Joey playfully leaned in toward Tham Ming, waving her hand in front of his eyes as if teasing a distracted cat. Tham Ming offered absolutely no reaction. His eyes remained hollow, clearly trapped once again in the inescapable depths of his own memories.
This was a scene Joey had long grown used to. Every time she saw Tham Ming frozen in this "paralyzed" state, she could never resist the urge to prod him. Once, she had even gone so far as to extend her index finger right under his nose to check for a breath, wanting to confirm if the guy was still alive. The moment she neared, however, Tham Ming had suddenly muttered in a low, gravelly tone, "What are you doing?" The voice had sounded so muffled and close that it scared the utterly defenseless Joey into a sharp shriek. She collapsed straight backward onto her backside, her heart pounding wildly for quite a while afterward.
The screen remained illuminated. Joey leaned her body over Tham Ming, bringing her head close to the monitor to inspect the MY FM community broadcast notice.
"Huh? How come I didn't get this notification?" Confused, Joey pulled out her own phone and opened her social media apps to search the official MY FM fan page. "There’s nothing on their feed. I was actually planning to tune in to their New Year special program. I never expected Professor Tham to listen to MY FM, though. I've never even seen him tune into a radio broadcast..."
"What are you looking at?" came a sudden, low murmur.
"Ah!" Joey’s movements stiffened. The sudden guilt of being caught snooping made her instinctively take a step back. "I... I was just curious..."
Tham Ming did not speak. He silently reached out his hand, intending to close the laptop screen.
Just as his hand neared the lid, Joey stopped him. "Professor Tham, wait..."
"I think there's something weird about this email. Some parts don't match what I know about MY FM..."
"What doesn't match?" In truth, Tham Ming had also faintly sensed that something was off with this promotional text.
Frowning, Joey leaned closer to the screen again. "The social media copywriters at MY FM don't write copy like this. And I haven't heard anything about a new DJ joining the station recently."
Tham Ming’s gaze lingered slightly on Joey's eyes.
"MY FM usually loves using a lighthearted or exaggerated tone—stuff like 'Make sure to tune in on time!' But this..." Joey paused. "It’s way too stiff and formal!"
Tham Ming remained silent. No one could tell what was running through his mind.
Joey continued, "Plus, since when do radio stations have online customer service? Usually, listeners interact directly with the DJs online... And I’ve never heard of a copywriter named Husky. The broadcast frequency is wrong, too..."
Yet Joey’s words acted like a mechanical gear, slowly clicking into place inside his mind.
Online customer service.
A non-existent copywriter.
And that tone... which sounded entirely unlike a routine announcement.
It felt much more like someone carefully following a template to evade something specific. Tham Ming stared at the screen. The intuition grew stronger by the second. This text wasn't a "promotion" at all. It was—
A transmission.
He would have ordinarily dismissed the appearance of those terms as a mere coincidence. If he hadn't received that call from Norde at noon, he would never have connected these words at all. Tham Ming suddenly felt a burgeoning headache. He hadn't encountered this feeling in years. It felt as if someone were violently forcing a jumble of completely unrelated fragments into his brain. What was worse—he was beginning to resist the urge to piece them together.
"...I am just a theoretician," he murmured under his breath, as if defining his own boundaries. "Not a detective."
"Joey."
"Yeah?"
"If... someone wanted to hide information in this announcement..."
Joey blinked, visibly taken aback. "Hide it for whom?"
Tham Ming didn't answer immediately, seemingly filtering thoughts through his mind. Two seconds later, he spoke: "Someone... who knows the rules."
Joey burst out laughing. "Professor Tham, have you been watching too many conspiracy theory videos lately?"
She meant it entirely as a joke, but Tham Ming did not laugh. The air felt as though it had been lightly compressed by an unseen weight, and the previously light atmosphere suddenly froze mid-air. The smile on Joey’s face gradually faded away. "...Are you serious?"
"Back when I was in the US," Tham Ming spoke slowly, his eyes not looking at her but resting on some invisible point in space. "Some people would break apart research data and scatter it into public datasets—"
"Weather forecasts, stock market data, flight numbers..."
"Even an advertisement."
Joey’s expression transformed completely.
"Because true secrets are never hidden in the deep," Tham Ming continued. "They are hidden in plain sight, right where everyone can see them."
"That's... that is so cool!" Joey’s eyes lit up. "So this really could be some kind of hidden message?"
The moment the words left her mouth, she realized something was amiss. There was no excitement on Tham Ming’s face. That was not the expression of a man who had discovered a thrilling puzzle. It looked more like—
A profound exhaustion, as if he were being ensnared once again by something old and forgotten.
Joey slowly reined in her tone. She looked at him, hesitating for a moment. "Professor Tham... do you—do you know the person who wrote this announcement?"
"I'm not certain yet if the person who wrote this is the one I know," Tham Ming murmured, his hesitation betraying a lack of absolute conviction.
"It doesn't matter, let's try to decrypt it! Detective Conan is my absolute favorite. To actually encounter a real-life cipher like this is just too exciting!" Joey rubbed her hands together and pulled her chair much closer to Tham Ming. "Where do we start? Should we copy down the whole announcement?"
Tham Ming did not stop her; he simply gave a slight nod.
Joey quickly grabbed a sheet of scrap paper from the edge of the desk and began transcribing it sentence by sentence.
"‘Due to a recent sustained increase in background noise, some of our station’s channels are experiencing signal instability...’ Okay, this part seems fairly normal..."
As she started writing the second sentence, she suddenly froze.
"Wait. ‘The technical department advises listeners to avoid using older-generation receiving equipment and, where conditions permit, to upgrade to new-generation digital radio terminals to ensure the integrity of information reception.’ This is way too corporate. MY FM never speaks so rigidly. Still... aside from being stiff, there doesn't seem to be anything inherently wrong with it."
Tham Ming’s eyes shifted slightly. "Wait. Circle 'older-generation receiving equipment' first."
Joey was puzzled. "Why?"
Tham Ming waved his hand, signaling her to keep going.
"And then here—" Joey’s eyes brightened. "‘Please set the audio channel frequency of digital terminals to 100.27’... But MY FM’s frequency in Penang is 99.7 MHz. Also, radio stations shouldn't have customer service, and the cut-off time for the service—5:40 PM—is completely abrupt."
Tham Ming suddenly reached out, gesturing for her to pause.
"100.27..." he repeated in a low voice, his brow gradually furrowing.
Joey knitted her eyebrows. "What did you think of? An account number? An email address?"
"...That’s not a frequency," Tham Ming said softly. "At least, not a frequency any ordinary listener could tune into."
He took the scrap paper and circled the two sets of numbers. "If this were a genuine radio announcement, it would never write a frequency in a format accurate to two decimal places like 100.27. They would normally write 100.3 or just say FM 100.3. 100.27..."
Tham Ming wrote $100.27$ in the blank space beside it, and wrote $5:40$ right next to it. He pondered over it for a long time, completely at a loss.
The air in the room grew heavy. Joey stood up, resting her hands against her lower back as she paced back and forth across the office.
"100270540. Professor, do you have any specific memory associated with this string of numbers?"
Tham Ming shook his head.
"What about 054010027?"
Tham Ming shook his head again.
Joey clutched her head with both hands, messing up her hair until it resembled a tangled patch of weeds. "Deductions in manga are always so direct and easy. Why is it so hard when you bring it into reality?"
"5:40 PM, 100.27..." Joey kept repeating the numbers like an incantation, pacing back and forth. She casually grabbed another piece of paper and scribbled down the figures as she muttered them.
Like most science and engineering students, when faced with an incomprehensible formula or pattern, she preferred to write it out. More often than not, the physical act of writing helped clarify her train of thought.
"100.27... 5.40..." Joey stared down at the paper. "What if we convert the time format to a 24-hour clock?"
She quickly wrote: 100.27 1740...
"...Still nothing. What if we reverse them?"
5.40 100.27
1740 100.27...
The numbers on the paper grew more numerous and increasingly chaotic.
Staring at the four rows of figures she had written, Joey suddenly froze. A flash of inspiration struck her. "Why does it have to be time? What if it's space?"
"Could it be coordinates?" Joey snapped her head up.
Tham Ming didn't respond immediately. He pondered for a good while before asking, "If it's coordinates, why split it into two parts? Why not just leave it in a standard format?"
Joey faltered for a moment. "Because... because he didn't want anyone else to realize it at a glance?"
Tham Ming remained silent for a few seconds, then said in a low voice, "Or because he knows that public information is being monitored."
Joey pulled out her phone, intending to open Google Maps to search the two sets of coordinates.
"Wait." Tham Ming pressed his hand firmly down on her wrist, his voice dropping an octave. "Don't search the exact coordinates online yet... If this is real, someone might be monitoring our search traffic."
Joey bit her lower lip, then whirled around and rushed out of the office. "Then wait for me, Professor! I know Professor Wen has a globe in his office. I'll go borrow it. Wait for me."
In front of the heavy, three-dimensional globe, the two held their breath.
Joey quickly cross-referenced the figures. "If we convert 5:40 to military time, it’s 1740, which means a longitude of 17°24′ or 5°24′ depending on the notation; if we treat 100.27 as latitude, that’s 100°16′12..." She spun the globe rapidly, finally pinning a location on a mountain range in Thailand. "But if we use 5.40 directly as latitude... then it points straight to the hills of Penang."
Joey sucked in a sharp breath. Her initial excitement was gradually replaced by a creeping dread. She had found it thrilling at first, but as the puzzle unraveled layer by layer and their hypotheses began to realign with reality, an inexplicable panic gripped her heart.
"The globe's precision isn't high enough; it can only show a rough approximation..." Tham Ming suppressed the unease rising in his chest. "It's getting late. Tomorrow morning, we'll head to the library together to find a modern geographical atlas before deciding on our next move."
He turned to look at Joey, his eyes carrying a stark, unmistakable warning for the very first time.
"Joey, this might not be a game. Promise me that before I confirm anything, you won't act on your own, and don't discuss this matter in any public setting. Likewise, do not look up any related data on the internet."
"Okay..."
Turning off the lights, the two walked out together. The office plunged back into darkness, leaving only the scrap paper on the desk, still quietly spread open.
The torrential rain had washed away the city's dust, leaving the night sky clear to the point of transparency. The moon seemed to have shed a heavy coat, hanging weightlessly in the heavens, surrounded by distant, quiet dark clouds. Under the moonlight filtering through the window, the chaotic clusters of numbers on the scrap paper shivered silently, like an incomplete signal waiting to be read.
ns216.73.216.69da2
and then Add to home screen.