Turing's Delirium

by Edmundo Paz Soldán

  Kandinsky's first thought is that the government intelligence service is breaking up his organization and that the same fate will soon befall the other members. He decides not to contact anyone for a few days. Nothing happens.

  A few weeks pass. There is still no explanation for what happened to Vivas and Padilla. AllHacker, a site that Kandinsky often visits, has dared to speculate that the individuals who were killed were hackers belonging to the Resistance and that the person responsible for their deaths is Kandinsky. The reason: he is a megalomaniac who is more interested in maintaining his own power than in fighting the government. Delirious. Still, something worries him: how did the girl in charge of AllHacker know that Vivas and Padilla were members of the Resistance? Who is her informant? Someone in his inner circle? Or is she working for the government again?

  He rules out Baez and Corso. He could not have made such a huge mistake. Still, he will watch them closely.

  It has to be the government, which is on his trail and knows more than he thinks it does.

  A hack into her Web site will convince him that the person responsible—a schoolgirl named Flavia Sáenz—does not know more than what she reported and is groping about in the dark, with no actual proof for her accusations. One of these days he will play a cruel joke on her and invite her to form part of the Resistance. She needs to be scared, be made to see that they are on her trail.

  He meets with Corso and Baez in a private chatroom. He gives them free rein to reinitiate their attacks on Monday of the following week. They will be of a magnitude unsuspected by the government and will continue to increase throughout the week to coincide on Thursday with the Coalition's planned blockade of streets and highways. Corso seems uncertain.

  On Wednesday of the following week, in the midst of the Resistance's unbridled attack on government and GlobaLux computers, Corso is shot dead at an Internet café in Bohemia.

  Kandinsky feels trapped. He decides to turn off his computers and not leave his apartment until he finds out what's going on. He wonders how he will do that with his computers turned off.

  Chapter 38

  MY DESTINY DOES NOT end in one man ... My destiny continues in all men...

  I speak these words on this terrible, mournful day. My body dead but unable to die ... Looking out a window where the colors of evening alight after the rain. The lilac glow of sunset. The green of a tall pepper tree. Waving in the breeze. The washed-out blue of the sky.

  The man who shot me has gone ... My chest has been torn open by his lead bullets. My blood is flowing out from more than one hole ... The sheets are being stained with yet another sticky substance. They are used to my dripping saliva ... To the sweat from my pores. To my acidic urine. And now I'm swimming in a reddish pool...

  The minutes tick by ... I know that this is not how I will end. At most I will leave this life to return in another ... Perhaps in New Zealand or Pakistan. I will be a cryptographer or a cryptanalyst ... I will again obscure clarity by means of a code. Or reveal it by means of another...

  I'm tired. I'm Albert. I was. I am so many more.

  Huettenhain. I wasn't Huettenhain.

  Approximately an hour passes and the next guard on duty. Dark-skinned and bucktoothed. Finds me ... I hear panic in his voice as he calls his superiors. Asking for an ambulance ... I'd like to tell him to calm down. To trust me. Or at least whoever created me. Whoever created us ... Because the same Creator must have created us all. Or maybe not ... Perhaps a mischievous demiurge created me. Perhaps that's how this cosmic joke can be explained ... Knowing myself to be infinite in a finite body.

  Immortal in a mortal body...

  I breathe softly. As if my breath doesn't want to be noticed. As if it prefers calm to desperation ... As if it also knows what awaits it. Or what does not.

  Two paramedics move me onto a stretcher without a fuss ... To them I'm simply another load. I leave my room. I will miss the window and nothing else ... Not even the photos. Which will soon no longer be mine. They put me into an ambulance ... It might be the last time I travel through the streets of Rio Fugitivo. Its bridges hiding beggars and dead dogs underneath. And suicides. Those who committed suicide...

  It's only right that this be my last means of transport. Ambulances are closely linked to my time here. Government security forces liked to use them ... Its paramilitary was moved in them for more than one coup d'état ... An innocent symbol for such a heinous crime.

  And I was behind some of those coups. Decoding ... Or inventing decoded messages. So that those who needed to fall fell.

  I am an electric ant.

  My spirit has no defined morals. Sometimes. Like now. I'm reincarnated in evil men ... Other times in someone who fights evil. Or are they the same?

  I was. For example. Marian Rejewski. The Polish cryptanalyst who helped to dismantle the intricate mechanism of Enigma ... That powerful Nazi ciphering machine.

  With Enigma ... Pencil and paper were left behind. And technology became responsible for encryption ... The ability to transmit secret messages was mechanized. Enigma looked like a portable typewriter ... One typed a letter on the keyboard ... The keys were connected by cables to rotating disks that mixed up the letters ... Thus, one letter became another. One phrase became another ... And from those disks ran other cables that led to a panel with dim lights ... Each light represented a letter. The lights that lit up were the encrypted letters that made up the encrypted message...

  But that wasn't all.

  Every time a letter was encrypted. The rotating disk turned one twenty-sixth of a rotation. So that when that letter was typed again ... It was encrypted with a different letter ... And a different light lit up. Each Enigma consisted of three rotating disks. Twenty-six times twenty-six times twenty-six ... Resulting in a total of 17,576 options. Not to mention the reflector ... And the ring ... Which complicated things even more.

  It was invented by the German Arthur Scherbius in 1918 ... They went into mass production in 1925. And were used by the German army the following year ... The German army would eventually buy 30,000 Enigma machines. When World War II began. No country could compare with the security of the Germans' communications system ... With Enigma. The Nazis had a great advantage over the Allies ... They lost that advantage thanks to the work of many people. Above all Rejewski...

  And the Englishman Alan Turing...

  At one time I was both men. I helped to bring down the Nazis.

  I was Rejewski. I was born in Bromberg ... A city that after World War I belonged to Poland. And was called Bydgoszcz ... I studied mathematics in Gottingen. I was shy. I wore thick glasses ... I majored in statistics, because I wanted to work for an insurance company ... In 1929 I received an offer to go as an assistant professor to the University of Poznan ... Over sixty miles from Bydgoszcz. I found my true vocation there. I found myself there. The Polish government's Biuro Szyfrów had organized a course in cryptography, to which I was invited ... They had chosen Poznan because it had belonged to Germany until 1918 ... So the majority of mathematicians there spoke German. The biuro's intention was to prepare young mathematicians ... In the intricate art of deciphering the German army's codes ... Until that time it was assumed that the best cryptanalysts were those who worked with language. The arrival of Enigma changed everything. The biuro thought that mathematicians might do better ... And they were right ... At least about me.

  The paramedics have given me up for dead. Like so many others on so many other occasions.

  The ambulance advances and stops. Advances and stops ... The driver has to get out and speak with those who are still blocking the streets ... I hear bits of the negotiation. Please. Let us through ... We've got an old man who's dying. They ask him for money ... Sometimes they come and peer in through the rear window ... See me lying on the stretcher. With my mouth open...

  An electric ant that appears to be lifeless.

  We continue on our way.

  In order to tackle Enigma. The basis of my theory wa
s the essential fact that the weakness of every cryptographic system is its repetitions ... The basic repetition of Enigma was at the beginning. In the message key ... Which consisted of three letters that were repeated twice for security purposes ... This key determined the position of the rotating disks. Their sequence ... The position of the rings ... Et cetera ... And the key was found in the armed forces cipher manual. The encoder thus indicated which key would be used. The one who received the message read the key and adjusted his machine for the signal that would come ... So that the ciphered text was automatically deciphered.

  A very simple idea came to me ... If the first six letters of a message were the key ... And if the key was the same group of letters repeated twice. Say, DMQAJT ... Then the first and the fourth letters. The second and the fifth. The third and the sixth. Represented the same letters. They were just encoded using different permutations...

  You could get a great deal of information about the first six permutations. If you received several Enigma messages each day ... We had at our disposal at least a hundred messages a day. That's how we went about discovering the daily key ... The signal key ... It took us a year ... Then the Germans' communication became clear to us. We spent the thirties struggling with Enigma's keys on a daily basis.

  No one should underestimate what we did ... No one should underestimate what I did.

  We even built a machine. Called the bomba ... Which could review all of Enigma's initial structure positions in under two hours ... Until it found the daily key. All of this ended in December 1938 ...When the Germans decided to make their machine more secure. And added two more rotating disks. That was enough to make decoding impossible. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland ... The war began. And I could do nothing. Just when I was needed most...

  We stop again. The door opens. The light pierces my retinas ... We've arrived at a hospital ... The paramedics carry the stretcher. They go into the emergency room. I should tell them that this is no emergency ... What has to happen will happen.

  Maybe I'll go. Maybe I won't.

  Deep down it doesn't matter...

  Perhaps that's my punishment.

  Kaufbeuren. Rosenheim. Names that come back.

  The boy ... Where was I a child? There are images of a valley. And of a boy. But I don't know whether that's my valley. Or whether I'm that boy.

  I was Alan Mathison Turing. I was born in London in 1912. In 1926, I began to attend Sherborne. In Dorset. I was a shy teenager ... Only interested in science. Until I met Christopher Morcom ... He was also interested in science. We were friends for four years ... Disaster struck in 1930. Christopher died of tuberculosis ... He never knew how I felt about him. I never dared to tell him ... He was. The only. Personal have. Ever. Loved.

  I decided to be a scientist. Christopher had won a scholarship to Cambridge ... I wanted one as well. I wanted to do for him what he could not ... I got the scholarship in 1931. I put a photo of him on my desk ... And I concentrated on my studies. Four years later I got my degree ... I went to Princeton for a few years. In 1937 I published my most important work on mathematical logic. On Computable Numbers. In it. I described an imaginary machine that would follow predetermined steps in order to multiply. Or add. Or subtract. Or divide. A Turing Machine for a particular function ... Then I thought of a Universal Turing Machine ... Capable of doing everything that each one of the Turing Machines could do...

  The first computers would be born from these ideas. Once there was sufficient technology.

  It's no coincidence that I wanted to find the algorithms that allow our brain to function ... The logical steps by means of which thought allows itself to be thought ... The order that's hidden behind our disordered associations of ideas...

  Each one of us is. In his or her own way. A Universal Turing Machine. The world works like a Universal Turing Machine. There is an algorithm that controls all of the heartbeats in the universe ... Or perhaps it's a few lines of code ... All of the steps. From the simplest to the most complicated ... This will be proven. Once there is enough technology ... It could take years. Decades. Centuries. The only certainty is that I ... Who am bleeding in a tidy hospital room. Will be present.

  In 1939 I was called by the Government Code and Cipher School to work as a cryptanalyst. Forty miles north of London. In an aristocratic mansion in Bletchley ... It was the headquarters for the government's efforts to intercept and read enemy messages ... Ten thousand people worked there. We were the inheritors of the prestigious Room 40 from World War I. During my first few months at Bletchley ... The work on Enigma ... Was based on Rejewski's discoveries ... But I had to find an alternative.

  The war was quickly complicating the situation. Now Enigma consisted of eight rotating disks. And in May of 1940. The first six letters of the message disappeared ... The Germans had found another way to transmit the key. The bombes I built to tackle Enigma were much more complicated than Rejewski's bombas ... I finished the first design in early 1940. The first one arrived at Bletchley in March of that same year ... It was called Victoria ... And it was capable of scanning, quite quickly, the huge number of signals that were intercepted each day ... Searching for words that the military used frequently. Such as Oberkommando... High Command ... Then the decoders went to work.

  The basic idea was that Enigma ... Never encrypted a letter using that same letter. So if the letter o appeared in the ciphered text ... We were sure that the word Oberkommando didn't start there. These words that one assumed might exist in a message were necessary for the bombes to work ... The bombe encoded them with the greatest possible number of options ... If a combination of letters was discovered. Then the bombe could indicate the daily key used for that signal...

  It was. In effect. The precursor to a computer.

  In the beginning ... It could take a week to find the key. The more advanced bombes might take less than an hour. In 1943 there were sixty bombes in operation ... Thanks to them ... In the first year of the war ... England was already able to read the German army's secret messages ... Thanks to this ... Churchill learned of Hitler's intention to conquer England. And he prepared to defend it...

  One of the main reasons for the Nazi defeat. Is. The defeat of Enigma early on.

  There is the sound of voices in the room ... I don't understand what they're saying about me. They've put an intravenous line in and soon the anesthesia will course through my body ... The lights go out...

  A blurry image comes to mind. That of Miguel Sáenz on his first day of work at the Black Chamber. Hunched over his desk.

  He appeared to be so dedicated to his work. So unaffected by distractions ... That he looked like a Universal Turing Machine ... All logic. All input ... All output ... That's when I decided to call him Turing.

  He always thought that the nickname was because of his talent for cryptanalysis.

  The real reason was different.

  Chapter 39

  CARLA HELPS YOU into the room. You lie down on the bed and she lies down beside you; you shelter your head between her breasts. The reddish glow of a lamp bathes you in the fading afternoon.

  "I'm tired. So tired."

  "I bet there's more to it than that."

  "Anything I say would sound melodramatic and untrue."

  You speak without looking at her, as usual. It is easier for you to speak words that veil your feelings, to express them indirectly.

  "Try," she insists.

  After a long silence punctuated by the sounds of cars in the street, you tell her—this time trying to get straight to the point.

  "I've been living a life that's not mine."

  "Come on ... That doesn't help me understand anything."

  You would like to fall asleep and wake up in another reality. At one time you had a heightened sense of reality; over the past few years it has become ordinary, and all of a sudden, in retrospect, it has become a lie. Albert, your admired boss, was a playwright filling your life with deceitful acts that had fatal consequences
. All of your actions are irreversible; there is no way to bring back the victims of your talent for cryptanalysis. Oh, if only you had failed at least once. But Albert chose you because he knew you would not fail. Or perhaps the puzzles he gave you were not very difficult, were intentionally made to match your talents.

  And you, who would have given your life for him. And you, who, admit it, are still capable of giving your life for him. How humiliating. How pleasantly, achingly humiliating.

  You cling to Carla as if you are about to drown. Can she keep you afloat? That is asking far too much; all you have to do is stroke her arms to feel the infected wounds. With so much methadone in her system, she can't even take responsibility for herself. She has been the one clinging to you these past few months, the one who has made you, among other things, use your credit card—the numbers encrypted in each transaction, the presence of codes in the most insignificant gestures of daily life—to pay for her room at the boarding house, her debts at the El Dorado, her unsuccessful hours in rehab, and yes, don't fool yourself again, the methadone purchased behind your back. Did you really think you could pull her out of her abyss? Or is it that perhaps by being a Good Samaritan you were unconsciously atoning for the guilt that threatened to rise to the surface? Ruth was right after all. And those messages as well: your hands are stained with blood.

  "Miguel, I can't understand what you're saying."

  "I didn't say anything."

  "I thought I heard you mumble something."

  "Don't pay any attention to me. I must be delirious. Too much work. Too much stress."

  "What the hell is wrong with you? Snap out of it. We need to talk."

  "I'm listening."

  "I'm all out of money, and I don't have anywhere to sleep tonight. They threw me out of the boarding house and kept my suitcase until I pay them."