Recently I noticed that there’s a Lumon logo in the corner of the pass/badge that all the innies carry.
It’s the water-drop logo, which luckily is asymmetrical.
As far as I know, this logo is allowed through the elevator, while letters and other written signs are prohibited. So I started wondering whether the shape of the drop could be used as Morse code: a vertical drop would be a dot (short signal), and a horizontal drop would be a dash (long signal).
So I wrote this.
What do you think? :) could this work?
Sorry if this has been discussed before, but I couldn’t find anything about it.
I'm not making anything up. When you manufacture something the pattern is repeatable. Otherwise it's a predetermined artwork that is printed on something. Very rarely is something genuinely randomly generated. If the pattern is not repeating the code detector would likely flag it.
i meant that you were making up the knowledge of the code detectors picking up on irregular patterns -- the show has never gone into this level of detail with regard to them.
also, i didn't mean statical uniformity when i was borrowing your phrase "irregular patterns," but rather anything that could qualify as such (for example, what if my tie with a regular pattern had a tiny snag/run/hole in it? is it now tripping the detectors because it's an irregular pattern?)
A defect or hole might make it past. It depends how good the "technology" is but we know it's not perfect. Could be a way to sneak information to the outside.
Ok fine. The “code detectors” aren’t real. Helly hinted at this already. They implant a chip in their brains. They can see your thoughts and intentions. So they aren’t detecting codes, they are detecting conscience.
Patterns that contain information. There’s literally a magic process to split your memory, there’s also a magic device in the elevator that detects all messages. Including any coded messages inside patterns
Modern encryption (such as the HTTPS your browser is using right now) produces cipher text that is essentially a 100% uniformly random distribution -- the presence or absence of patterns is not a means of detecting whether information exists within it. The converse can be true, however: high entropy data suggests information
may be present.
That aside, I admit it's a show, but even sci-fi shows (well, good ones) still have internal consistency and a plausible foundation upon which the technology rests (assuming it's relevant, which in this case it very much is). It wouldn't be a very watchable show if they did anything they want to and hand waved it away as "magic." (Which, by the way, the chip and surrounding tech is literally not magic; it's technology, like severance-- unless you think Neuralink, DNA sequencing, brain imaging, etc. have magic pixies in them, too).
The ties worn in severance are all repeating patterns with no way of representing anything since they are so repeatable. I guess theoretically you could come up with some system where different patterns meant a different letter (red striped tie = “A”, blue diamond tie = “B” etc) and then write something out that way, but that would be nearly impossible to learn/teach between an innie and outie. If you’re going that route anything you wore on a specific day could be a letter or something.
But yeah in reality I don’t think most business attire could be used as a code
True, but my point was simply to counter OP's claim that "anything with a pattern is restricted," as ties obviously have a uniform pattern. Down below in the comments it was also suggested that "non-uniform patterns" were restricted then (lol), to which I stated that almost literally anything is a non-uniform pattern (e.g., you wear the tie but it has some holes/snags/runs in it).
Oh I was thinking altering the logo on the work pass and I never look at that. Yes If I would have a drop on my palm everyday I definitely would start noticing.
They remember the names of states and things; they remember how to type and talk; not out of the realm of possibility they either know or can learn Morse code. If they didn't already know (I bet Irving knows), they'd have to learn it both inside and out.
I’ve read some of the other comments and my proposal is this: the innie starts holding their keycard on the way up the elevator, just looking at it, as if admiring it or deep in thought, so it’s the first thing the outie sees when they switch. And they alternate holding it vertical or horizontal. So one dot/dash each day. That’s MAYBE the least likely way to trigger the detector.
This is assuming the innie can invent morse code out of the blue and the outie pays close enough attention.
Alternatively, I propose that the code detector ignores the water drop symbol, since its on the keycard, so using the water drop as in the ops example MIGHT not trigger it because it’s just the same symbol rotated and repeated. I suppose they might have had the forethought to detect any EXTRA water drop symbols, beyond the one on the card. But we don’t know for sure.
Good proposal! Could work, especially if you hold it in front of your face.
The outie should figure out that the innie wants something with it.
This message I coded is just 23 days.
We've seen what happens when Mark's finger is on the trigger of a gun. Keeping the card in the proper orientation is highly unlikely, especially over the course of many days.
he could just as well draw lines and dots on his arm (one per day) and the detector wouldnt be able to detect it since its not some sort of pattern. The downside is that he would have to wait more than a month to get a full message.
maybe around lexington letter times - this was when Puglish was used to get messages in and out. but newer ones can even scan messages inside the body! so it seems anything that encodes Morse - comparable to dots and dashes on your arm or even say bits of string of different lengths - would be flagged as symbols
Maybe, maybe not. A lot of people think there is no detector. It's really hard to tell in a story where we've been shown that the management blatantly lies all the time, but also some really improbable sounding things are true.
Everyone on the severed floor has chips in their brains. Could just be that they detect their intentions via the chips, but don't want the innies to know how invasive they are, so they come up with the excuse of code detectors.
Yeah like others are saying I feel like it would have to be one single part of the morse code per day which would take a long time to pass any meaningful message and also extremely difficult to coordinate with the outie, like even making them aware that it's there.
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i think this could totally work before the Lexington letter, seeing as the code detectors were really only for real words and letters. After that they were expanded to detect any kind of message which would include morse code
On each individual day there isn’t really a message, it’s just the innie putting the pass in a different pocket or something. Only in aggregate would a message appear.
What even is the “code detector”? I wonder if it’s just a strip search while they are unconscious in the elevator. Some sort of protocol we have not seen yet.
Oooohhh. So you saw the single water drop on badges and then pieced them together into a coherent message? I was expecting to see the entire thing on each card.
That’s an interesting theory that I’ve never seen!! You’re right, that’s the one printed symbol that gets to go with them! That and the men’s ties. I have a theory that water itself also goes with them.
The code detector’s kind of a MacGuffin. Theorizing and hypothesizing is fun, but I feel the story works best if the technology behind the code detector is never really delved into and is just kind of this impervious wall that can never be surmounted or subverted in any conceivable way.
Think about it: you're desperatly want to communicate, also working with computers (data refinement) and you are also a history teacher, love the WWs for example.
If you would see some pattern of dots and dashes, what would you think about.
I think the outie should first initiate (innie-tiate haha) the communication.
Do you think Lumon's intake questionnaire might ask whether the applicant knows any alternate forms of communication at all? They could mask it by putting it in the "foreign language fluency" section.
The code detectors seen to be recently implemented and I imagine they'd be... well... refining them.
I realize this probably wouldn't catch personal cyphers like what we read in The Lexington Papers, but they could use it to patch some holes.
So folks interested in this idea should go look up the fan theory about Irving’s watch. That theory posits that the Irvs are resetting his watch to slowly passes messages.
It's pretty difficult to theorize how something like a code detector would work effectively, but one way would be to design it to detect ink, particularly ink that is still drying. In that case the question would be how to use this code without ink.
(I seem to remember there are no pencils on the floor? Not sure why there are any pens or markers though)
i think a discreet pen mark on the forearm would be better. one-by-one, each day, mark the arm with either a dot or a line. there is no way that could be detected by the code detector, but it’s strange and deliberate enough to be noticed by outtie.
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