Transmission 006 // “Static”
The air was thick with static, the charged hush before a lightning strike. Marv leaned over the table, fingers tapping an uneven rhythm into the wood. Across from him, Amelia stared down at the book—jaw tight, fists balled—as if the numbers might solve themselves if she held them in her gaze long enough. But the page offered nothing. And the silence behind it only sharpened what she feared.
When she couldn’t stare anymore, she blinked hard, drawing a breath that wasn’t steady.
“Marv, do you think…”
She didn’t finish. She didn’t have to.
“I don’t know, Ames,” he murmured. “But we have to see what it says.”
He pulled the book beneath the lamp’s halo, the light slicing the page into clarity. Amelia pressed her knuckles into the table to keep her hands from shaking.
“So… what do we do?”
“First, figure out what we’re dealing with.”
“How many kinds of cipher even are there?”
He gave a crooked half-smile. “Depends on which century you want. Codes have been around forever—monks hiding banned scriptures, smugglers stitching secrets into sails, spies sending battle plans disguised as poetry.” A glance, dry and sideways. “Raymond probably remembers that last one.”
Her expression shut that down fast.
“So a thousand years of code-breakers?” she groaned. “Where do we start?”
“Trial and error,” he said. “Emphasis on error.”
He tested theories, sketched them out, killed them one by one. Substitution cipher? No—numbers too high. Rokov shift? Dead. Halberd grid? Wrong structure. Math sequences? Close, then collapsing. The pencil hit the desk. Marv leaned back with a frustrated grunt.
“Damn. I thought I had it twice.”
“It’s okay,” she said softly.
“No, it’s… there’s logic here. I can feel it. I’m missing something obvious.”
He dragged a hand through his hair and leaned in again.
“Look at the pattern: eight clusters. Each with three numbers separated by slashes. Biggest to smallest. Structured like dates, but they don’t behave like dates.”
“Coordinates?” she tried.
Marv shook his head. “Coordinates use two axes. Three means height or depth. Tunnels, satellites… doesn’t fit.”
She nodded, deflated. “Just an idea.”
“There’s no such thing as a bad idea,” he said.
She arched an eyebrow. “The bathroom hand dryer?”
He groaned. “Okay—some ideas are catastrophically bad.”
They shared half a smile before it fell away.
Marv stood again, arms folded, one hand over his mouth. He circled the book like he was waiting for the numbers to twitch. Amelia saw it—the shift in his posture. The hunt.
“Alright,” he said suddenly. “Back to fundamentals. Any encryption needs shared rules. A structure both sides recognize—sender and receiver. Everything else is decoration.” He tapped the page, eyes narrowing. “For that, you need one thing.”
A beat.
“A key.”
His voice picked up, quickening.
“You can encrypt anything—text, images, whatever—but without the key, the receiver gets nothing. Just noise.”
His fingers flicked beside his temple, static in mime.
“Static.”
His brow furrowed. One hand hovered over the page.
“Think of it in simple terms—a cipher’s just a locked door. Doesn’t matter how clever you are. No key, no entry.”
“Right,” Amelia murmured. “So this coded message is the door, the real message is behind it… and the cipher unlocks it.”
“Exactly. Crack the cipher, the door opens.” He mimed a turn, a quiet click. “You’re in.”
Amelia didn’t answer. Something tugged at the edges of her mind.
“Marv…”
“Yeah?”
“This is going to sound stupid, but… I had a dream last night.”
He stilled.
“One of the nightmares. It started in the closet—same as always. But this one kept going. There was a hallway, a door… and I ended up in the kitchen of my old house.”
She swallowed.
“Something was chasing me. A shadow. I slammed the door, and when I looked down…” Her voice thinned. “There was a key in the lock. Already there.”
Marv didn’t flinch.
“And she was in the room,” Amelia whispered.
“Who?”
“My mom.” The words barely made it out. “It felt like she left the key there for me.”
She braced for him to laugh, dismiss it, pull her back to earth.
He didn’t.
He only turned toward the book. Then back to her. Like the key wasn’t in the dream at all, but sitting between them right now.
He spoke slowly, thought catching up to itself as it formed.
“Okay—first question. Are you alright?”
A nod.
“Second—and you know I don’t go in for ghosts or visions—but…” His gaze dipped to the page. “I think your mom did leave you a key.”
His fingers brushed the margin.
“She had to have used this kind of code before. Nobody invents a system like this in the middle of a crisis. This was active. She was a sender, probably a receiver too. A network.”
He started pacing again, but now his steps had purpose.
“And a network’s just a chain of connected nodes. Two or two hundred, doesn’t matter. What matters is the signal. The message. This isn’t random, Ames. It’s a ping. A warning. Something she needed someone to read.”
He looked up, eyes sharp.
“But she also knew she was running out of time. Your parents hid you because they saw it coming. They planned for it.”
The tears in Amelia’s eyes glittered, but she didn’t blink.
“And if you’re a scientist,” Marv pressed on, “you don’t trust a compromised system. You make redundancies. Backups. You build something that survives a failure.”
He stopped pacing.
“So what do you do if you have one shot to pass on something important… and you can’t trust your network anymore? You don’t hope. You don’t gamble. You leave a failsafe.”
His voice dropped.
“You put it where someone will find it.”
Amelia frowned. “But who?”
Marv raised a hand.
“That’s the point. She couldn’t know. So she didn’t aim it at one person.”
He drew a slow breath.
“She aimed it at you.”
The room tightened around her.
“You weren’t just given a book,” Marv said. “You were made the last node. The redundancy. The backup.” He opened the volume again, the pages whispering. “She left everything here. The lock. And the key.”
Amelia’s voice cracked. “But how?”
“I think it’s a book cipher,” he said. “Old-school spycraft. The key is the book itself. You write the coded message separately. Anyone with the exact same book can decode it. Anyone without it gets nothing but noise.”
He framed the numbers with his hands, like he was bracketing a revelation.
“The number sequences—that was the giveaway. In a book cipher, the biggest number is always the page. Second number is the line. Third is the word.” Marv tapped the clusters. “Page. Line. Word. That’s the pattern. We’ve got it, Ames.”
“So each cluster gives us a word?” Amelia leaned forward. “A sentence?”
Marv shook his head, grinning. “Not the word—just its first letter. That’s how these things work. The message is spelled, not written.”
“But wait,” she said. “The message is in the book. You said they’re supposed to be separate—”
“Exactly.” He lifted a finger. “That’s what I was missing. Normally you keep the encoded message separate from the key. Air-gapped. But your mom… God, Ames.” He exhaled, a little shaken. “She broke the rule on purpose.”
Amelia frowned. “Meaning?”
“Meaning she collapsed the system. She wrote the cipher inside the key book because she wanted a failsafe—something anyone could decode if the network failed. She didn’t trust the system anymore.”
A flash of recognition tightened Amelia’s chest. She could see it: her mother flipping pages with frantic hands, writing fast, time evaporating around her.
“That night,” Marv said gently, “what did she tell you to do with this book?”
“Keep it safe,” Amelia whispered. “Don’t let go.”
“And you did. For twelve years.” His voice softened. “I think she knew you would. I think she meant for you to find this—if no one else came.”
Amelia stared at the scrawl. The numbers seemed to hum under the lamplight.
“So what do we do?”
“We solve it.” He tore a sheet from her math book. “Let’s go.”
He read the first cluster.
47/11/4
Marv flipped pages. He counted lines. Traced words.
“Hydrosphere.”
He wrote the H.
Amelia’s pulse kicked.
“Next.”
“Page sixty-four, line eighteen, word five… ‘Example.’”
E.
Again.
“Seventy-five, eleven, two… ‘Like.’”
L.
“Page ninety-two, line seven, word one… ‘Plasma.’”
The pencil hesitated before he wrote it.
P.
Amelia’s hand flew to her mouth. The letters lined up like teeth.
H-E-L-P
“Oh my God,” she breathed.
“We keep going,” Marv said. “We need the rest.”
He moved fast now.
“One-oh-six, thirteen, five… ‘Method.’”
M.
“One-seventy-eight, nine, five… ‘About.’”
A.
“Two-ten, eleven, four… ‘Nucleus.’”
N.
“One more.”
Marv’s voice dropped.
“Two-forty-three, seventeen, five.”
He found it.
“‘Nature.’”
N.
He slid the paper toward her. Eight letters stared back.
HELPMANN
Amelia whispered it. The word felt foreign, heavy.
Marv tapped the pencil against his forehead. “One word or two? Helpmann? Help Mann? A codename? A command? An acronym—”
“It’s a name,” Amelia said.
He froze. Looked at her. Something in her tone cut straight through his speculation.
She didn’t know the name. But she felt it.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “A name.”
Amelia sat back, breath shaky. “I don’t know anyone called Helpmann.”
“Maybe your mom did.”
The idea landed hard. A message dragged across twelve silent years. A name carved out of numbers and fear.
“And if she knew him…” Amelia whispered, “how do we find him?”
For once, Marv didn’t have an instant answer.
Then he reached for her laptop.
“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “But I’ve got a few ideas.”
He opened it. The search bar blinked, waiting.
And the thread began to pull.
