Issue 11 – February 2015

Lights of Encryption by Andrew Ostrovsky

Table of Contents

Jump Cut by Lauren C. Teffeau
Dropped Stitches by Levi Sable
It’s Machine Code by Curtis C. Chen
Those Who Gave Their Island to Survive by Barry King
The Confession of Whistling Dixie by Fiona Moore
The Joy of Sects by Joseph Tomaras

Editors’ Note:

Welcome, dear readers, to another issue of The Journal of Unlikely Cryptography.

Cryptography has established itself more firmly in the public consciousness of late with the award nominations and critical praise being heaped on The Imitation Game, in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, who famously broke the code of the Nazi’s Enigma Machine. (More fleetingly in the public eye, in the year since our last cryptography issue, we have seen multiple extremely large security compromises affecting the personal and financial information of in excess of a hundred million people, and a recent court decision in the UK determining that British intelligence committed human rights violations simply by using the information gathered by the NSA. But don’t let that worry you.) The unlikeliness of Mr. Cumberbatch’s cheekbones aside, we at Unlikely Story take a slightly more fantastical view of the subject.

In these digital pages, you’ll find stories exploring the limits and possibilities of technology and the various ways it defines, enhances, and intersects with humanity. An unorthodox application of a 3D printer; the creation of private worlds; hacking the human brain with extreme video sequences; parents customizing ideal children through knitted code; a self-aware AI taking up the pirating life; and a cult seeking transcendence through transformation -- all of these stories explore coding, hacking, cracking, and our relationship with technology in most unlikely ways.

The stories in these pages also explore human questions as well. How far would you go to win? Would you risk everything for your beliefs? What would you do for your job? We invite you to immerse yourself in these tales, dear readers, and explore these questions along with us.

Cover art by Andrew Ostrovsky