Sometime Pad
Palimpsestual Persistification Techniques Harmonized With Cryptography
My first suggestion would be to read the Wikipedia (or other suitable source) on One-time Pads. Or you could read Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and have much more fun.
One-time pads are an interesting way of enciphering text that renders them absolutely impervious to decryption. If the pad key text is created using a truly random method, there will be no detectable pattern in the cipher text that would enable a computer or a very brilliant human to decode the text. The Palimpsestual Persistification method has been used to convert an analog sound recording to a digital mp3 file and then BinHexed to ASCII and printed. I propose that the ASCII document be used as the key text for the One-time Pad, or as I would call it, the Sometime Pad. For example, using Retreived From The Temple, page 5, 37th row from the top, starting from the 11th character from the left we could take these 10 characters: “4A4!YTH5d4” (ignore the quotes, they are not part of the key). These would be the Sometime Pad key and with the Modulo 127 method based on the character number on the far left column of the ASCII chart (re: the Wikipedia page) we could encrypt the plain text “Sour-dough” to the following number series cipher (kept as 3 digits from the ASCII chart for consistency’s sake): 008 049 042 020 007 057 056 043 076 029. Now I wouldn’t transpose those back to letters on the ASCII chart because several of those numbers don’t transfer over to letters. For example, 008 ends up being “backspace”. This would make for an ungainly looking cipher text. I suppose it could be transposed to Hexadecimal which would keep it in tidy two character packets for each 3 digit number and be very crypto looking. Or whatever appeals to your taste.
My point (and thanks for your patience) is that you could create a cipher text that would still be virtually undecipherable. The “virtually” part is the most interesting for me. This is because what separates the key text from a truly random creation is the essence of the music it contains. The music in the key text combines with the plain text to create a cipher text that has the qualities of a very elegant palimpsest. The music is like the vellum that has been erased and the plain text is the content that has been written on it. Imagine some future quantum cryptographer decrypting some mysterious text encoded this way and not only finding the secret message, but also re-discovering some long-lost work of music.
I feel this is a very pleasant thing to imagine.
