The Raw Shark Texts. Steven Hall

I find I’ve lost my grip on one of the ends. Like trying to hang a huge sheet out in the wind, I can’t keep hold of it all at once and parts are escaping, flapping away out of reach. Are you there? Is there even going to be a you after I’m gone? I’m trying hard not to lose faith. Don’t lose faith in me, Eric. If you are there, you will need this information to survive; I need you to believe in me. I’ve killed myself so slowly it’s taken years and I don’t really even know why. I don’t want to die. I’m scared of dying but even more I don’t want to not be. I remembered something Clio said and I wrote it down. We were coming out of a building like a pub or a cinema or a shopping complex and Clio said, “I’m going to have a smiley face tattooed on the underneath of my big toe.” I said why and Clio said, “So when I’m dead and they put a toe tag on me it’ll look funny in the morgue.” Memories like this one are like the coloured dust from butterfly wings coming off on my fingers and then blowing away. I think Clio liked the idea of the tattoo because it would be like her something, her sense of humour, would still be there for at least a little bit longer when her body was cold and dead. It would be like a little cheat. You see what I’m saying don’t you? Don’t lose faith in me, Eric.

      Regret and hope,

      E

      (Received: 12th January)

      Letter #111

      Dear Eric,

      There are two stages to the light bulb text encryption. The first is simple Morse code. The bulb flashes in short and long bursts, dots and dashes. These can be transcribed as letters using the following chart:

A.-	H….	O ---	V…-
B-…	I..	P.--.	W.--
C-.-.	J.---	Q --.-	X -..-
D-..	K -.-	R.-.	Y -.--
E.	L.-..	S…	Z --..
F..-.	M --	T-
G -.	N..	U ..-

      You will notice that the letters produced still appear to be random at this point. They don’t make any sense. That is because there is still more to do.

      The second part of the code uses the layout of a computer or typewriter keyboard, as below (with rows two and three slightly realigned to make a grid):

      Each letter from the translated Morse code sequence is applied to the grid:

      The final, correctly decoded letter will always be one of those adjacent to the Morse code letter. For example, if you translate an ‘F’ from the Morse code, the actual letter you are looking for will be one of the eight adjacent to ‘F’ on the QWERTY layout:

      The translation letters also ‘rollaround’. This is a way of saying if a Morse code letter touches the edge of the board, as B does

      the possible translation letters will not only include V, F, G, H and N, but also R, T and Y, as the three unavailable bottom spaces are rolled up to the top.

      This rollaround is applied to all edge-of-grid letters, as shown here:

      As you are probably noticing, the code is not very specific. When translated from Morse, each letter has eight possible solutions. Only one of these will be the correct letter. This means clean text cannot be constructed at the level of the individual letter. Possible translations must be constructed at word level, re-evaluated at sentence level and refined at paragraph level. It makes the process very time-consuming. It will take a long time. I think I built ambiguity into the encryption as added camouflage against the word shark. Did I? Well. It seems to serve no other purpose. It’s raining here in the past. I hope the weather there in the future is better.

      Regret and hope,

      E

      

      (Received: 29th April)

      Letter #205

      Dear Eric,

      Six months. Are you still with me? A sort of half birthday if you are, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you are so alone. Now, here is what this letter is about:

      There is a story. There is a story I’ve been avoiding. It’s the story about why all this is happening. Why the Ludovician is hunting you. It’s all my fault, Eric.

      Stories. There used to be more stories, records of other things, other fragments I’d written down or encoded. I can remember some of their names. Once, there was The Dust Fragment and The Shadow Fragment and The Envelope Fragment, as well as The Light Bulb Fragment which you have. But it’s dangerous here in the past where I am and things get muddled or lost or destroyed. I’m trying, I’m trying to save as much as I can but those fragments have all gone and I can’t remember what they said.

      There once was a fragment called The Aquarium Fragment. I have a single piece of text left from The Aquarium Fragment. It is part of the story of why all this is happening. I will try to tell the story and slot this little bit of fragment in the right place.

      This is how the story goes:

      To try to change what happened to Clio, I went looking for a man called Dr Trey Fidorous. I don’t know, I don’t remember what I thought this Dr Trey Fidorous could do, but I devoted myself to finding him. He was a writer, an academic, I think. I looked for him first in his dense and complex papers, all filed and forgotten in university basement stacks. From them, I found his rolling pencil footnotes in a set of old encyclopaedias in a library in Hull. They led me to flyposted text-swarmed poster sheets in Leeds, and from Leeds, on to series of essays written in black marker on the tiles of underpasses in Sheffield. The underpass essays led me to a suite of chalked texts on the walls of an old tower block in Manchester.

      I remember this part, this route so clearly because I repeat it to myself every day: ‘The dictionary in Hull, the posters in Leeds, the underpasses in Sheffield, the tower block in Manchester.’ And then there’s a last stop on this route, the place I finally found Dr Trey Fidorous: I found him sick in a closed-up doorway in Blackpool. Something had happened to him. I can’t remember what it was.

      Hull. Leeds. Sheffield. Manchester. Blackpool.

      Hull. Leeds. Sheffield. Manchester. Blackpool.

      What happened next is I went with Fidorous down into the empty, abandoned areas in the world which are sometimes called un-space (I will write you a letter about un-space another time) and I studied with him down there. I learned things, the things I am teaching you about survival and other things too, things he wanted me to know and things he didn’t want me to know, that I shouldn’t have known. I thought I could save her, Eric. I had so many ideas. The details have all gone.

      Somewhere in un-space,