"We're comparing the missing parts of the tattoos," Lisa replied absently, concentrating on her screen.
"Why?" he responded with a glance at his boss. "They're random glitches as far as the common theories go. People have searched for some sort of pattern to them ever since they were first noticed, but no one can find one."
"They're not us," Taylor muttered, concentrating hard. The Varga was watching through her eyes and his and made a few suggestions, causing her to add search terms and examine the resulting new images.
No one said anything for twenty minutes, other than exchanging looks as they worked, collating images from both public sources and the PRT internal database using their affiliate access. Eventually, having tracked down over a hundred images of different tattoos covering both the obviously physically divergent Case 53s and the rarer human-appearing ones, she and Lisa leaned back on their tails.
"That's all the ones I can find that are good enough to see the defects," her friend said. "Is it enough?"
"Yes. I'm going to have to think for a bit."
"About what?" Newter burst out, unable to contain his curiosity. "What's so interesting about some tattoos with missing parts?"
"The missing parts are an encrypted code," Lisa said, turning to him.
He stared at her, then looked at Faultline, who seemed somewhat startled. "A code?" he echoed.
"A code," she confirmed. "They're not random at all. They've been run through an algorithm to add entropy to them like a password file on a computer, which makes them look random enough to fool most people."
"Even the PRT?" Faultline asked, sounding a little dubious. "I don't like them, but even I'll admit they have some fucking good people in their research departments."
"If we're right about Cauldron, it's entirely possible that they could suppress this research in the PRT without anyone noticing," the Varga pointed out. "Either by covering up the results, or just managing to divert interest away from a detailed examination of precisely this part of the puzzle. And in any case, breaking the code from such a limited sample set would be extremely difficult for human researchers in the first place, even assuming they realized what was there to begin with."
"We're much better at math than they are," Taylor smiled, still pondering the problem with most of her attention, the Varga and her working on the equations at a level she'd have found utterly impossible to explain to anyone else. Even Randall or Lisa would have had massive issues following more than a small amount of what they were coming up with. "Ah. Metis, go back to… four images ago in that series?"
"Sure, here you are," Lisa replied, clicking and dragging.
"Thanks…" She peered at the image and tested her mental calculations on it. "OK, yes, that makes sense."
"Got it?"
"Yep. It's two dimensional matrix very similar to a 2d bar code, like you see on shipping packages and that sort of thing, encrypted with a two hundred and fifty six bit key elliptic curve algorithm, then cut up and spread across the tattoo in a pattern based on Fibonacci prime numbers." She zoomed in on one image so that part of the tattoo filled the screen. "The missing dots encode just over a hundred characters in simple ASCII form, once you reassemble it, decrypt it and convert it from the matrix." Indicating the various groups of dots as she spoke, she added, "Each character string seems to have the same header, and ends in a thirty two bit checksum, like a record in a database."
"Which they are, I'm almost certain," Lisa put in.
"Look, this is what that one there decodes to," Taylor went on, indicating the PRT document that was open on the other monitor showing the tattoo belonging to a Case 53 called Gully, a Ward from San Diego. She typed a rapid string of text, then double-checked it and nodded.
They all looked at the result in the text editor she'd opened:
CXRD//EXD//00004086//F02-41/N01-25/W04-04/Q12-22/xxxxxx/B01-08//OE0001//010000000000//20080821//F5E37EC9
"So what does that mean?" Newter asked after a few seconds, sounding baffled.
"Well, the last eight digits are definitely a checksum, using a basic CRC32 algorithm," Taylor replied, tapping the screen over the numbers. "The field immediately to the left is obviously a date." Pointing at the other end of the cryptic string, she carried on, "The first field is the same in all cases. The next one is EXD in every case with visible physical differences from normal humans."
