kscans

Chapter 111 - Episode 2: First Half, Statistical Information Analysis

A crowd of officials, no, bureaucrats, passed by in the hallway. The men and women, dressed like figures in portraits you might see on the wall of a music room, walked silently with expressionless faces.

This was the heart of national politics, the stronghold of all regulation. It’s starting to feel like enemy territory. Well, the nation's stability is its foundation, so I can't just complain.

"Mia, you've been here once before, right? I think it was just before the dragon came to Kurtheite."

I spoke to the girl accompanying me.

"With Princess Alfina and the Grand Duchess, yes. This seems like the kind of place you wouldn't like, Ricardo-senpai."

"That's true, but it's not a problem."

Today, Mia was the star of the show. I was just her escort.

"R, Ricardo Vinder!? What are you doing here?"

A young man stopped ahead of us in the hall. Who was he again?

"...Leonard Grynisias," Mia whispered to me.

Oh, right, him. Come to think of it, he was the Chancellor's second son. He was a fourth-year last year, so he must have graduated. Hired by his father's office through connections. Whoops, nepotism is the norm here, not the exception. In fact, you can't get hired any other way.

"So, why is a commoner... a student, here?" the alumnus demanded, closing the distance between us.

"Haha, I have some business with your father, Leonard-senpai..."

I showed him the letters of introduction from the commander of the Anti-Monster Knight Order, the Grand Duchess Bertold, and the Great Sage. Leonard looked as if he had seen something unbelievable. Still, he agreed to guide us.

I did just put Hilda in her place at that tea party the other day. He's strangely earnest, or perhaps dutiful, in an odd way. Or maybe the son is becoming neutral to match his father's change in position. Unlike in modern Japan, the unit of action and decision-making here isn't the individual, but the family. In that sense, nepotism is a given. I wish there were a little more freedom, but now is not the time for that.

"I hear the Empire sent a notice. It was supposedly quite aggressive. What do you think?" I asked, wanting to get a feel for the general sentiment among the bureaucrats.

"Why would you... Everyone is laughing, saying, 'That barbarian nation only survives on food from our kingdom.' I hear the commander of the First Knight Order is furious about being falsely accused of abducting the Imperial Princess," Leonard said.

For the Empire, it was effectively the expulsion of their ambassador and the detention of their princess. For those who know the truth, it's a brazenly shameless claim, but these kinds of moves aren't about facts. They are just declarations of their own convenient narrative. I figured that was how it would be spun within the Empire. The Kingdom's reaction, however, was deeply depressing. We don't have the luxury for that kind of attitude.

◇◇

The office was simple for a man of his position. On the wide desk, neatly organized documents were sorted into categories.

"I heard from Prince Craig about the Empire's 'horses'."

The head of the administration's tone was calm, as if he were simply confirming facts. It was much better than being met with panic or emotional denial. Incidentally, his son had fled outside the door with a single stern glance from his father.

"If it is confirmed as fact, you will be duly rewarded."

"The key players in the analysis were the Great Sage and the Dalgan Company, so please do not be mistaken."

I ducked behind my shield. It was the truth, so there was no problem. Besides, I felt that Dalgan, unlike me, could properly handle that kind of honor.

"...Today's business is about breaking a code, I hear."

"An amateur could not possibly break it. It is unthinkable to allow such a dubious commoner to handle state secrets."

The man in a civil official's uniform, who looked to be in his mid-twenties and was standing by the Chancellor's side, spoke up. His pride seemed to be wounded.

Even I, with my self-preservation-first attitude, don't want to make waves like this. But the situation doesn't allow for it.

"We can't judge whether she can break it or not until we see it," I said, glancing at Mia.

It all depended on the complexity of the Imperial cipher, but Mia should be able to tell just by looking at it.

"...First, I will tell you the circumstances under which the coded documents were secured," the Chancellor said.

It was the morning Biral had fled. After Princess Lisabet and Biral left the residence through separate gates, the city guard, which operates under the Chancellor, stormed the building. In the envoy head's room, they found one of the handmaidens burning a bundle of documents and apprehended her. She was quite something, apparently trying to shove the smoldering papers into the fireplace with her bare hands, ignoring the burns.

"Here it is. Now, read it for us."

The civil official made an absurd demand. Even if it were written in plaintext, neither Mia nor I could read it. The spoken language was apparently almost the same, but we didn't know the Imperial written language. Besides, those kinds of documents are probably full of expressions only an expert could interpret.

At the hands of the disgruntled man, the documents, some with scorched marks, were spread on the table. They ranged from almost perfectly preserved pages to ones that were half ash. Even scraps with only a few lines were neatly organized and numbered. A thorough job.

There were about fifteen decent documents. With this many samples, we should be able to manage.

The letters looked like Latin. At a glance, there were no spaces or periods. No line breaks either. This alone showed that some care was put into the encryption. It clearly wasn't a simple Caesar cipher, shifting letters by three.

"What do you think, Mia?"

"...I think it will be fine," Mia said after a quick look at the documents.

"What? How can you be so certain? If you're going to make such a bold claim, then read what it says." The official's eyes widened at the girl's words.

"I am also interested. Surely you are not going to say you have the codebook," the Chancellor said, his gaze turning almost cruel.

No, no, the codebook would have been the first thing they burned. Ah, so the suspicion that we're Imperial counter-spies hasn't gone away yet.

"Senpai."

Mia looked at me. I nodded. Showing them how it was done would clear up the misunderstanding.

"I have no idea what this text means. However, I can see that the arrangement of these symbols has enough redundancy, or in other words, patterns, to be deciphered."

"What are you talking about? Hey!"

After her overly brief explanation, Mia turned back to the documents. Once she enters the world of numbers, Mia can sometimes be even worse at reading the room than I am. The two men, young and old, stared blankly. Four gazes, filled with renewed suspicion, focused on me. As the escort, I supposed I should at least play the role of commentator.

"Um, well. What we are trying to do now is extract information from this sequence of characters, right?" With Mia now engrossed in her puzzle, I decided to start from the beginning. "You see, the characters here are just ink stains arranged regularly on paper. They are not a random spatter of ink."

On a piece of paper before me, I wrote a single character from the Kingdom, the 'V' for Vinder. Next to it, I made a random dot with about the same amount of ink.

What separates a random ink stain from a letter is a pattern. More specifically, lines and curves. The two of them looked at me as if this were obvious.

"And text is the same. The Kingdom's alphabet has twenty-seven letters, but arranging those twenty-seven letters randomly will not result in a meaningful sentence."

To be precise, there is a chance it could become a meaningful sentence. If you randomly arrange twenty-seven letters, you might happen to get THIS or WHAT. It is a famous example, but if you have a monkey hit a typewriter, the probability of it producing Hamlet is not zero. However, that text would have no meaning, because the monkey did not intend to write Hamlet. In any case, as long as human will is involved, a pattern will inevitably emerge. Conversely, that pattern is the meaning.

"In other words, we can distinguish between a meaningful sequence of letters and a meaningless one, even without understanding the meaning at all," I said.

The Chancellor listened in silence, but the young official looked like he was about to snap. I'm already breaking this down as much as I can. They wouldn't understand if I started talking about calculating the entropy of the algorithm in the brain that generates the text. I don't even understand it myself.

"The behavior of the 'meaning' within a text exists independently of the 'clothes' the characters are wearing. For instance, Chancellor, couldn't you tell just by looking at their backs whether your subordinates are doing meaningful work or just pretending to be busy?"

"...I see."

Despite my attempt at wit, the Chancellor's expression turned grim. And for some reason, the young official looked uncomfortable.

When visualized, humans are fairly excellent pattern recognition machines. However, when abstracted one level up, as with text, the difficulty skyrockets. That is where statistics comes in. Statistics is a method for calculating the deviation from randomness, in other words, the degree of patterning.

Using the earlier example, a randomly scattered ink stain would form a normal distribution around the pen tip. A letter, on the other hand, would not.

Well, for someone who can see the world of numbers, that rule doesn't apply. Just then, Mia looked up from beside me.

"Senpai, I am finished."