coordinates for Calais France do not match the code necessary to make the whole string work fully - L O N L E



The list of locations is -

1 - Bergan, Norway - 60N, 5E - I Y B W U
2 - Biabou, St. Vincent - 13 N, 61 W - HOEIT
3 - Portland, Or - 45 N, 123 W - AUGLO
4 - Thunkar, Bhutan - 27 N, 91 E - VFILT
5 - Santiago, Spain - 33 S, 70 W - ERNLH
6 - Calais, France - 51 N, 0 E - XBTUP (??)
7 - Morondava, Madagascar - 20 S, 44 E - OMIVE
8 - Havana, Cuba - 23 N, 82 W - VTNEN
9 - Sofia, Bulgaria - 42.70 N, 23.33 E (approx) - E H G Y D
10 - New York City - 44 N, 73 W - DEIO*

You can see the discussion on the Eotvos wheel code page, Click here to see the first comment and then scroll down slightly to see the post by ObFuSc8

Next, not really book related, Mr Toasty has kindly set up an IRC room for us to chat in about S if we want to - Straka IRC

Then we had an interesting tweet from @sFileSerin, who said if you look at this website for UViRCO Technologies, the name Vaclav Straka and CORIOLIS General Trading is mentioned.

I'm sure it is a complete coincidence, but fun never the less.

Finally for now is this article from the San Marcos Mercury

It interviews Doug Dorst and talks about the secrecy behind the books creation.

Footnotes 9-10

Thinking about the Eotvos Wheel and potential clues to the code to decode it these two footnotes jumped out at me.

They are the only two chapters with footnotes 9 and 10 on the same page, and they do seem to allude to a code of some sort. That combined with the Eotvos Wheel website saying lots of Santorini man pages were 9-10 is looking more like a deliberate pointer rather than a coincidence.

Page 225 Footnote 9 again has an instance of 19 - "He argued that while these were separate conceptions of individual identity, they were equally true, as were seventeen other “Lesser Variant-Selves” between those two endpoints."

Jen also underlines the name and two dates "Mariusz Mytych (b. 1853 or 1854)" she says Mytych doesn't exist and that the 60 + 24 are what is important, which don't correspond to the dates that are part of the Nihilist Cipher used in that chapter.

Page 225 footnote 10, the only thing that seems significant is - "I do not know whether Straka would have agreed, but one could argue that this conflict is at the very heart of the book you are now reading." Possibly alluding to an underlying mystery.

I can't read anything relevant into Footnote 9 on page 270, so if anyone has any theories please let us know.

Looking at footnote 10 on page 270 I think the relevant part of the footnote is - "but modifying its suite of disorientations to include the additional dimension of Time"

A possible reference to the date being significant to the code being deciphered as well as the longitude and latitude of the locations we have seen, both in the Santorini Man murder locations and the locations in Ship of Theseus.

Where does this leave us ? not very far forward I'm afraid I have tried combinations of the date year to get a digit between 1 and 5 to read a single letter from the wheel code, but have not managed to find any combination or calculation that is plausible. Of course we may need to take the whole line of the code at the selected location and use them in something like a Railfence or Play fair cipher as people have suggested, however this would drastically limit the amount of coded messages that the wheel could produce for us.

Any suggestions and theories on this are more than welcome.

Footnotes and Ciphers

The footnotes below were imported from ebook of Ship of Theseus as text and without formatting found in actual book or ebook. The formatting may be important to understanding some of the ciphers, so please refer to published versions for exactness.

This post may containing spoilers, notes on ciphers solved and those on which we are working. Color coding as been added for better understanding.

You can reach us at sfiles22blog @ gmail dot com.