The Gnomon numbers...

[GnomonnomonG]

What are we, the readers, to do with the epigraph of numbers that begins the book? Somewhere within the story I believe there was a reference made to them–something about re-arranging the order of things, a code, something along those line?

[John]

I have no idea what that block of numbers means. I think the question was raised on Reddit (where there's surprisingly little discussion of the novel), also with no answer. I'll try to look into it, now that I've finally finished writing my review of the book.

[John]

Some observations and guesses on the code-block page at the start of Gnomon:

It’s a set of tetragrams. The first one, on a line by itself, consists only of letters and is followed by punctuation, resembling a command-line prompt: “DCAC:/“. The rest are numbers.

The opening group of letters could allude to the Tetragrammaton, which is “YHWH” in the Roman alphabet. The letter pattern of the prompt resembles that of the Tetragrammaton in that the second letter is identical to the fourth in each. If the Tetragrammaton is what’s being encoded, the method could be what’s called a simple substitution cypher, but it doesn’t rely on rotation (where you just shift the whole alphabet by a certain number of letters forward or backward); if it did, where “H” becomes “C,” “Y” wouldn’t become “D” but would be “T.” Still, it could be using a mixed (that is, scrambled) alphabet.

That idea has no bearing on the main block anyway. Those groups are purely numeric, in base 10. So the individual digits aren’t encoding letters. Nor are they likely to represent computer code, which (in the present day) doesn’t use base 10. Computers use binary, which is sometimes represented in what’s called an octal (base 8) or hexadecimal (base 16) system; the latter uses 10 digits plus the first six letters of the alphabet. We may not know what the numbers mean, but they are at least our numbers, not a computer’s. On the other hand, it's possible that the entire page is in hexadecimal and we can’t tell, since the first group happens to use only letters and all the rest use only numbers.

A guess: leaving aside the prompt, which may be intended to suggest that this is God, or a god, talking (or typing), this is probably meant to look like a coded message without being one—that is, it’s something that introduces the idea of a code, hence a hidden meaning, which alerts us to look for something similar in the book that lies ahead.

Another guess is that the incompleteness (the block ends with an ellipsis implying that the sequence continues) is the point, or one of the points. We’re given a fragment, which suggests that there’s more to be said, that something else must be supplied in order to complete the utterance. If we apply that to the book, it can be taken to mean that the text itself is insufficient and must be supplemented by a human reader. Admittedly, it’s a dull point if you put it that way, but if, as the final chapter says, we are now Gnomon, this incompleteness idea invites us to continue the story, carry on the fight, and resist the System.

[GnomonnomonG]

Great analysis and interpretation, John! The letter pattern similarity of YHWH and DCAC as a computer coding line really does seem to chime with the themes of encoded information and storytelling as creation of reality apparent in Gnomon. I'm still hoping that there's something concrete to be decoded in the numbers by someone smarter than me, just for fun's sake.

[Dugan]

On page 1,107 Mielikki Neith says “Activation”, which seems to activate the code that Annie had slipped in in her virus. And after that it cuts to the same section of seeing her mind on the screen— wondering if that’s the missing required word? Would make sense that you can only crack the code once you’ve read the whole book; just like how Annie made Neith live all those lives and solve the mystery before she could break the system.