Holmes chewed contemplatively on his pipe and stared at the cipher of the dancing ASCII.
"Hmm, yes, Watson," he said, "a most perplexing conundrum. I do not believe I have been so at a loss for decipherment since we chased the army of clones of Jack the Ripper onto the Titanic in Hitler's time machine."
"I still do not understand," I said to him. "Since we are merely characters in virtual reality, what does it matter whether you solve the Mystery of the Dancing ASCII? Surely the player can merely reboot the program and start us from square one."
"You neglect to consider," said Holmes, "that once the Loch Ness Monster's head was cloned, it became possible to create duplicates of living objects, perhaps even of ourselves. Have you not thought it possible that we could be in the real world, or perhaps on a fictional starship in the year 2369?" He took a deep draw from the pipe, snorted three lines of cocaine he had bought from that crackpot Freud (off on his way to shovel tons of it into the giant Adenoid on the Strand, no doubt), smoked some crystal meth, dropped acid, and injected himself intravenously with Black Flag insecticide.
"Why, no, Holmes, I hadn't... Why, indeed, we may be real! But, then, what of Moriarty?"
"I am amazed, my dear Watson, that you were unable to deduce the elementary fact that Moriarty, Hitler, Jack the Ripper, Qurzak of Atzor (who murdered eleven prostitutes on Albemuth Seven in 2268), Gharlane of Eddore, Nero, Harlan Ellison, Cher, Manny, Moe, Jack, and so-called 'Satan' are actually all cross-sections of the same transdimensional entity. I have, you see, written a monograph on transdimensional entities. They tend to rap on tables in a distinctive manner. I discovered this while following a trail of cigar ashes up the face of El Capitan. You see, by covering itself with vermiculite, this being was able to partially negate the effects of gravitational attraction and transcend all space and time. It is the most basic principle of physics: A beam of energy can always be controlled."
"Incredible."
"It's insane... But I digress. These ASCII characters... Watson, can you make anything of them?"
"I can't say that I do, Holmes. Just looking at them makes my war wounds ache: the one in my right knee, and the other one in my left shoulder that came from the second gunman on the grassy knoll."
"Note the double-height vertical lines! I saw such lines on retail products when we were making our last little jaunt through time and space. They appear in the Universal Product Code, used in the late twentieth century to genetically encode the true prices of products, to be read with a concentrated proton beam without the knowledge of the manufacturer. It was not discovered until 2110 that such proton beams caused the human ear to become sensitive only to polarized light, thus making music from the tropics inaudible. I believe that this so-called message is no message at all: it in fact originates from someone wishing to drive us mad."
"And who could that be?"
"Why, the author!"
"Why, amazing, Holmes! Surely this instance of self-reference in a Sherlock Holmes pastiche is the cleverest thing ever written!"
After ingesting his daily megadose of vitamin C, Holmes merely smiled and said, "Not half so clever as I am, Watson. Not half."