I recognized the voice, it was Conrade Mercer, an old acquaintance of mine. I looked at the holographic display of my A.I who had a faux coy look on its face like it was surprising me. Heuristics, I rolled my eyes at it and listened to the rest of the message.

“Don’t delete this message, I need a man with your skill set, I can’t tell you the specifics online. I need to meet with you in person, at our usual place.” Then there was a tone which sounded a lot like a beep you hear when ending a call to someone. I recognised it as something of an on the fly way to encrypt messages when you don’t have the time, or resources to do it the right way. It wasn’t always reliable as A.I were crafty things that could spot such anomalies, and if it was what I thought it was, and given enough time could puzzle out what the message said. But that required humans to be paying attention.

“Hellen,” I called up my office’s A.I “Did you hear the tone at the very end of the message?” I asked, leaning back in my chair. The A.I’s hologram flickered into view a moment later, and said “no boss, let me analyze the message.” A moment later, Hellen confirmed “Yes boss there is a five nano-second period where a tone can be heard before the message ends.

“Slow it down, cut the speed in half” I requested, and Hellen did just that. The tone was an octave lower, and twice as long.

I requested “do it again.” And again the tone dropped an octave, and its length doubled. But this time, I heard separated portions of the tone a kind of a bebebebebebebeeb. I had Hellen slow it down a few more times to make sure I was hearing what I thought. I pulled my pad, and stylus, and began marking little dot’s, and dashes --. .- .-. -.. . -. / -.-. .- ..-. ..-.. / .. -. / - .... . / -... ..- ... .. -. . ... ... / -.-. . -. - . .-. .-.-.-

Hellen piped up, and said “I have analyzed this code, I recognise it as binary, but neither variant of one’s, and zero’s make any sense. It's all I believe the term is gibberish.”

I chuckled, “the code is even older than that. It predates computers so it’s not a programming language.”

I matched the dot’s, and dashes to the letters I was taught, and held it up for Hellen to see my translation ‘Garden cafe in the business center’ not our usual meeting spot “My grand dad taught the language to me as a way to keep my mind busy, he learned it from his grand dad, and so on, and so on.”