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