These Easter Eggs were originally posted over at Dreamspinner Press.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, the book is in a large part an homage to Alan Turing – the Prologue to The Prince and The Program is a short introduction to his life and works.

Shortly before he died, Alan sent postcards, entitled “Messages from the Unseen World” to his graduate student and friend, Robin Gandy. One of these messages forms the core of my novel:

There’s a QR code on the cover art of the book – slightly hard to make out on the digital version’s thumbnail, so I’ve included a version below. Why don’t you scan it in?

Another of Alan Turing’s messages, the one that adorns his Epitaph, is part of a more convoluted Easter Egg:

If you take all the SPT (Sunless Planes Timezone Times) HH:MM in order, convert them to their binary equivalent, then convert that to ASCII, you get a message.

13:01, 28:23, 00:25 –> 01101, 00001, 11100, 10111…

=

There are other postcards, of course, and other Messages. I’ll leave the task of finding them up to the interested reader…

The scanned images of the postcards are courtesy of the Turing Digital Archive.