Customs · inspection of container 4

The seal does not open with a key: it opens by answering. Strike the bar to the same beat the rivets of the weld seam are giving.

Short strike = dot · long strike = dash. Every digit is exactly five signals, so each group closes itself on the fifth.

dotdash
·
Read the rivets and beat it back.
Port of Alicante · west quay · 1978
THE RIVETED PLATE
00:000 of 4 digits
No manifest, sealed from the inside

THE RIVETED PLATE

The Morse chart has been bolted to that door since 1974 and nobody had ever looked at it: it passed for part of the container. The message does not blink in any lamp either — it is in the rivets of the weld seam, round ones and long ones. And the seal is not read: it is answered.

The seal gives way