Bificurus Access Instructions

Tim posted the following image together with to link to the Bifurcus Site on the Project Bifurcus Black Box Discord channel

BAI.jpeg

Solution

Key: 8x8 letter box

On top is he main approach: We need a 8x8 letter box.
We figured out that this relates to the four letter codes Starling received earlier.

4lettercodes.png

But we still struggled in how to us it correctly.

So we got several hints:

Hint 1 by Tim

Tim posted this on Discord:

Not sure if this relevant, but there was an imprint on the paper that had the device.

Imprint.jpg

Looks like:
| TLSO
V HPDN
I'll look through and see if any other documents have impressions/imprints that might be helpful.

hinting also on the imprints on four letter codes needed for Bifurcus Site
Again the arrow we already had on the main puzzle instrcutions, but now confirming it is realted to the four letter codes

Hint 2 by Spire

During a February 15 Spire chat we got the following three hints:

1. Most Recent: plewis - Have you tried making a 8x8 grid of letters and reading down.
2. Second Result: ebarker - The first message should be something like "THE SYMBOL PROVIDES…"
3. Final Result: <unknown source> - Alex has the black box, Oakley will have the key, and Paula has the records?

The first one explains that the down arrow just means reading down
The second hint gives us the begining of Message 1 helping us to understand the decoding at all
The third hint is unclear, yet (ToDo_ Update if clarified)

Message 1

Knowing the beginning of the decoded message we were able to understand the coding technique:
Just take the "smallest" distance between the two letters, counting forward OR backward

E-Z: 5 and H-A 7 —> EH-AZ =57

resulting in those 16 numbers

57, 44, 28, 17, 21, 47, 52, 50, 64, 06, 35, 37, 8, 13, 40, 24

Taking the four letter codes from above we could fill a 8x8 letter box from left to right:

TLSORASO
HPDNELRU
ERISRSER
SORESESP
YVEXAPEL
MICPNATA
BDTLDTSC
OEIOFHYE

reading down reveals:

THE SYMBOL PROVIDES DIRECTIONS EXPLORERS AND FALSE PATHS RESETS YOUR PLACE

Message 2

We figured out that the words refer to the Nightvale podcasts and every word could assigned to an episode:

episodes.png

putting them again in a 8x8 box

THASRATY
HAVMANIO
ETEETTNU
PYLAHHAR
AOHNEETE
TUOIRDIA
HTLNTEOC
TRDGHSNH

reveals:

THE PATH THAT YOU TRAVEL HOLDS MEANING RATHER THAN THE DESTINATION YOU REACH

Message 3

We assumed that each letter has to replaced by a number between 1 and 9 and than doing the maths to get a 32 digit result.
The letters could be ordered and assigned this way

NIGHTVA E
1234567 9

(we found this after we "bruteforced" the solution by trying combination writing a clever computer program)

This results in this equation:

23*71*211*6791240024027*20654711416663 = 48332232013912610515101449094263

and to the following 4 letter codes and 8x8 letter box

48 33 22 32 01 39 12 61 05 15 10 14 49 09 42 63

RSPMLOEN
ESTALMVE
AFOLOEEX
DRBPWGAT
AOOHEALS
CMTADTTT
RTTFBOHE
OOOOYREP

and the third message read downwards:

READ ACROSS FROM TOP TO BOTTOM ALPHA FOLLOWED BY OMEGA TO REVEAL THE NEXT STEP

Message 4

unsolved
Symbol is a "quarter rest". We assumed it just tells us to use the rest (1/4 of all codes) to assemble the last message.
We figured out the layout:

WSILNHOE
HTSYDEWY
AOAAOGSO
TBCLMLTU
SETPEOHH
EOUHGWEO
ENAAASOL
MELATHND

and the message

WHAT SEEMS TO BE ONE IS ACTUALLY ALPHA AND OMEGA THE GLOW SHOWS THE ONE YOU HOLD

Those messages were meant to help us with the Bifurcus Site - even thought their meaning we understood much later

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