Technology Lab / Information Technology

Solve 20-year-old mystery in William Gibson’s “Agrippa,” win prizes

Contest calls on cryptographers to unravel the self-destructing Gibson e-poem.

Disk information for the file that displays William Gibson's Agrippa exactly once and then renders the text unreadable

Academic researchers are calling on cryptographers to crack the encryption behind a two-decade-old floppy disk that displays a poem penned by cyberpunk author William Gibson exactly once and then permanently scrambles the words so they can never be read again.

The 3.5-inch diskette was unveiled at a 1992 meeting held by the Americas Society. It caused a then-unknown poem called "Agrippa (a book of the dead)" to be displayed on a Mac PowerBook exactly once. A script contained on the disk, which was included with an obscure "noir art book" by Dennis Ashbaugh and Kevin Begos, Jr., then caused the words of the poem to self destruct, and no amount of tinkering has been able to restore them. (New York University film students captured the words as they scrolled up the screen during the event and later transcribed and posted them to the Internet, where they still live today.)

Almost exactly 20 years later, Quinn DuPont, a University of Toronto PhD student studying cryptography, has compiled disk image, a System 7 emulator, and much of the underlying source code for the app. He is sharing it online in the hopes that cryptographers can figure out exactly how it all works. The first person to document the scheme will receive a copy of every William Gibson book ever published (except Agrippa). Runners up will be credited with also solving the puzzle.

"This is a piece that's long been of interest to scholars and artists," Matthew Kirschenbaum, a University of Maryland English professor, told Ars Technica. "Given the way... so few copies [of the noir book] were printed, it became a myth or meme—and given the way, too, that the plans for the encryption of the digital poem were so graphically circumvented." The transitory nature of the 300-line work underscores its theme of memory and loss, he added.

It was Kirschenbaum's 2008 book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination that helped unearth an unused diskette and a seven-page hard copy of the underlying source code. That led to Quinn's idea to sponsor the challenge. (Work from University of California at Santa Barbara English professor Alan Liu also proved invaluable.)

DuPont said the source code and other archive material makes references to implementations of the DES, or digital encryption standard, which was once the predominant cryptographic algorithm. Unfortunately, the page of source code that actually handles the self-destructing text is missing, so the routine remains a mystery. DuPont said Gibson has never been known as much of a technical person, so it is believed he contracted a programmer to write the script.

To win, an entrant must be the first to submit, under Creative Commons usage rights, a technical description of his cryptanalysis. The analysis, according to the official rules, should explain "what kind of encryption is used (if any), how it functions, and how it was reversed or cracked (and what the key is, if there is one). Should there be no encryption at all (a possibility), or should the application merely 'scramble' or 'destroy' the data, this must be technically demonstrated or proved. Since the plain text is known, the cryptanalysis is purely for fun and academic curiosity, and thus the description should provide technical details."

Gibson has long intrigued his fans as "someone who was always one step ahead, and not anymore than that" of his contemporaries, Kirschenbaum said. "It's almost our world but not quite. There's a way it functions as a kind of mirror, but a pixelated mirror, in which we can see our own contemporary world."

Depending on the outcome of the challenge, Gibson's prescient rendering of the world may soon extend into the field of cryptography. Stay tuned.


Almost 24 hours after this article was published, Gibsonsaid on Twitter: "I was never entirely convinced that the text had actually been encrypted, myself. The whole project was more than a little fugitive, dodgy."

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