That's a pretty good set up for some wild fiction. You could go to the fabled moon / arctic bases, time travel, aliens ... it's a nice foundation. Problem is these days people would start believing in whatever fiction you write. The internet is broken like that.

A company I used to work for was partly comprised of hackers, and one of the books they always raved about was called Cryptonomicon. I know that it involves the nazis and encoded secrets, though I never read it (still on my to-read list). I'd recommend checking it out if that kind of thing sounds interesting to you.

I read it back in the day. I can't remember much of the plot, but i do remember that it seemed about twice as long as it needed to be. Which I find ro be typical of Stephenson's fiction. Plenty of people seem to like it though.

He does like regressions into historical causes and effect chains... hell the whole system of the world trilogy is almost nothing BUT that (and contains some character/family crossovers with cryptonomicon)

Less so than his later books in my opinion. It’s a lot of great plot throughout with good explanations of the math concepts it refers to.

I may be biased, After reading wheel of time, nothing seems too long anymore!

I liked it but I thought it was overly dramatic in a "survival of the fittest" way and indeed way too long. But I'm not a fan of the guy anyway.

It is a decent book to read once though.

Cryptonomicon is almost exactly this premise :) It’s an amazing book, one that any aspiring hacker should read!

Not just the internet.

Animal Planet made a fake documentary about Mermaids (a somewhat hokey one at that), with a disclaimer that it was a work of fiction.

Despite that, it's convinced a generation of fools that mermaids are real.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mermaids-the-body-found/

But back to the internet. Plenty of youtube clips from this program where commenters are insistent that it's evidence that Mermaids are real. And comments linking to the footage of the disclaimer, and resulting dumb arguments. Still! In 2023!

It is only somewhat hokey.

I love a bad/earnest low-budget movie. I think they are often much more revealing about the nature of culture, cinema and art than -- to pick a single counterpoint -- really anything in the MCU except Age of Ultron [0].

There were plenty of things in that to like. I watched it only recently, I'm glad they made it, and I hope the people who make it continue to reject the big bucks.

[0] This is a hill I will die on. Almost everything in the MCU is pointless dross except James Spader as Ultron.

This is basically the setting of Gravity’s Rainbow.

Low-key, you could claim that about nearly anything and nobody would/could really challenge you for Gravity's Rainbow

See also, Finnegan's Wake. For instance, here's a nonsense claim that sounds plausible: Finnegan's Wake is the best book about the Irish Civil War. You feel the frenzy and delirium of the lucid somnambulism that comes with insomnia on the battlefield. As foggy and vivid as war, the words carefully balance the interregnum between the forbidden, forgotten and forsaken laid bare as poetry. The deconstruction of the language is married with the deconstruction of life as belligerents kill over conflicting dreams.

The middle third or so of GR describes a fairly lucid plot in which the characters are traversing Germany during its final disintegration at the end of WW2 and the beginning of the Allied occupation.

As does Finnegan's Wake.

Th are even great historical starting points for such fiction, like the bunch of German U-Boats spread across the world (mostly the Atlantic), including one (U-234) en route to Japan with special cargo including uranium oxide, high-ranking Germans and Japanese and an Me-262.

Better starting hook that the Last Resort series (US nuclear submarine with intercontinental ballistic missiles refuses weird orders, is fired upon by the US Navy, and decides to occupy a fictitious island).

Maybe solving this would be determining a set of likely encrypted messages.

They could be scored by decrypted content matching structure of priors and context. Along with char difference from the encrypted message on record.

I can picture it: a German soldier feeling defeated just set the keys to something random and typed his message, sending a message without expecting anyone to hear...

"In the old days, if someone had a secret they didn’t want to share, they went up a mountain, found a tree, carved a hole in it, and whispered the secret into the hole. Then they covered it with mud and leave the secret there forever." - Wong Kar Wai/In The Mood for Love