The Midas Code

AFTERWORD

Exploring the history, settings, and technologies that I drew on for The Midas Code was almost as much fun as writing the book itself — sometimes even more fun when it meant racing down the autobahn at 150 miles per hour in the name of research. The world has a wealth of astonishing places to visit and mysteries to delve into, which made it difficult to choose just a few to include in the novel. It might surprise the reader to know how little I had to make up for this story.

Although the geolabe is fictional, its real-world cousins, the Antikythera Mechanism and its replica, are on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The display cases for them are just as I described, and a security camera in the room with the Antikythera Mechanism really was missing the day I visited. Although theories abound as to the function of the Antikythera Mechanism, the best guess is that it was used to predict the motion of the sun, the stars, and the planets. For more on the Antikythera Mechanism, I recommend the intriguing Decoding the Heavens, by Jo Marchant.

Who built the Antikythera Mechanism is also open to argument, but many archaeologists believe its design could have originated from antiquity’s greatest scientist and engineer, Archimedes. His long-rumored treatise, On Sphere-Making, has eluded historians for more than two thousand years, but if it ever comes to light we may discover that Archimedes’ genius was even greater than we imagined.

In fact, Archimedes’ manuscript may still exist somewhere. As recently as 1998, a codex called the Archimedes Palimpsest was purchased at auction, the Greek writing hidden for hundreds of years under the text of a thirteenth-century prayer book. If you’d like to read more about that fascinating story and about Archimedes’ puzzle, the Stomachion, I highly recommend The Archimedes Codex, by Reviel Netz and William Noel.

The Greeks invented steganography and did hide messages under the wax of writing tablets. Another real method of concealing communications was to shave a messenger bald, tattoo the message onto his head, and wait for the hair to grow back before sending him on his mission. Slow, yes, but it got the job done.

As of today, the British Museum in London and the New Acropolis Museum in Athens continue to spar over the fate of the Elgin Marbles.

I have yet to park my own car in a robotic parking garage, but the structures do exist in many European countries. They’re starting to make their way into crowded downtown areas in the United States, so I may get to try one out someday.

If you ever want to eat in a real bank vault, there are several restaurants in New York City offering that unique experience.

Naples is a beautiful city, and it’s hard to believe that a vast world of subterranean tunnels and caverns exists under the bustling metropolis. Every year more underground passageways are discovered, so I’m sure we’ll continue to learn more about their Greek and Roman excavators. To get a feel for the dark and claustrophobic spaces, take a tour of the tunnels at Napoli Sotterranea, near Piazza San Gaetano, the next time you’re in Naples.

The Camorra has been entrenched in the Naples area for more than a century, and women are starting to take over some of the crime families. For a sobering exploration of the Camorra, read Gomorrah, by Roberto Saviano.

The bizarre true tale of Louis Dethy’s booby-trapped home needed no embellishment from me.

The strontium-90 nuclear fuel from radioisotope thermoelectric generators is a real threat to international security. Many of the devices have gone missing since the collapse of the Soviet Union, raising the specter of the radioactive material being used in dirty bombs. Security analysts around the world are already searching for them, and some were found when the thieves turned up with severe radiation sickness.

While the Midas Touch is a fantasy, distilling gold from water is not. Extremophiles, which are microbes called archaea, thrive around hot springs and black smokers on the ocean floor, and some species consume the heavy metal dissolved in the water before excreting it as a solid. No one has yet figured out how to profitably extract the tiny concentrations of dissolved gold from seawater, but billions of ounces of it are waiting for whoever can.

The legend of Midas is just that — a legend. But, as with most legends, there is some historical basis for the characters involved. Scholars do think that Midas was a king of Phrygia in modern-day Turkey, but to this day no one has found his birthplace or tomb. If and when someone does find his final resting place, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that a huge cache of gold was buried with Midas. I hear that guy was rich.