LEVEL ONE

To: Agent W-4, Location 9

Dispatch 745900044, Source 12AB

Certainty Level One, Confidence Level (9zB-Warren)

Encrypted Level Gamma-1

WARNING: The reading of this Dispatch is prohibited for anyone but the intended recipient. There are no exceptions. If you possess the encryption key and are not the intended recipient, be apprised that the means of decoding the contents do not constitute license. Penalties for the possession of the following include life imprisonment, or immediate execution. If you are delivered this message by accident, either delete it or, if a hard copy, seal it within an opaque receptacle and store in a secure location. Again, use decryption only if addressee, or risk attached penalties.

BY AUTHORITY OF: authority xxxxxxxxx (redacted in cover message)

LEVEL TWO

From: General redacted, Chief of Confederate Intelligence

To: Operative N (Purple Orchid), xxxxxxxxxx

Subject: Warning

The following correspondence has also been decrypted, via a level two secrecy algorithm. It is designed to read like a personal letter and may be carried in hard copy, as long as it remains in the possession of its current recipient. It is, as per custom, itself encrypted using the Level Two algorithm. Please address at the key provided in secure location X.

(Ital. optional)

Dear Shirley:

I dearly hope this letter finds you in good health. I have, after a delightful journey of several days, arrived at the villa offered by Cousin Bran, and am delighted by the climate, the surroundings, and the kindness of neighbors. Bran has left a note detailing how to find everything, and so I’m well. I watched our neighbor, the Viscount, riding his stallion in the fields, and believed him to be most pleasing to the eye and an excellent candidate for the husband I have traveled so long to find. I penned him a letter and am hoping that he accepts my invitation, but he has not had time to reply. Hope springs eternal. I miss you and I trust that the dogs are not being a problem. Please do think of joining me here at some point in July or August. The sun is spectacular.

Sincerely, and with most gracious love,

Ramona

(end message)

LEVEL THREE

From: Intelligence Directorate N

Office Of the Phoenix, Desk of Interstellar Defense

Codex 37987909733347907072739 (encrypted, not actual Codex)

Tattoo Z, Two Sparrows Nesting

War Materials Sensitivity: Porcelain

Sensitivity Advisory: Again, if you are not the intended recipient, do not decrypt or risk the penalties.

Current Danger to Recipient: Green

Subject: Expected Assault on Outer-System Colonies

Text: To Whom It Concerns

Evidence suggests that the hostiles are shipping equipment and personnel, in vast quantities to the staging areas attached. Data transfer is at an intensity not seen since the last system war, with only about one percent of the current traffic successfully captured and decrypted. The current theory is that only one percent of the data is actionable, the rest being chaff. Infiltrate and advise. XR2.

LEVEL FOUR

Date Redacted

From: Lieutenant Jasper Boothby

Dept of: Procedures and Arrangements

Encryption Level: Velcro

879869698696675435434222671111-Rowboat Sigmund Alpha Twelve

Personal to Recipient: You have succeeded in finding the fourth message embedded within the message, encrypted via the method Russian Nesting Doll. Each decrypted message will reveal another message that will need to be decrypted by another message. There are unfortunately fourteen subsequent levels of encoded messages, each one to be decoded using the standard protocols. You must find the key hidden in each dispatch in order to find the next message hidden inside it; and, as per standard procedure, the use of an incorrect key at any point will result in the production of a false message, consisting of anything from personal correspondence to warning of imminent attack. When you are done decrypting all fourteen nested messages you will apply key Lincoln-5 to the entire text, compiled in proper sequence, in order to obtain the final urgent text.

This is my cue to be frank with you:

I really do despise you, Smedley.

I always have, since University.

I hated that insufferable look of satisfaction you gave off. I hated the sense you always had that your connections would help you worm your way past the queue and into the hallowed chambers where the decisions were made. I hated your moustache and the perversity to wear it somewhere under your nose. I hated that you had more than one. I hated your know-it-all attitude toward the war, your stories about how your father the Chancellor had a secret plan to win it while everybody else in government was still putting on their shoes. I hated how you swept in and snatched up that lovely girl who I was just starting to get on with, and I hated that you insisted on calling her “Mrs. Smedley” from the very first moment you met her. I hate that while you sit in your office overlooking the city and pontificating about armaments and Proust, the rest of us have to sit at our little desks in that waterlogged room beneath the leaky piping and speak in that code you have forced us to use, the one with all the fricatives that make us spit.

I do, however, love that this deep in the levels of coding, nobody can accuse me of venting because you are not Smedley but some hapless and nameless field operative in a basement room much like the one I just described.

Here is the thing, Operative Who is Not Smedley:

Nothing about the current campaign is a joke. The aliens possess technology well beyond our imagining and are dedicated to our absolute annihilation. It is now believed that they hold within their armada a weapon capable of destroying us all and that they intend to use it, in an interval as short as the gap between this sentence and the next. That you are now alive to read the next sentence is a small miracle that might well be attributed to your above-average reading speed. That you can now read the following sentence means that you’re likely skimming. This means that you may be missing vital details that a more careful perusal, conducted with somebody with the life expectancy that permits a careful and dedicated study, would catch. Your presence in this current sentence is enough to make us wonder whether you’re really paying attention at all. You are now definitely missing some things. An enemy would take advantage of this. I confess that I’m sleeping with your wife.

LEVEL FIVE

Operation N8092101807e07-wombat

Code: FIFARS (nud)

(Thirteen lines of random symbols redacted)

(Seventeen hours of line noises redacted)

(Decryption key Zed-298098098 applied)

. . . Be advised, Smedley has drowned inside a fifty-gallon barrel of honey. He was found upside down in the cannister, bound and naked, with nothing on his person but a slip of paper bearing the legend, “I believe that I have miscalculated.” No further messages from Smedley are to be considered actionable. Full explanation will be found in the imbedded message within this imbedded message. It should take you no more than seventy hours to decode. Proceed with haste.

LEVEL SIX

8098-e435348-foxtrot-wooha.

(Fifty lines of confirmation code Redacted)

(Photo of an elephant giving birth, for some reason)

(The following is the most recent imbedded message. It is the only coherent segment of a text that is multiple times the length of the Oxford English Dictionary; the rest is random syllabification and about one hundred thousand repetitions of the word, “Hammersmith.” It is believed that each repetition is another imbedded message representing over one million words of text. Each of those, it is now believed, imbeds another one million messages. It is significantly more than any one human being can decrypt even with cybernetic means, in less than a lifetime. This does, however, seem to be the most sensible summary of what’s going on. Please forward to all relevant contacts.)

There is no Smedley. There is no Boothby. There is no espionage bureaucracy torturing its agents with messages within messages within messages, the coding equivalent of a zoologist neck deep in a proctological examination of a hippo in search of the cell phone some tourist dropped into its mouth. The intrepid veterinarian might recover some photos of the tourist in a Hawaiian shirt, waving at the camera while the floor show at the wilderness lodge plays out behind him, but he will still be painted in dung from the neck up, an extreme price to pay for intelligence of zero significance.

This is what you need to know. There is no Smedley. There is no Boothby.

There is nobody but yourself.

You have been wading through something that has touched truth, but is no longer truth.

What has been imbedded in this infinite series of nonsense messages is the entire human race, stored for safekeeping after a catastrophe of universal import. Get to the end of any chain, decrypt the long chain of code you will find there, feed that into the machine you will construct following the instructions at the end of another chain, add the chemical ingredients to be found in yet another, and one of humanity’s many stored billions will slide out the end of the chute, complete in body and personality, to assist you in the restoration of another in your stored supply of mewling humanity.

Of course, mewling humanity being what we know it to be, chances are nearly infinite to nearly zero that the first person you have rescued at random will be only good at harassing you over the estimated arrival time of lunch.

We are sorry about this. We neglected to put any labels on these files. The approximately two hundred world-class savants who were responsible for this project, unfortunately, left the grunt work to clerks, who left them all unlabeled. By the time anyone in authority realized what had been done, all of humanity was a randomized filing cabinet. You will need to do an awful lot of decrypting in multiple layers to find someone equipped to assist, and by the time you have replicated the population in numbers of any sort the mob will be dominated by those who think the whole project is stupid and that the files should be randomized so that nobody still embodied only in code will ever emerge and take all their stuff. Nevertheless, you must persist, because it is only those two hundred who know the threat that faces us all, the one that will yet re-emerge and destroy us if

The next five hundred thousand, two hundred thirty words have been corrupted.

Decryption Code attached.

LEVEL SEVEN

In its entirety:

How are you? We are fine.