[PART SEVEN] - CLOSED
quick note; GUYS. please be aware that if you posted a prompt in part six and it is now screened, i have posted them to the post already - so that you guys don't have to. thanks for being patient and making the fill-a-thon such a success
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Eduardo is adjusting to life after graduating from Harvard. He's been meeting the right people, dropping the right hints, investigating the right opportunities. He has a job in New York at the moment, doing low level statistical work at a venture capital firm. It's not much, but it's giving him a feel for the business that he wouldn't get from going it alone. He's got an office that he shares with two other people, and he has an apartment that sometimes looks more like a closet even though he could do better with the money he got from the settlement. He has a neighbor who will give him dinners in tiny tupperware containers because she thinks he's too thin for his own good, and he has a guy who always remembers his order at the deli, and he has a girl he smiles at on the street as they walk past each other, even though he doesn't know her name.
What Eduardo doesn't have is the time or the patience to deal with Mark's bullshit all over again.
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"What the fuck is he trying to tell me?" he asks Dustin over the phone.
Eduardo can almost see Dustin shrug all the way across the country. "I have no idea, man. Mark doesn't tell me personal shit, especially not when he's evil-geniusing. You know that."
On Eduardo's screen, he has the Wikipedia pages for "bitwise operator" and "ASCII" open. It all makes sense to him in pieces, but he doesn't quite know how to put it all together just yet. Mark is the only one who knows that, and no one knows what the fuck is going on in Mark's head. This is low even for him. "I'm not asking for his social security number, here. I just want to know if I should be worried that Mark is going to sue me or trying to exact revenge on me by making me go insane or something."
Dustin says, "I hate to say it, but if Mark was going to sue you, you'd already know about it, and Mark doesn't hate you enough to want to make you go insane." He sounds almost apologetic.
"But he does hate me enough to send me completely incomprehensible numbers that will probably make me go insane," Eduardo says. He rubs his forehead. Fucking Mark. Why does everything have to come back to him?
"I'll do my best to pry it out of him, man, but he'll probably just stare at me until I go away. He's a little terrifying like that," Dustin says. He makes a noise that almost sounds like a shiver, and Eduardo doesn't hate him or feel resentful or anything. It's a lot easier to remember why he liked hanging out with Dustin in the first place. Dustin used to sit in his room and heckle Mark while Mark had his headphones on, completely wired in. The insults usually didn't make any sense, a weird collection of non sequiturs and technical jargon, and half the time it was probably offensive to the French, considering the way Dustin liked to butcher the accent and every word in the language. Eduardo would just watch from the common room, as Dustin's expressions became ever more exaggerated and Mark's expression didn't even flicker even the tiniest bit, and Eduardo would end up laughing so hard his sides would hurt.
"Thanks, Dustin," Eduardo says.
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Which Christmas party?
Subject: Re: Re: decryption
The first one.
Eduardo's been to a lot of Christmas parties, despite not celebrating the holiday himself. His father would go to a lot of them for business reasons, family gatherings, those sorts of things. Eduardo liked the cookies and sometimes he liked the trees covered in decorations and fake snow, but he can't remember ever going to one of those parties with Mark around. At Harvard, all the students they knew were too busy with finals and travel plans for winter break to set up a party like that. Hillel did have a Hanukkah party every year, Mark, Eduardo, Dustin and Chris usually went to together, along with the rest of AEPi. They'd eat latkes and listen to mediocre klemzer and Mark would shove his hands in his pockets while Eduardo would dance like a dork with Chris, because nothing negated the gay guy ability to dance like klemzer music.
It hurts less than it used to, thinking back to the older, happier days. Eduardo's not over anything that happened (and he's not sure he ever will be), but he thinks that maybe he could have a conversation with Chris without flinching, and he can talk to his father on the phone without feeling like a complete failure. He digs up an old AEPi photo, a group shot of the brothers standing in a row. Mark is looking to one side, away from the camera. Eduardo himself is smiling brightly, looking straight on in the way his mom had always instructed him to do. He looks so fucking naive.
And then Eduardo remembers.
It was a stupid idea, but Eduardo wasn't external social chair at the time, so he didn't have any control over it. The brothers thought it was funny for AEPi to put on a Christmas party before Thanksgiving, and so they put on a Christmas party in early October. The decorations team went all out for that one, setting up a Christmas tree, red and green streamers, stockings, gingerbread cookies. They drew a line at a nativity scene, though there was some dispute over just how offensive it would be to have one. That was sophomore year. That was the party where Eduardo met Mark for the first time.
Back then Mark was just a gawky freshman hugging the walls, and Eduardo had felt bad for him in the way he felt bad for all the new freshman, still trying to feel their way around the college experience. Eduardo ended up talking to him over disgusting punch. Their conversation circled around idiots in the intro courses and how to spot the kids who couldn't handle the math classes. Mark talked really fast, his sentences sharp and choppy, like he was always trying to spit all his words out all at once. Eduardo had liked Mark even then, liked Mark's unblinking eyes and the odd curl of Mark's mouth. He'd seen something there, a spark, a ferocity. Students at Harvard don't lack ambition. but even then, Mark was different. Mark wasn't going to let anyone stand in his way.
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But he does have all his old AEPi listserv e-mails, which means he has the original party announcement, complete with a tacky animated Santa GIF and Comic Sans font. Eduardo jots down the date listed: October 5, 2002. There are a few different ways Mark could have encoded that information into a numeric key.
1052002
5102002
2002510
2002105
10052002
20021005
20020510
Of course, it's possible that there's no way to decode the message at all, and Eduardo won't get anything out of it. But that would be sadistic. Mark is a douchebag, but he's not all that good at being a sadist. Sadism involves caring about the emotional state of the people around you.
There are online calculators that will do the bitwise XOR, which means it only takes about ten minutes per key for Eduardo to decrypt the whole message. It's still annoying grunt work, and Eduardo still hates Mark for making him do it, but he'd forgotten what it could be like with a problem in front of him, having to take it apart piece by piece. Once, while Mark was drunk, he had rambled on for five whole minutes about why he loved programming as a means of solving problems. He had mumbled about how he liked making everything come together, liked making every piece fit and do its part. Mark usually gets more articulate and more mean while drunk, which had always amused Eduardo to no end, but that time Mark had been a little sleepy, fuzzy around the edges. It had made him look more human than Eduardo had ever seen him before, like there was something behind that cold, blank stare.
None of the keys Eduardo uses gives him a full result, which maybe he should have expected since Mark only gave him the clue for the first key. He'll probably need all of them to decrypt the message.
But one thing sticks out. The key 10052002 gives him this result:
19025 18975 19029 32 115 111 114 114 121 80387 80458 80388 80462 80387 18992 18998 18976 18987 19043 18978 18989 19043 80450 80464 80464 80459 80460 80463 80454 80397 81786 81715 81786 81718 81717 81708 81727 81786 81699 81717 81711 81780
Most of the numbers are outside the range of normal ASCII characters, but 32 115 111 114 114 121 are not.
Eduardo pulls up the Wikipedia page for ASCII again and translates each character by hand.
And then he stares at the result for a long, long time, because he's not sure why Mark wrote it, why it's there. It's just one word. The others are still encrypted, and who fucking knows what they are, but what really hits Eduardo in the gut is that Mark made this the word Eduardo would decrypt first, that Mark designed this to be the first word Eduardo would see.
s o r r y
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i have no words <333
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i love the amount of detail and thought you've put into the code. because i can buy that its something mark would do, if he wasn't sure of what he wanted to say or how to say it. i know very very very little about cryptography but i can still appreciate the drama it adds to the narrative. as much as eduardo likes solving puzzles, i like watching him solve puzzles c: c:
and that last line, YOU'VE KILLED ME
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The various comments about how Mark doesn't care enough about Eduardo to totally try and send him insane were really true sounding, it is that that really hurts Eduardo, the idea that he just means nothing to Mark.
Can't wait to see what the rest of the code says.
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This is so interesting. I wonder what the message says. :)
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I'm excited to read more.
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now, give us some more, will you?!
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s o r r y" <3 <3 <3
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