Is the MULVANE a real motor yacht?

There’s a Golden Age mystery sensibility, but does JOURNAL OF THE SUPERNOVA conform to the Golden Age mystery rules?

Who is the target audience for JOURNAL OF THE SUPERNOVA?

Is Kang Youwei a genuine historical figure?

Is there a Chinese version of a Rolls-Royce, like Tang Tang’s limousine?

The automobile company Hongqi (“red flag”) has a long history of producing Chinese versions of Western vehicles, sometimes licensed (Audi, Toyota, Lincoln) and sometimes not (see accompanying photograph of the Hongqi H9, eerily similar to a Roll-Royce Ghost, even down to the characteristic two-tone paint scheme). However, unlike with sensitive Western technologies as varied as the W-88 nuclear warhead and the 7-nm 5G silicon chip, this was not necessarily the result of illicit espionage—in 2018, Hongqi hired Rolls-Royce’s former chief of design.

But the similarities with R-R are only skin deep: Jeremy Clarkson, testing a Hongqi for the British television program “Top Gear,” noted that the power-to-weight ratio was only equal to that of the lowly Peugeot 308 diesel, and that there was no official 0-60 time because the car probably
couldn’t make it that fast.

Are there off-road Harley-Davidsons like the one Zara leaves for Jarrow to escape to Mexico?

Do CIPHER keys exist?

At the time Ash Wednesday was written there was no practical application of optical refraction as a means of secure encryption that the author is aware of. So it remains today, although there has certainly been research on the subject, notably in a paper published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, April 7, 2023. That paper can be accessed here.

The fictional CIPHER key (Commercial & Industrial Phased Energy Refraction) is imagined as a molded crystal-like structure (like quartz crystals, pictured) but with a randomized internal density matrix (so not a true crystal). After manufacture, the refracted laser pulse’s properties would be empirically matched to a receiver responding to that precise output alone which, when coupled with the key, would form a secure mechanism. Since the proposed density matrix would be infinitely variable (instead of a finite combination of 0s and 1s), the coming of quantum computing would not be the threat to encryption by light refraction that it is to existing digital encryption.

In the CIPHER key, the only things being ‘encrypted’ are the laser pulse’s properties post-refraction—it is just a lock. Zhang et al.’s Nature Communications paper proposes to encrypt data, something much more ambitious and applicable broadly in computer network and telecommunications traffic. But the underlying principle is, like the CIPHER key, an “…optical security strategy…which fully exploits the abundant degrees of freedom of light as well as the spatial dislocation as key parameters

Given the overarching theme of Ash Wednesday, it is interesting to note that all the authors of this paper are members of research institutions operating under the aegis of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.