Evidently Gamon was delusional. This wasn’t a surprise. I’d had that feeling already. And actually, “talking” was what a radio was supposed to do...
I decided to ignore Gamon’s words, just like I was ignoring Narusawa’s. Japanese people had the bad habit of interrupting stories and dragging out meetings.
I tapped my fingers lightly on the photo of the pegboard.
“More specifically, it was using a format called Baudot code.”
“Baudot code?”
Everyone looked confused.
“It doesn’t surprise me that you haven’t heard about it. It was a form of letter encoding used as a storage medium for PCs over 50 years ago.”
“A storage medium? You mean like a hard disk?”
“Old computers used a kind of paper tape called punch tape to record data by punching five rows of holes.” It was used as a means of read/write storage for computers, but before that, it was used for telegraphs. It had a long history.
Evidently there were also versions that used six or eight rows instead of five, but I’d been able to decode my father’s message using the five-row version.
“Hey! Hey! I saw that in an old movie, maybe!” Narusawa had been spacing out with drool oozing down the side of her mouth, but suddenly she jumped up and began to do little hops. It seemed she was able to form a mental image of punch tape in her head.
“So you punch holes in tape... then the holes on the ceiling were...?!”
“It’s the same thing as binary. You can either leave a hole open, or close it. If it’s open, it’s ‘0.’ If it’s closed, it’s ‘1.’ And then you just treat it as Baudot code. For example, ‘00011’ is ‘A,’ and ‘11001’ is ‘B.’” I used my right hand to count in binary.
“I see. Or not. I don’t get it.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter. By using this code, five dots can be converted into a single letter.”
“Man, that sounds like a pain in the ass. So you need to look at fifty dots just to get ten letters?”
Gamon had actually pointed out something intelligent for once.
“That’s right.”
“So what was the message on the ceiling?” Aikawa seemed worried as she motioned for me to continue.
“That’s right. That’s what’s important.”
“Imp? ☆ Or Tant! ☆”
“Fine. I’ll get started. I’ll tell you. It was... names.”
“A name?” Gamon stood up in shock. “It wasn’t ‘Ririka Nishizono,’ was it?”
“Who’s that?”
“Huh? It’s not her?”
“It wasn’t a single individual’s name, actually.”
I paused for a moment — and then took a deep breath before speaking very carefully.
“It was the names of 256 people.”
I could hear everyone gulp.
Everyone in the room had reached a single conclusion, and fallen silent.
“I took a random section and decoded it, only to get the name ‘KAMATA NORIYUKI.’”
“Who’s that?”
“No idea. There were others, like ‘USUI SACHIKO’ and ‘SHIRAYAMA TORU.’”
“U-Um?!” Aikawa leaned forward, more eager than she’d been a moment ago.
“Was one of the names ‘Chizu Kawabata’?”
“Is that someone you know?’
“...Yes. My best friend.”
“I’m not sure. It would take a long time to decode all the names.”
“I see...” Aikawa’s shoulders were slumping.
“Wait, why didn’t you decode them all? Even if it takes time, it’s still worth doing, right?” Gamon sounded angry.
“The decoding is a simple task. There’s no reason for me to do it. Now that I’ve come up with the interpretation algorithm, anyone can do the rest. Any idiot, I should say. Why don’t you do it?”
“...Grr...”
“Instead, I chose to spend my time on a series of letters that I found more inexplicable.”
“An inexplicable series of letters?”
“Yes. After every one of the 256 names, there was a ten-character series of strange letters. I thought about it all night, and didn’t come up with an answer.”
“I see...” Gamon suddenly had a nasty grin on his face. “So the famous Sarai’s throwing in the towel... LOL!”
“I haven’t thrown in the towel. I just haven’t had time to finish analyzing the problem.”
“Right, right. Whatever you say, man.”
Gamon wanted to know the answer, right? Why did he keep provoking me? It wasn’t going to help him with anything.
“Um, was there any kind of rule or something for those last ten letters?” Aikawa seemed to have run out of patience with Gamon, and she knocked him out of the way to ask her question.
“The last seven were always the same. ‘EEQTUWI.’”
“Umyu? That doesn’t sound like it means anything, huh.”
“But the three in front were always different. The most common was ‘QEQ.’ Then there was also ‘QQQ,’ ‘POQ,’ ‘QRQ,’ ‘QPQ,’ ‘QEY,’ ‘QEQ,’ ‘QQY,’ ‘QWQ,’ and ‘PIQ.’ There was only one ‘QQY’ that I saw, for example.”
“So there’s some kind of rule for them, but you don’t know what they mean? Maybe Toko would know...”
“Toko?”
“She’s an editor at Mumuu.”
“Huh? Seriously?” Gamon shouted excitedly.
“Seriously.”
“Introduce me.”
“Oh, sure. That’s fine. I’ll do that.”
“Thanks... Um, anyway.” Gamon turned back to me and slowly raised his hand. “By the way, those 256 people, they have to be... them, right?”
I knew what Gamon was trying to say.
Of course, so did Aikawa and Narusawa.
256.
It was a special number, mathematically. It was also a good number for computers to work with. On old 8-bit computers, the highest number you could show was 256. But in Japan right now, that number had an entirely different meaning. For the past few days, you couldn’t look anywhere on the media or the internet without seeing it.
“Maybe this is... a list of the victims who were found in Inokashira Lake.”
Everyone fell silent and the air became heavy once more.
“By the way, um, did you try matching it with the publicly available list of victims?”
“No. I haven’t. I only decoded about ten randomly picked names.”
After that, I used all my brain’s memory capacity towards solving the mystery of the other letters. I thought about it all during work today, but I’d gotten nowhere.
The news had still only announced about half of the victims’ names, and the internet was buzzing with rumors about secret conspiracies and government censorship. But it was still a mystery why it was taking so long.
Gamon suddenly pointed a finger at Ryotasu.
“Okay, Ryotasu. You decode them.”
“Me? Hmm, okay. I didn’t understand what Sarai-kyun said at ALL! Not in the slightest! So you can just leave it to me! ♪”
“Wait—”
“...”
This Narusawa girl seemed to have a few screws loose after all.
She was always so... innocent... no matter what was going on around her... I-It was hard to understand.
“She’s no good. Somebody has to do it. Okay, who should it be, then?” Gamon was refusing to volunteer himself. It was obvious that he’d spent his whole life foisting off the hard jobs onto someone else.
“Do you want me to do it?” Aikawa raised her hand reluctantly.
Gamon’s eyes were shining, but surprisingly, Narusawa shook her head.
“Myu, you don’t have time for that.”
“Huh?”
“You just focus on your friend. Okay?”
“Narusawa...”
Friend? Did she mean Chizu Kawabata?
“But then who’s going to do it?”
“Gamon should do it.” Since they were taking so long, I chose to decide things myself, but Narusawa interrupted again.
“Gamotan can’t do it either. He doesn’t have time for that.”
“You don’t?”
“...Y-Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. That’s exactly right. I’m busy.”
Gamon was trying his best to look away from everyone. That meant he was lying. He was easy to understand.
At this rate, we weren’t going to get anywhere. I guess we’d just have to put off the list, then.
“By the way, you said the name ‘Ririka Nishizono.’ Who is that?”
“...It’s someone I’m thinking might be the real killer, not that I have any evidence.”
“The real killer?” Did he mean the person who’d killed my dad? But he didn’t have any evidence, he’d said. “Who are they?”
“An ero-doujin writer.”
“What did you say?”
“The person who drew this,” Gamon said, and he took out of his bag — a shady-looking doujin with two men holding each other on the cover.
“Hey, can I go home?”
“W-Wait! There’s a reason for this!”