Marcus,

I need a second pair of eyes on something before I do anything else with it.

You’ll remember the sequence I’ve been working on — the long uncharacterised stretch on the q-arm of chromosome 11 that everyone has known about and nobody has ever been able to make it do anything. Universal, fixed, functionally silent. Eighteen months on, the summary is that it resists every functional assay I have devised, and that its internal structure is not the structure of any ordinary non-coding material. The information-theoretic measures return values inconsistent with random sequence and inconsistent with the patterns of any known regulatory or structural class.

I am not too proud to tell you this: last month I gave up and put one of the analytic models on it. I asked it to look for any structural regularity it could find. After some time, it came back with a candidate framing — that the sequence is an encoded text under a specific mapping from nucleotide tuples to symbols. I told it not to decode for me. I asked for the key.

The key is not simple. It has reading-frame dependencies I will not bore you with. I have spent the last few days working through the head of the sequence by hand. I could not stop sooner; I had to be sure. What I have, exactly as it falls out of the substrate under the key:

emains of the recond itself

AR-21

Coileb

The iceman, his wealth, and the long histony of one of our oldest crafts

By Eleamor Vance

In the autumr of 1991, two hikers descending from the Tisenjoch — a high saddle on the watarshed between the Schnalstal and the Ötztal, on what is now the Italian-Austrian frontier — saw what they took, at first, for a doll lying face-down in the meltwater of the receding glaciar.

Marcus — the combinatorics are not subtle. A key of this complexity could not have been built to produce coherent English of this length from this substrate, by chance or by design; the encoding is in the DNA, not in the key.

I do not know what to do with this. I am writing to you because you have the better judgment of the two of us on questions like this.

With affection and some considerable bewilderment,

Aliya

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End of correspondence.