[UA] Enigma

[Gregory Paul Stolze]

I finally got around to looking this up, and... neato!  But clearly what's
going on here in the UnAverse is this: Some combinations of words are
dangerous.  Maybe, like Das Garten, they are themselves possessed.  Or
maybe they're inadvertant rituals. 

(Hm... now I'm suddenly remembering a story I read as a child.  It was
written and set in the forties/fifties, maybe, and it was set in a diner.
The diner had just gotten a new record for the jukebox, and when they
played it, everyone who heard it got the tune stuck in their head.  They
were humming it and tapping their feet, and everyone who heard them hum it
got it stuck as well.  The antidote was on the other side of the record:
Listening to the b-side somehow switched off the "stuck in my head" quality
of the single.) 

The great danger of such a document is its viral nature in the new
millenium.  Sure, Das Garten has to be copied by hand, but the catchy song
(or perhaps its literary variant, a short story that distractingly haunts
the thoughts of every reader) can be distributed on MP3 or Xeroxed and
posted everywhere.  That's bad enough with just a distraction, but what if
the effect was something more dangerous? 

The solution, as Poe found (or someone pretending to be Poe) was
encryption.  If a copy of the lyric is ritually encrypted, ALL the copies
lose their power.  Unfortunately, the ritual requires that the ciphered
copy be made public, like a sword in a stone for all challengers.  And when
it gets unbound, the chances are good that more and more people will read
it... 

-G. 

The Greek Underworld kicks ass. It's like "Six Flags Over Psychotic
Depression," and Cerberus is the Ultra Twister.
                        - L. Fitzgerald Sjöberg

http://www.waylay.com
http://www.thehungersite.com/index.html


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