Reading The Room
When An Entire Bookshelf was The Message. It Just Had To Be Deciphered.
“Learn to read the room,” he said, after they walked into the rectangular office.
The entire length of one wall was made of glass, so that each day’s light came in from dawn to dusk, and transports flitted by like fireflies at night.
“What a mess. He fired the housekeeper, after she tried to clean the room.”
“He was always bad with people. He could never read them, so it’s funny that the note they found on his body was ‘read the room’,” he said, as he picked at a desk’s snowdrifts of paper.
“Only after she tried to clean the room and ‘help’ him,” she said as she ran a gloved finger along the bookshelf, which spanned the wall, “No dust on any of it. This wasn’t the housekeeper. He did this.”
“Learn to read the room,” he said, repeating and thinking about the note’s only message.
“I AM reading the room,” she said, as she walked up and down the length of the bookshelf.
“What do you see?,” he asked.
“I see a message.”
“The message is hidden in the books?,” he asked as he leaned in and squinted at the books.
“The message is ‘the books’,” she said, and pulled him back a few steps from the shelf.
“Look,” she said, as she took off her designer Persol shades, limited collab with Apple, an “E.H. Land” polarized edition, lenses sandwiched with a homebrew of nanos, gave them to him to wear, gestured towards the shelves, and said, “look again.”
He saw it, what she saw, at least he thought he did. Spines of the books became lines, thick and thin, black and white, and rows and columns.
“It looks like bar codes.”
“It’s code, layers of code, binary, hexadecimal, genomic, and morse. Most encrypted. Encrypted because here and there, reading the dashes and dots, the “ATCGs”, zeros and ones, makes sense for a little bit, then it’s crazy.” Crazy alright.
“What else do you see?”
“Some of the books are pushed in, pulled out, wide and narrow. This first row is “readme,” she said as she continued to scan the bookshelf’s message, “and we need a private key, unless this is the key,” she said, with her arms outstretched to her sides.
He looked at the shelves again, and saw the “bar codes” written into the shelves, and noticed something.
“One of the books is missing,” he said.
Author’s Notes on what’s going on:
This “Book #3” project, “RETRIEVE”, is meant to be a prequel to two other books, “Box Of Stars” and “Harvest” but it can be read as a standalone story.
A few months ago, the prologue for “RETRIEVE”, was submitted as a short story.
“An Impossible Island”, Part One and Part Two, and Part Three, was inspired by writing prompts from the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) creative community, beginning with an STSC Symposium monthly theme of “BEACH”.
Chapter 1, “Older Than Bones”, was inspired by the theme, “Dinosaurs”.
Chapter 2, A Love Trinity Denied, was inspired by “Romance”.
Chapter 3, “A Forgotten Circle Of Hades” was inspired by “Superstition”.
“RETRIEVE” chapter and notes will be posted in this Substack, while I edit books #1 (“Box Of Stars”) and #2 (“Harvest”). All will be in the archive, not all will be emailed.)
Fascinating. What a brilliant idea!