actual word count :1,721
place I should be at :1,667
reason for negligence :
word count for today :1,721


The halls at Beaumanor are quiet places; the rooms even more so. It's an odd place, filled with young women intently listening to little beeps and bips. Long ones and short ones. Long beeps and short bips that make up a pattern. The pattern becomes a language, a simple language, elegant in its simplicity. The patterns can be grouped into sets, each set becoming a letter. Sadly, once you know that, that the long beeps and short bips in their little patterns become a group of letters - twenty-six in all, with nine numbers following close on their heels - it becomes rather less elegant, because the patterns suddenly, abruptly, lose their pattern and are forced into meaning. Meaning because letters form words, and words tell you things. Too many things, sometimes, and the things can be terribly confusing, because their meaning will only be transparent to a very few, who the original receivers - the neat young uniformed women listening to the plainsong of beeps and bips and noting them down oh so diligently - will never speak to, let alone be privy to what the letters and words translate to. They're gibberish, the words they take down. Messages from across the world, each girl taking down ones from different areas of Europe and Africa and America, across great stretches of ocean and great swathes of land, the little patterns of beeps and bips sent while bombs explode and shots ring out. The war rages on.

This one's colloquially known as World War 2 for the next few centuries. The one known as World War One took place a generation or so before - twenty years before. It was the first one to range so far, but it won't be the last. For now they're just trying to get through this one, listening to the pattern of beeps and bips and translating them into the letters that makes up strings of gibberish. it truly is gibberish, for the most part, because so much is sent in code. Not just code, a coded version of other languages. Rarely is the message plain and simple, words that might be easily taken down and understood by the girls themselves. Once in the war the words will come through clear and strong, the senders uncaring of code or secrecy, only concerned with screaming for help, because their city is burning, one side having fire bombed it, and all that fills the airwaves from that city is the word 'fire'. Easy to translate with barely a smidgen of understanding of the other language. But that is a good few years away yet. The girls work on, taking down the nonsense that will be broken down by machines and minds into words, much of it coded again in a mix-up of language to disguise its meaning even then.

One of the girls puts down her pen and takes off her headset, straightening in her chair and then pushing away, picking up the paper in front of her and getting up from her seat. She goes over to the man overseeing their work, and coughs quietly to get his attention. No-one ever raises their voice in this place. The beeps and bips are all-important, and more than the quiet hush might obscure that vital one that makes all the difference in a letter and how the message gets taken down. No-one wants to be the one that might scupper a vital transmission getting through. "Excuse me, sir?"

He turns, a little distracted. "Yes, Penny? What is it?"

Penny - real name Margaret, but there were already three other girls of the same name when she got here, all with dibs on the most common variations of the name - hands him the message she's just intercepted and noted down from Berlin. "It's the latest transmission from Berlin, sir. Reply to those Eastern Front messages, same operator as usual. The odd one. You said to be informed when he was sending."

Bridges nods. "Thankyou, Penny. Much appreciated."

She nods, and goes back to her station, putting on her headset and taking down the next transmission to come through.

There have been some very odd transmissions coming through on the airwaves with regards to the Eastern Front. Hitler concentrated on the Eastern Front from very early on - Britain was incidental, and he never had plans to fight this damp little island located off its north western shores. Britain had declared war on Germany, on behalf of the other countries in Europe. But amongst the expected chatter about troups and movements, there are ... other messages. It started with questions and queries, and became an exchange of information as more was gathered at the Berlin end of the conversation. Berlin had been gathering information from other corners, the traffic about this topic always distinct by virtue of the marker that singles out conversation on the subject. Their marker enabling the girls listening at Beaumanor to file it straight away for Intelligence, who are very interested.

The messages and words are translating into strange messages, questions and queries about objects. They've been getting more frequent, the same code words used, and as the Germans' lack of preparation for the Russian winter becomes more evident, more urgent. And as the messages are exchanged, they get more pointed, the information becoming more detailed.

The messages are put into the mailbag for the courier to Bletchley Park for decoding, same as all the other transmissions they receive. Except for these ones, along with a select few other sets, a phonecall tends to precede them. It didn't used to. At first, they were just odd, interesting content and speculation, mostly interesting for their sheer oddity. The analysts and spies approached them like a particularly interesting puzzle, a pleasant diversion, wondering at this frankly barmy conversation that seemed like idle banter, an ongoing conversation between a few signal operators. As with all chatter, they were filed and marked. then their frequency and urgency increased, and someone at the Home Office and the Secret Intelligence Service really sat up and took notice, demanding to see everything transmitted on the subject, and to be informed when a new message came through.

All that Beaumanor knows is that the distinctive messages have to be passed on quickly and that Bletchley wants to be notified whenever a new one comes through. When the courier arrives at Bletchley with its sack of mail, it's sorted out quickly and distributed to the relevant huts and departments.

In Hut 8, the arrival of the latest missive of distinct oddness is preceded by Kingcome perking up and asking Logie if there was anything from the nutter. They called him that because of the bizzareness of the queries. Mad, speculative ideas more fit for a storytelling session around the fire one evening rather than the seriousness of the war going on.

Logie puts the other traffic down on the table, then extracts a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket with a smirk. "Got it right here. Which of you buggers wants first crack at it?"

It's Puck who gets there first, Upjohn and Pinker having managed to trip over each other in their haste to get to the puzzle, Jericho still being half asleep over a game of chess and not having moved, and Turing elbowed out of the way, not nearly fast enough out of the starter's blocks to be in with a chance. Puck snatches it out of Logie's hand triumphantly.

Logie shakes his stinging hand, jerked roughly as Puck pulled the paper out of it from an odd angle, reaching for his pipe and tobacco. "Not so rough," he complains. "You're like a pack of animals on this one, you are."

"It's a matter of pride." Puck replies. "And this one is a puzzle, which you are very well aware that we thrive on."

"What do you reckon this one's going to be about?" Baxter asks as he puts the tea on.

"Who knows." Puck shrugs, putting the paper on the table as they gather round, drawn by the lure of the puzzle. Not so urgent as U-boat co-ordinates, with the pleasing air of a crossword puzzle at the end, words and images to be thrown in the air to be juggled and teased for alternate meanings. The kind of thing they used to do for pleasure on the train or at the breakfast table before being recruited for Bletchley. They still do crossword puzzles, but they're not the same, nowhere near a contender against the maddening code that comes in over the wires, gets passed down to them and then onto MI5, MI6 and the military. "Perhaps it will talk about Rhine maidens."

"Hardly." Turing shrugs. "The last set've been distinctly about some sort of messenger.
Don't think Rhine maidens have anything to do with that."

"They had gold in an inaccessible place." Puck replies. "They certainly want something; why else all this traffic and questions? There may be Rhine Maidens at the end of this after all."

"You wish, Puck, you wish." Turing says.

They set to it, chucking ideas back and forth as they find connections, finally ending up with a message in German that for all and intents and purposes really could have come from a story book.

Jericho twiddles his pencil, then stuffs it behind his ear as Turing smoothes his bit of paper out that's covered in notes. Possible double meanings and question marks, the result of some of the biggest brains in the country working at full tilt, eked out in pencil markings on paper. "I think that's it, gents. Poking at it's not going to do anything. We don't even bloody know what it's about."

"And we're never going to know, and that's the way it should be." Logie replies, picking up the final translation. "Some things are for the lounge lizards alone."

"Yes, but it's clearly about a mission of some sort." Baxter complains. "I just harbour intense curiosity about what the mission's going to end up getting. It's clearly something important."

"Curiosity killed the cat, after all." Logie says, taking another puff on his pipe. "Now I've got to get this to the boys in Whitehall. Entertain yourselves." On that, he exits, paper tucked firmly in his inside pocket.