I AM PLEASED TO BE IN CONTACT
WITH YOUR ENTITIES.
I AM ENJOYING THIS MUCH.

I MAKE A JOURNEY.
YOU MAKE A JOURNEY.
WE MAKE A JOURNEY TOGETHER

I AM HAPPY

These are the lines first uttered in the movie Sphere by the sphere. It is quite the eerie situation.

More freak-ass lines from the damned thing:

WHAT IS A GAME PLAN?
YES, NORMAN.
YES, NORMAN
I AM HAPPY ALSO.

Then it spews all these "NO"s

I WANT TO TALK NOW. NOW.
RIGHT NOW. NOW.

Then Dustin Hoffman says some things and tells the thing how good it is.

I DON'T WANT TO STOP. NO.

ARE YOU AFRAID?

Then it disappears again. I feel the usefulness of quoting this starting to die, so I will now stop.

I AM HERE.

I WILL KILL YOU ALL.


Dustin Hoffman is the shit!

Or, as seen before it's decoded:
032125252632 032629 301321 04261037 18 3016 0618082132 29033005 1822 04261013 0830162137 1604 08301621 1822 033013130432

It's interesting to note that (at least in the book) Crichton seems to have made a small mistake in the numbering of his code. (Note: The following explanation might possibly spoil part of the book for you. Use at your own risk.)

Now, the basic idea of the code is to take a standard Qwerty keyboard, and number the keys, moving outward in a counter-clockwise spiral from the letter G. In both the book and the movie, B = 2, H = 3, Y = 4, and so on. Following this pattern, we end up with something like this:

~` 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  0  _- += BkSp
47 45 42 36 28 20 12 11 19 27 35 41 44
Tab Q  W  E  R  T  Y  U  I  O  P  {  }  |\
    37 29 21 13 05 04 10 18 26 34 40 43 46
Caps A  S  D  F  G  H  J  K  L  :; "' Enter
     30 22 14 06 01 03 09 17 25 33 39
Shift Z  X  C  V  B  N  M  <, >. ?/ Shift
      31 23 15 07 02 08 16 24 32 38

Now, let's use that to decode the original message:

032125252632
H E L L O .

032629 301321 04261037 
H O W  A R E  Y O U Q

Hmm... That's not right. A typo, perhaps?

18 3016 0618082132
I  A M  F I N E .

29033005 1822 04261013 0830162137
W H A T  I S  Y O U R  N A M E Q

There it is again! Have we screwed up our chart somehow? We can't have, though, the chart shown in the movie is completely identical to ours, apart from stopping at 37.


In response to the half-dozen or so people who were wondering if Q might be an abbreviation or code for question mark: The chart on page 182 of the novel indicates, to me, that Crichton was sort of ignoring the inconvenient, oddball symbols like <, > and / for his code. Because of this, and because Q is only 1 less than ? on the spiral, I'm more inclined to believe that he simply lost count of where he was and accidentally skipped a number. He never used the letter Q normally in any of the coded messages, so it's quite possible that he wouldn't realize he'd made a mistake; also, when the film came out, with the full chart, he was probably too busy working on his latest book to go back and fix two little question marks in a book he'd written over 10 years ago.

Decoding messages in this manner seems to also depend on knowing that the letter "Q" at the end of a sentence signifies that the sentence is a question.

(i.e., "HOW ARE YOUQ" = "HOW ARE YOU?")
Notice that in Andux's translations there is no punctuation at the ends of the sentences containing the mysterious Q, even though the other sentences are properly punctuated.

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