PopCo (10 page)

Rachel gets up, nods to Mac and starts handing out documents. ‘OK,’ Mac says. ‘Now, the packs that Rachel is handing around contain paperwork that needs to be completed now. There are NDAs, new contracts, details of new salaries, terms and conditions and so on. Please sign them and hand them back to her. Anyone who doesn’t want to be involved in this project should probably say so now …?’ No one says anything. ‘Great.’ He sits down on the chair and starts saying something to Georges.

Non Disclosure Agreements? Why? This is becoming a Fort Knox of ideas. I thought all our ideas, thoughts, everything were PopCo’s property anyway. We all have NDA-type clauses written in to our normal contracts. Perhaps they feel they need extra reinforcements for their wall around any ideas we might generate here. I take my pack and start looking through it, still wondering why I’m here. I am not the kind of person you choose for special projects, I’m really not. I do my best to just get on with my life without being noticed, especially after all the odd things that happened when I was a kid.
Now it looks like I’m part of a secret again and I’m not sure how I feel about it.

After everything is signed and handed back, Mac starts wrapping things up.

‘Please be as creative as you can, people,’ he says. ‘The old ideas can go out of the window because they just don’t work. We want a fresh approach to this problem. There will be no research, as such, just pure design and ideation. And, remember – if you think an idea is just too crazy, you may well be on the right track. Thanks.’ He looks down and then up again. ‘You’re free to go. Don’t forget the PopCo disco over at the Sports Hall. Oh – Esther, could you stay back, please – and you, Hiro.’ Esther doesn’t give us the funny look we expect but instead just says something like
I’ll see you later
, as we get up to leave. Both Mac and Georges seem to know Esther by her first name. I can’t help wondering exactly what her job is.

As soon as Dan and I are outside we are both like balloons popping.

‘What the fuck?’ Dan says.

‘We’ve been chosen,’ I say, kind of ironically but with a sprinkle of genuine excitement. And then we look at each other in a thrilling-secret way, our eyes reminding us that we just signed forms to promise we wouldn’t talk about this in public.

‘Disco?’ says Dan.

‘I suppose so.’ I feel dazed. ‘But I do want to go to bed early-ish.’

‘So what exactly
was
all that about, then?’ he asks me in a low voice, as we walk down the path with our torches. ‘Mac’s
Weird
Idea
.’ He is referring to a book from work called
Weird Ideas that
Work: 11½ Ways to Promote, Manage and Sustain Innovation
. The ‘Weird Ideas’ in the book include things like ‘Hire Slow Learners (of the Organizational Code)’, ‘Find Some Happy People and Get Them to Fight’ and ‘Think of Some Ridiculous or Impractical Things to Do, Then Plan to Do Them’. Innovation seems to mean that corporations are pretty much up for anything now, however crazy. Innovation is everybody’s best friend this century: shareholders love it, young bum-fluff managers adore it and even normal staff members quite like dressing up as rabbits for the day, pretending to be blind or being hired despite having no experience at all. The
vacuum cleaner company Dyson apparently only hires new graduates. The Sony Playstation was, legend has it, invented by people entirely new to the world of videogames. I have a suspicion that my own employment at PopCo came about as a result of a Weird Idea.
Hire someone who has a strange skill but no experience in
the toy industry at all
.

I shrug. ‘Don’t ask me. I am genuinely baffled.’

‘Does this mean that we’re special, now?’ Dan asks.

‘I’m not sure. Perhaps.’

After spending the minimum time possible at the disco (half an hour), I make some excuses and retire to the dorm, hoping that no one else will return for a while. I tell myself that I am not scared, walking the gravel track up behind the main building. I tell myself that the night is beautiful, with its bats and silence and tiny waxing moon, and that the snuffling in the hedge outside the barn is probably a badger.

The old wooden stairs creak as I walk up them. Again, I make sure that I am not scared by concentrating on their music. It’s all minor chords here: no distinct notes at all. Perhaps minor chords played on wooden stairs aren’t the most soothing thing in the world because I jump like I’ve been injected with adrenaline when I open the door to the dorm and find a scruffy young guy standing by one of the other beds, holding something white in his hand.

‘Shit!’ I say, automatically.

He jumps too. ‘Fuck!’

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘You gave me a shock.’

‘Yeah, you gave me one too,’ he says back.

‘What are you? … I mean …’ I say. I want to directly ask him what he’s doing here but the words don’t seem to come out. Surely he isn’t going to be sleeping here? I’d assumed that the dorms were single sex.

‘Yeah, sorry,’ he says. ‘I came to deliver this, but I don’t know which bed is whose.’ The thing in his now shaking hands is an
envelope which he holds up to show me. It has my name on it handwritten in blue ink.

‘That’s me,’ I say, pointing at the name on the front.

‘Oh – great,’ he says, and, after hurriedly giving me the envelope, he leaves.

‘Thanks,’ I say. But he has gone.

I immediately open the envelope. The message is typed.
Dear
Alice Butler, Please move to
Study/Bedroom
number 23 in the Main
Building as soon as possible. There has been a mistake in the allocation
of rooms. Sorry for any inconvenience. If you need any assistance
with any matters at all, including those of a personal nature,
please get in touch with Helen Forrest on extension 934
. The letter isn’t signed by anyone. I don’t understand the extension number. There are no phones here that I’ve seen so far, let alone ones on a PopCo network. Maybe there’s one in my new room, wherever that actually is.

My tobacco pouch is on the bed, where I left it. I reach for it and roll myself a small cigarette which I smoke out of the window, watching a large moth bump against the outside wall-light. Well, it looks like I’m on the move again. Once I have finished my cigarette, and my brain feels more low-frequency and normal, I start re-packing my things.

In the dark, the Main Building feels like a place you’d get to after trekking through a bandit-ridden forest on an RPG. Approaching it from behind (rather than through the main entrance, or the Great Hall entrance), it seems like a drawing from Dan’s notebook, hazy with orange wall-lights and moth-shadows. There should definitely be flute and fiddle music here, I think, and the drunken clink of goblets held by goblins and elves. It is, however, silent. After walking through a stone arch, I can see a large rectangle of well-tended grass directly in front of me, to the left and the right of which are two residential wings, each containing what seem to be several little rooms. A few are illuminated, although I can see no people. Just as I am prepared to get completely lost, I see a small sign which says Study/Bedrooms 26–51, and has an arrow pointing around to my left. I turn my head to the right and find a similar sign pointing to rooms 1–25. This is where I need to be.

I walk on stone through a covered passage, with the grass on
my left, as I count off the rooms on my right. Would people once have had sword-fights on this grass? It’s easy to imagine, although I can’t visualise corpses or blood, just people facing one another at dawn. Anyway, up one flight of stone stairs, through a small corridor with soft carpet and art on the walls, and then back on myself down another slim corridor and I am there.
Room 23
. There is an envelope on the door with my name on it. It contains the key, with which I unlock the door and go inside. Oh my God. This is more like it. The room has a polished, slightly uneven oak floor, a sloping, oak-beamed ceiling, and is furnished almost entirely with antiques: an old writing bureau with a little key (which immediately makes me think,
Great, I can lock away my things
, until I remember how easy it is to pick those things), a four-poster double bed, a little oak bookcase with a glass door on the front, and a comfortable-looking armchair. The room also has an en-suite bathroom containing a heavy-looking white enamel bathtub and a small sink and toilet. I feel a bit grubby so I immediately wash my hands and then dry them on a small white cotton towel. There is a little wooden mirrored cabinet above the sink, which I open. I expect it to be empty but find it instead full of expensive cosmetic and bath products, many in mauve glass bottles: seaweed and arnica bath soak; rosemary shampoo; seaweed shampoo, orange flower water, and quite a few other things. There are also delicate bars of French soap, two natural sponges, a new wooden hairbrush, nail-clippers, and a huge packet of condoms. For some reason this last find makes me blush and I leave the bathroom.

Back in the bedroom, I notice that the bookshelves actually contain books. There are many ideation and marketing titles (of course), a large dictionary, a bible and rather a lot of fiction that looks like it would appeal to teenage girls. So I am here because of Mac’s Weird Idea. But why wasn’t I here in this room in the first place? And why am I even part of Mac’s crazy project? I still have no idea at all. But seeing this room answers Dan’s question, anyway. Yes: for whatever reason, being singled out for this means we are special.

What I want to do right now is take a long bath, and then roll around luxuriating on the four-poster bed. What I actually do is take the dictionary out of the bookcase and walk over to the writing bureau. I unlock it with the little brass-coloured key and find – of course – that it is packed with expensive stationary. After packing
away the complimentary stuff in one of the drawers, I take my notebook and pen out of my bag, place them on the desk, and sit down. The notebook is the type I always use – narrow-ruled in faded-looking pale blue – and the pen is my favourite of the many small fountain pens I own. I can’t really write with anything else. There is a little lamp which I switch on. I quickly write half of a lame-ish To Do list (
1. Organise cat-sitter
), ready to stick over the top of what I am doing if anyone comes along. Then I take out the PopCo
With Compliments
slip from my pocket and lay it on the desk.

XYCGKNCJYCJZSDSPPAGHDFTCRIVXU

Time to make sense of this. Ignoring persistent thoughts like
Who
sent me this
? And also the fact that I want to sleep so badly my eyes are watering, I start trying to pick out patterns. It takes me about ten minutes to pretty much confirm my original, intuitive theory that this isn’t a simple mono-alphabetic substitution. So I am going to go down the Vigenère route and see what happens.

Patterns. You’d see more patterns in a longer piece of text, that’s for sure. Still, I can see a couple of interesting factors here, and I start making some initial notes in my notebook.

Mono-alphabetic ciphers have been in existence, in various forms, for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. In these ciphers, each letter from the plaintext alphabet is replaced with another letter from a corresponding cipher alphabet. ‘A’ might be written as P, and ‘b’ might be written as S, for example. Each letter in the alphabet will have a corresponding letter which will always stand for it in the cipher. It is called ‘mono’-alphabetic because there is only one cipher alphabet. I remember having this explained to me when I was a child and suggesting that it would be ‘easy-peasy’ to crack any of these sorts of ciphers. The Caesar shift, yes: that is easy-peasy. All you do is work out how many places the alphabet has been ‘shifted’ and you’ve done it. But if the cipher alphabet is sufficiently randomised then it does get a bit trickier. In fact, if you think of the cipher alphabet as a key, then the Caesar shift cipher has twenty-five possible keys (as there are basically only twenty-five ways of shifting the alphabet without actually rearranging it). However, if the cipher
alphabet (a basic English twenty-six-letter alphabet) can be rearranged in any way, there would, as my grandfather once pointed out to me, be 403,291,461,126,605,635,584,000,000 potential keys to find, this figure being the factorial value of twenty-six (rather cutely written down by mathematicians as 26! and proving that they also have a thing for exclamation marks, just like the toy industry).

This was the first time I discovered factorials. If you ever need to know, factorials are calculated the following way: 3! = 3 × 2 × 1 and 5! = 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 and 13! = 13 × 12 × 11 × 10 × 9 × 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1, and so on. It’s quite neat, actually. 100!, where all the numbers from 1 to 100 are multiplied together, gives a result bigger than the amount of atoms in the known universe. Anyway, as my grandfather explained, no one could check all those keys. It’s true: even a contemporary computer would take – yes – longer than the history of the known universe to perform a calculation like that (perhaps while figuring out all the possible configurations of Go pieces.)

Even after my grandfather explained factorials to me, I was ready to take up the challenge. ‘Go on, then,’ I said. ‘Create a random thingy alphabet, write a cipher in it and bet you I’ll crack it.’ He did, and I did, because the way you solve mono-alphabetic ciphers is never by trying to guess the key.

Say someone sends you a note written with a mono-alphabetic substitution cipher, and it says something like: QEPN BVQE C ASFN AXNYN GCZ C TSYU GXQ AXQBTXA ZXN PQBUH YNCH PSVXNYZ BEASU AXN HCK ZXN YNCUUK XCH AQ. You start in the following way. Is there a letter on its own? Yes. There’s a C, twice. Well, there are only two single-letter words in common usage in English: ‘I’ and ‘a’. So it’s going to be one of those. Then you look for the most common letters. In this cipher they are: N, which appears 9 times; X, which also appears 9 times; C, which appears 7 times; A, which appears 7 times; Q, which appears 5 times; Y, which appears 5 times; and U, which also appears 5 times, including its appearance in a repeated-letter digraph in the third from last word. A digraph is a combination of two letters. A trigraph is a combination of three letters. Digraphs can be useful when you are cracking mono-alphabetic ciphers, and only certain letters are commonly found in repeating pairs, the most common being ‘ss’, ‘ee’, ‘tt’, ‘ff’, ‘ll’, ‘mm’ and ‘oo’.

Think about what you already know about the English language. You know that E and T are the most common letters in all ‘normal’ texts. The most common letters in the ciphertext are N and X. Is one of these going to be E or T? The most common word in English is ‘the’. Are there any three-letter words in the text that look like they might be ‘the’? In order to crack a mono-alphabetic cipher without guessing the key, you have to be a word-detective. You have to look for the patterns. You have to start trying to put in letters you think you know and see if anything emerges. If you do this, you will be able to unscramble the message.

Alternatively, you could always use frequency analysis, which is particularly good when you have a ciphertext that is not conveniently broken into words. Frequency analysis involves noting down the frequencies of
all
letters in the ciphertext so you have a list of the first most popular letter, the second and so on right down to the least popular letter. Then you get a frequency table (there are lots out there and people even post them on the Internet now) of the frequencies of letters in common English usage. You take the most popular letter from your ciphertext and replace it with the most popular letter in English (according to your frequency table). Then you take the second most popular letter and replace that with the second most popular letter and so on. It is surprising how often this works with only very minor adjustments. This method will certainly usually give you enough to see what the message is yourself. If the pattern-recognition method is like a Sherlock Holmes style of detection, then this frequency method is more like a twenty-first-century forensic skill.

This is the key you will get if you decipher the message:

The first incarnation of my KidCracker pack came with an Alberti code-wheel, a Jefferson’s Wheel, a battery-operated mini-Enigma machine and a laminated Vigenère square. Alberti was a fifteenth-century architect, and is known as the true grandfather of contemporary Western cryptology. His code-wheel formed the basis for all forms of poly-alphabetic ciphers that came later, including Enigma. I worked with two young engineers from the Mechanical Design team at PopCo
London to recreate these devices, which we did after researching many primary texts and objects at the British Library and various museums. As a result of this, my Age 9 to 12 code-breaking kit ended up containing miniature working models of some of the greatest cryptological devices ever invented. Originals of this kit now sell to collectors for almost a hundred times their initial selling price because of this, and have the same kind of appeal to adult cryptology enthusiasts as the famous Fischer Price Super 8 camera has for grown-up cinematographers. It probably also helps that my kit ended up being banned in various countries and had to be re-launched without the many interesting extras that were causing all the fuss. I thought I would be in all sorts of trouble for creating a toy that ended up being banned – and maybe I would have been if it hadn’t worked to our advantage. As it was, a couple of newspapers ran short pieces on it and the publicity just about undid the damage the ban had caused. I was, however, given a talking-to by Carmen the first, during which I was given tips on legal research and much anecdotal evidence of product launches gone wrong as a result of fuckwitted creatives (the launch of the
Nova
car in Spain being the most obvious example;
Nova
meaning, of course, ‘it doesn’t go’ in Spanish).