In Memoriam: Solution
By Kawika Pierson
Answer:
ISLAND OF OPPORTUNITY
Each of the numbered entries is a quote from a famous person encoded with a simple cipher. The first step in solving the puzzle is to identify each cipher and decode each quote. The correct ciphers, quotes, and people for the entries are:
| Entry | Cipher | Quote | Person |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Atbash | Maoists want a directly elected president, but this will give birth to an autocrat. | Sushil Koirala |
| 2 | Grafton novels | When a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey his children have a way of crying from hunger pains. | Harper Lee |
| 3 | Navajo | I never, never in my life took a course in economics. | Lloyd Shapley |
| 4 | Matoran (Bionicle) alphabet | Most of my life I feel I have been Unicycling at the Edge of the Abyss. | Jon Polito |
| 5 | Alien Language 1 from Futurama | I do take my work seriously and the way to do that is not to take yourself too seriously. | Alan Rickman |
| 6 | Moon type | You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, Look at that, you son of a bitch. | Edgar Mitchell |
| 7 | HTML entities | Now this first SLIIIDE... shows a very, very interesting thing: our main building. | George Gaynes |
| 8 | Wingdings | Just say no! | Nancy Reagan |
| 9 | Polybius square | I been getting good crowds. It only took 50 years. | Mose Allison |
| 10 | Caesar shift by 2 | We were not able to realize that with the machete you can create a genocide. | Boutros Boutros-Ghali |
| 11 | Hexadecimal-encoded Unicode codepoints | Many of the problems which we face today are the eventual result of short-run measures taken as long as two or three decades ago. | Jay Wright Forrester |
| 12 | Octal-encoded Unicode codepoints | Me dio hasta vergüenza decir que esta obra era mía. | Sixto Durán Ballén |
| 13 | Gold-Bug cipher | I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house. | Zsa Zsa Gabor |
| 14 | Daedric alphabet | I got two words for you; You Suck! | Chyna |
| 15 | Dancing Men code | Life is just a party and parties weren’t meant to last. | Prince |
| 16 | Morse code | If science is to advance, some sacrifices must be made. | Bernard Fox |
| 17 | Base64 | As I said earlier, there are no writers who could create a literary vision of the new reality. | Andrzej Wajda |
| 18 | Telephone Number to Letter | Self-awareness and self-esteem. Those aren’t female issues, those are human issues. | Curtis Hanson |
| 19 | Music Sheet Cipher | I swear I won’t tease you. | George Michael |
All of these people share a common fate—they all died in
2016. The flavor text is also encoded with a simple cipher: it uses
the digits 01-26 to encode letters. Decoding the message yields TODAY
IS A GOOD DAY TO DIE, which suggests that the days on which
these people died will be important.
Taking the day of the month on which each person died as indexes into the alphabet gives:
| Person | Death Day | Letter |
|---|---|---|
| Sushil Koirala | 9 | I |
| Harper Lee | 19 | S |
| Lloyd Shapley | 12 | L |
| Jon Polito | 1 | A |
| Alan Rickman | 14 | N |
| Edgar Mitchell | 4 | D |
| George Gaynes | 15 | O |
| Nancy Reagan | 6 | F |
| Mose Allison | 15 | O |
| Boutros Boutros-Ghali | 16 | P |
| Jay Wright Forrester | 16 | P |
| Sixto Durán Ballén | 15 | O |
| Zsa Zsa Gabor | 18 | R |
| Chyna | 20 | T |
| Prince | 21 | U |
| Bernard Fox | 14 | N |
| Andrzej Wajda | 9 | I |
| Curtis Hanson | 20 | T |
| George Michael | 25 | Y |
Reading these in order gives the answer, ISLAND OF
OPPORTUNITY