The Search for SURY

Here's a post about something weird that I'd planned to write about back in August last year, but didn't quite manage to get out. It's still a fun little mystery, though, so grab a cuppa, have a read, and then help me solve this puzzle that's been stuck in my head for months.

Some time in about July, a strange medallion was glued to the masonry on the external wall of Brasenose College. For at least a couple of weeks, I walked past it each day, noting that it seemed pretty weird but not thinking all that much about it. After a while I mentioned in to the head Porter, wondering if there was strange in-joke that I wasn't it on, and he was a little perplexed by it too. A couple of days later, with some significant effort, the workshop team were able to pry it off (they take a poor view of people making unsanctioned additions to the 500 year old facade).

Deliberate damage to a heritage-listed building. That's a paddlin'.

They handed the coin to one of the students, and as these things tend to do, it migrated to the common room and became the topic of much discussion over cups of tea, and later into the evening, other beverages. What was this medal? Who had placed it on the college? What is SURY? Why the latin for something like "He will not be alone" (I left this bit to others, I have no Latin)? What was with the strange code-like drill holes? What could it all mean? 

14 lines? Like a sonnet?

The puzzle has a way of worming itself into your mind so that you can't stop thinking about it. We started googling everything, seeing strange, half-imagined connections between unrelated webpages on weird corners of the internet. When I came in the next day, I found this (actually, this is the board a couple of days later, I don't have a photo of it in its original state, but it didn't change that much after the first day).

Sometimes you just have to embrace your inner conspiracy theorist

A bit of googling turned up that this logo (oh, it's a winged handshake!) had been posted on the 4th January 2019 on designcrowd.com as a response to a design competition, albeit with different latin. Someone with a decent amount of cash to splash around  had commissioned this, and recently. From the design discussions there are some fascinating insights:

SURY which is just an acronym for (Snob, Urban, Rural, Yob) refer to attachment. It is not really a department store but this is probably the best way (analogy) to explain what the business is.

SURY is not compulsory either. If you have a better name suggestion that you would perhaps use for a "secret mens club" then propose that also. The name itself is not important as it is to be built as a brand hence the importance of the logo.

So, there's a brand, but at least back in January 2019 they're still not really committed to their name, which appears to be an acronym of some nonsensical string of descriptors. There's also a more in depth design pdf, which is pretty baffling all around as a business concept, but does include a proto-version of the logo with the different Latin.

At this point, I'm thinking either that the whole business brief is just a front for getting the logo designed without actually expressing what the 'brand' is really about, which seems like the sort of thing that someone designing a cryptic puzzle game might do, or that this logo was found on this site and co-opted by whoever placed the medallion. I found a couple of potential uses of the latin phrase Sine Qua Non for Australian registered companies, but nothing that seems that promising, so for now this angle feels like a bit of a dead end.

But wait, "He will not be alone".

There's a post on reddit of someone who'd found another coin attached to Blarney Castle on July 5th, which assuming that it was soon after it arrived there would put it at a similar time to the one at Brasenose. Over the next little while a few other people have found them at other locations too, Balloch Park in Scotland, Bolton Abbey, Caerphilly Castle in Wales, Bootham Bar in York. The medallions are all identical, but they all have different holes drilled in them. The turn around from logo design to being cast on coins, drilled strangely and stuck on landmarks no more than six months later (maybe earlier, some of them look more weathered) is pretty impressive.

All(?) our little ducks in a row.

This is not just some freak Oxford thing, this is some kind of deliberate puzzle hunt at historic locations around the UK and Ireland, or even further (who knows what other coins could have been out there and never found, or just not reported to reddit?).

So onto the code itself. Each SURY medal is made up of a grid of 21x14 drilled holes, but every second line is offset. After transcribing the digits and getting rid of the blank columns, I've ended up with six 21x7 binary blocks that just about feels like maybe something like ASCII binary letters if you assume each have a leading 0, but the letters that you come out with don't make any sense. I'm either missing some part of the puzzle or missing something staring me in the face.

21x7 doesn't mean anything to me, but maybe it's sparked something inside your head. If you'd like to jump in and have a play, feel free to take a look at the google sheet here. Maybe it's not a puzzle that can be solved without every single constituent part, but if that were true, why would someone travel hundreds of miles knowing that their coins are going to be removed in short order and people might never find them all? Personally, I hope I haven't seen the end of SURY just yet.