The Wire Between Words

The file wire.txt is the Hacker Manifesto with irregular spacing between words. The gap run-lengths take only three values, which encode Morse signal and silence.

Solve

1. Read wire.txt and record the length of every run of spaces. All runs are 2, 3, or 4.
2. Map gap 2 to dot, gap 4 to dash, and gap 3 as the letter separator that flushes the current Morse letter.
3. Decode each letter through a Morse table that includes punctuation, since Morse has no brace characters. The author used .-.-.- (.) to open the brace and ...-..- ($) to close it; ..--.- (_) separates words.

solve.py splits the text on triple-space letter separators, turns each remaining gap run into dot/dash, and looks the symbol up in a Morse table extended with the brace/underscore punctuation:

import re

MORSE = {
    ".-": "A", "-...": "B", "-.-.": "C", "-..": "D", ".": "E",
    "..-.": "F", "--.": "G", "....": "H", "..": "I", ".---": "J",
    "-.-": "K", ".-..": "L", "--": "M", "-.": "N", "---": "O",
    ".--.": "P", "--.-": "Q", ".-.": "R", "...": "S", "-": "T",
    "..-": "U", "...-": "V", ".--": "W", "-..-": "X", "-.--": "Y",
    "--..": "Z", "-----": "0", ".----": "1", "..---": "2", "...--": "3",
    "....-": "4", ".....": "5", "-....": "6", "--...": "7", "---..": "8",
    "----.": "9", ".-.-.-": "{", "...-..-": "}", "..--.-": "_",
}

text = open("wire.txt").read()
out = []
for chunk in re.split(r" {3}", text):
    code = "".join("." if len(g) == 2 else "-" for g in re.findall(r" +", chunk))
    if code:
        out.append(MORSE.get(code, "?"))
print("".join(out))

python3 solve.py

The raw Morse decode is SVIBGR.M0RS3_C0D3_1S_C00L$ (the brace/underscore tokens already resolve via the extended table).

4. Replace the leading . with { and the trailing $ with }.

Flag: SVIBGR{M0RS3_C0D3_1S_C00L}