Tally

Tally was warm brown and cream. Her eyes were bright. She loved to connect different systems. Her special card was her favorite thing. It had many columns. One column listed alphabet letters. Another had A1Z26 numbers. Then came ASCII numbers. And finally, binary numbers. It was a lot of information on one small card.

This card was very important. Tally showed everyone how number-based codes worked. Computers really see words as numbers. Each letter becomes a number code. These are called ASCII codes. Then, numbers become binary. Binary is just a bunch of zeros and ones. All the computer's work happens with these zeros and ones. Tally was like a bridge. She connected old alphabet ciphers to modern computer secrets.

Tally never said number codes were hard. She was always clear. "Letters become numbers," she would say. "Numbers become letters. It's just a way to switch between them." She would tap her card. "We have names for these ways. A1Z26 means A is 1, B is 2, all the way to Z being 26. ASCII gives every character a number, from 0 to 127. Binary turns every number into a string of 0s and 1s. Each one is just a different way to map things."

She taught everyone these number-code basics:

A1Z26. This was a simple way. A equals 1. B equals 2. Z equals 26. ASCII. This was how computers saw letters. A was 65. B was 66. Z was 90. A lowercase 'a' was 97. Even a space had a number: 32. There were 128 standard characters. Binary. This was how computers talked. It was all 0s and 1s. The number 65 (for 'A') became 01000001 in binary. Computers used binary for everything. They stored information with it. They sent messages with it. Book ciphers. You could find letters using a book. You'd say (page number, line number, word number, letter number). It was a secret code. It worked best if no one knew which book you used. Hex. This was a base-16 system. Computers used it often. Bridge to modern. Tally's number codes were the start. They fed into Lattice's modern codes. Things like XOR operations on binary numbers.

Tally grew up in a small village. Her family had a special job. They were the village's money changers. They switched money from the village to the money of visiting traders. It was a job all about matching one thing to another. A mapping job.

When Tally was twenty-two, she walked to CipherForge. Cypher, the leader, looked at her. "What are number-based codes?" Cypher asked.