Was the VM a failure?

[Pepper]

I see it the same way. Sometimes I think that the “code”, if the VMS is ever cracked, will turn out to be extremely unusual but basically simple in design. Many people will then think: “My goodness, why didn't I think of that before?”

Me too. Anything super sophisticated would be unprecedented for the 15th century. It's more likely to be a code that requires a specific piece of information to crack, like knowing that page 152 of a certain edition of the King James Bible was used to generate the first word of each line. That's not an ingenious breakthrough but it can be almost impossible to crack without knowing the reference document.