Turing's Delirium Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART II

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  PART III

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  First Mariner Books edition 2007

  Spanish edition copyright © 2003 by Edmundo Paz Soldán

  English translation copyright © 2006 by Lisa Carter

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from

  this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Paz Soldán, Edmundo, date.

  [Delirio de Turing. English]

  Turing's delirium / Edmundo Paz Soldán; translated by Lisa Carter.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13:978-0-618-54139-3

  ISBN-10:0-618-54139-X

  I. Carter, Lisa. II. Title.

  PQ7820.P39D4513 2006

  863'.64—dc22 2005024726

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-87259-6 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10:0-618-87259-0 (pbk.)

  Book design by Melissa Lotfy

  Printed in the United States of America

  MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Tammy and Gabriel,

  this time stolen from you,

  now finally returned

  To my brother Marcelo,

  who only knows how to give

  Inútil observar que el mejor volumen de los muchos hexágo-nos que administro se titula Trueno peinado, y otro El calambre de yeso y otro Axaxaxas mío. Esas proposiciones, a primera vista incoherentes, sin duda son capaces de una justificación criptográfica o alegórica; esa justificación es verbal y, ex hypothesi, ya figura en la Biblioteca. No puedo combinar unos caracteres dhcmrlchtdj que la divina Biblioteca no haya previsto y que en alguna de sus lenguas secretas no encierren un terrible sentido. Nadie puede articular una'sílaba que no esté llena de ternuras y temores; que no sea en alguno de esos lenguajes el nombre poderoso de un dios.

  —JORGE LUIS BORGES, La Biblioteca de Babel

  The king hath note of all that they intend,

  By interception which they dream not of.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Henry V

  All information looks like noise until you break the code.

  —NEAL STEPHENSON, SnowCrash

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  AS SOON AS you turn your back on the uncertain sunrise and enter your office building, you cease to be Miguel Sáenz, the civil servant discernible behind the wrinkled gray suit, round, wire-rimmed glasses, and fearful gaze, and become Turing, decipherer of secrets, relentless pursuer of encoded messages, the pride of the Black Chamber.

  You insert your electronic ID card into a slot. You are prompted for your password and type ruthl. The metal door opens and the world you unknowingly dreamed of as a child awaits you. Slowly, with measured steps, you enter a vaulted glass enclosure. Two policemen greet you formally. They see the color of your card—green, meaning Beyond Top Secret—without looking at it. It was all so much easier during Albert's time, when there were only two colors, yellow (Secret) and green. Then that smug Ramírez-Graham arrived (you had once called him "Mr. Ramírez" and he had corrected you: "Ramírez-Graham, please"), and card colors soon began to multiply. In less than a year, red (Top Secret), white (Not at All Secret), blue (Ultra), and orange (Ultra Priority) cards appeared. The color of your card indicates which parts of the building you have access to. Ramírez-Graham has the only purple card in existence, Ultra High Priority. In theory, there is only one area in the seven-story building for which the purple card is required: the Archive of Archives, a small section in the heart of the archives. Such proliferation is laughable. But you are not laughing; you are still offended that some of your colleagues have Ultra and Ultra Priority cards and can go where you cannot.

  "Always so early, Mr. Sâenz."

  "For as long as the old body holds out, captain."

  The policemen know who you are; they have heard the stories about you. They don't understand what you do or how you do it, but still they respect you. Or perhaps they respect you because they don't understand what you do or how you do it.

  You walk next to the wall where the great emblem of the Black, Chamber hangs. It is a resplendent aluminum disk encircling a man bent over a desk, trying to decipher a message, and a condor holding a ribbon in its claws that bears the motto "Logic and Intuition" in Morse code. True, both are needed to penetrate the crypt of secret codes, but they aren't used in equal proportions. For you, at least, intuition is what lights the way, but the hard work is done by reason.

  They don't understand what you do or how you do it, but still they respect you. What you do? Is it correct still to speak in the present tense? Your glory days, you have to admit, begin to fade in the expanse of time. For example, December 6, 1974, when you detected a cell of leftists who used phrases from Che Guevara's diary to encode messages; or September 17, 1976, when you were able to warn President Montenegro that an insurrection was brewing in the Cochabamba and Santa Cruz regiments; or December 25, 1981, when you deciphered messages from the Chilean government to its chargé d'affaires regarding water that was being diverted from a river along the border. There are many, many more, but since then your successes have been sporadic. Ramírez-Graham reassigned you, and although at first it, seemed that your new job was a promotion, it actually distanced you from the action. As head of the Black Chamber's general archives, you have become a cryptanalyst who no longer analyzes codes.

  Your steps echo down the hallway. You rub your hands together, trying to warm them. The country's return to democracy in the early 1980s didn't end the work that was done in this building, but it did minimize it. At first messages between unionists were intercepted, and then later on between drug traffickers, careless people who spoke on easily traceable radio frequencies and didn't even bother to code their messages. The 1990s brought sporadic work listening to opposition politicians on bugged telephones.

  You were happy when Montenegro returned to power through democratic means; you thought that everything would change under his rule and your work would again become urgent. What a disappointment. There was no significant threat to national security as there had been during his dictatorship. You were forced to admit that times had changed. Even worse, during the last stretch
of Montenegro's administration, the vice president, a charismatic technocrat—pardon the contradiction—with wide eyes and dimpled cheeks, had decided to reorganize the Black Chamber and turn it into the focal point of the fight against cyberterrorism. "This will pose one of the key challenges to the twenty-first century," he had said when he came to announce his initiative. "We must be prepared for what is to come." Immediately thereafter the vice president introduced Ramírez-Graham, the new director of the Black Chamber: "One of our countrymen who has succeeded abroad, a man who has left a promising career in the north to come and serve his country." A round of applause. He had annoyed you from the very start: the impeccable black suit, the well-polished loafers and neat haircut—he looked like some sleek businessman. Then he had opened his mouth and the bad impression only worsened. True, he might have had slightly darker skin than most, and somewhat Andean features, but he spoke Spanish with an American accent. It certainly didn't help when you discovered that he wasn't even born in Bolivia but was from Arlington, Virginia.

  You search the walls for a sign of salvation. Around you are only silent structures, muted-by the vigilance of a supervisor who believed it prudent that employees of the Black Chamber not be distracted. Aside from the aluminum emblem at the entrance, there are no signs or notices, no noise that might distract you in the endless search for the text that resides behind all texts. But you can find messages even on immaculate walls. It's simply a matter of looking for them. Your glasses are dirty—fingerprints, coffee stains—and the frame is twisted. There is a slight pain in your left eye caused by the lens bending at the wrong angle. For weeks you've been intending to make an appointment with the ophthalmologist.

  Ramírez-Graham has been director of the Black Chamber for almost a year. He has fired a number of your colleagues and replaced them with young computer experts. Since you obviously don't fit in with his plans for a generational change, why haven't you been fired? You put yourself in his shoes: you can't b£ fired. After all, you are a living archive, a repository of information regarding the profession. When you go, a whole millennium of knowledge will go with you, an entire encyclopedia of codes. Your colleagues who haven't yet turned thirty don't come to ask you practical questions. Rather, they come to hear your stories: of Etienne Bazeries, the French cryptanalyst who in the nineteenth century spent three years trying to decipher Louis XIV's code (so full of twists and turns that it took more than two centuries to decode it), or of Marian Rejewski, the Polish cryptanalyst who helped to defeat Enigma in World War II. There are so many stories, and you know them all. Your new colleagues use software to decipher codes and see you as a relic from times when the profession was not fully mechanized. The world has changed since Enigma, but being historically out of sync is nothing new in Rio Fugitivo.

  You pause in front of the Bletchley Room, where slim computers use complex mathematical processes to understand coded messages and fail more often than not. Years are needed to decode a single phrase. With the development of public key cryptography, and particularly with the appearance of the RSA asymmetric system in 1977, a message can now be coded using such high values that all of the computers in the world working to decipher it would take more than the age of the universe to find a solution. The ultimate irony is that with computers at their service, cryptographers have won the battle against cryptanalysts, and people like you, who don't depend on computers that much, can still be useful.

  Your younger colleagues are adept at computer science and useless before the power of the computer itself. Their work is more modern than yours (at least according to the movies, obsessed as they are with showing young programmers in front of a computer monitor), but it's still no use—they are just as out of date as you are. Deciphering codes in general has become a useless task. But someone has to do it: the Black Chamber has to maintain the pretense that it is still useful to the government, that power is not as vulnerable as it really is to the attacks of a conspiracy handled by means of secret codes.

  The room is empty and silent. When you began work here, the computers were enormous, noisy, metallic cupboards sprouting cables. Machines have become smaller and quieter, increasingly aseptic (in the Babbage Room there is still an ancient Cray supercomputer, a donation from the U.S. government). At one time you felt you were less than those who worked tirelessly on algorithms in the Bletchley Room. You even tried to learn from them, to move from your old office to this one, which was more in keeping with the times. But you couldn't—you didn't last long. You liked mathematics, but not enough to dedicate the best hours of your life to it. For you, mathematics was about functionality, not passion. Luckily, most conspirators in Bolivia aren't that good and don't know how to do more than the basics on computers either.

  You continue on your way, putting your hands into your coat pockets. A pencil, a pen, and a few coins. An image of your daughter, Flavia, comes to mind, and you are filled with tenderness. Before leaving, you went into her room to kiss her goodbye on the forehead. Duanne 2019, the heroine Flavia had created for some of her Web surfing, stared out at you from the screen saver on one of two monitors sitting on her desk, covered in photos of famous hackers (Kevin Mitnick, Ehud Tannenbaum). Or crackers, as she would insist. "You have to learn to differentiate them, Dad. Crackers abuse technology for illegal purposes." "So why is your site called AllHacker and not AllCracker?" "Good question. It's because only people in the know make the distinction. And if my site was called AllCracker, it wouldn't get even one percent of the hits it gets now." Hackers, crackers: it's all the same to you. But shouldn't you try to use the Spanish term and call them piratas informáticos? You prefer that term, even though it sounds strange. English had come first and become the norm. People sent attachments, not archivos adjuntos, e-mails, not correos electrónicos. In Spain they call the screen saver salvapantallas; in truth it sounds ridiculous. Still, you shouldn't give up; it is worth going against the grain. The survival of Spanish as a language of the twenty-first century is at stake. Piratas informáticos, piratas informáticos...

  Flavia was snoring lightly and you stood looking at her under the glow of the lamp on the bedside table. Her damp, tangled, chestnut-colored hair fell over her face with its full lips. Her nightshirt had twisted and her left breast was bared, the nipple pink and erect. Embarrassed, you covered her up. When had your mischievous, ponytailed little girl become a disturbing young woman of seventeen? When had you stopped paying attention? What had you been doing while she grew up? Computers had fascinated her ever since she was a child, and she had learned to program by the time she was thirteen. Her Web site provided information about the little-known hacker subculture. How many hours a day did she spend in front of her IBM clones? In most respects she had left adolescence behind. Luckily, she was not at all interested in the young men who had begun to flock to the house, attracted by her distant, languid beauty.

  The Vigenére Room is empty. The hands of the clock on the wall read 6:25 A.M. Ramírez-Graham hadn't been thorough enough and had left mechanical clocks in the building. Surely he would soon replace them with red numbers in quartz, analogue with digital. Such useless modernization. Seconds more or seconds less, precise or imprecise, time will continue to flow on and in the end have its way with us.

  The building at this hour is still chilly. It doesn't matter: you like to be the first to arrive at work. You learned that from Albert, your boss for over twenty-five years. Continuing on with the tradition is your homage to the man who did more for cryptanalysis in Río Fugitivo than anyone else. Albert is now confined to a medicinal-smelling room in a house on Avenida de las Acacias, delirious, his mind unable to respond. He is proof that it's not good to overload the brain with work: short circuits are the order of the day. You like to walk down the empty hallways, to see the desks in the cubicles piled high with paper. In the still air your eyes rest on file folders and ghostly machines with the disdainful arrogance of a benevolent god, of someone who will do his work because some unknown First Cause has ordain
ed it and its not wise to defy destiny.

  You press the elevator button and enter that metallic universe where the strangest thoughts have always occurred to you. Will the elevator malfunction and plunge you to your death? You are heading to the basement, to the archives, to the ends of the earth, to a death chamber that only you inhabit. It is even colder down there. Suspended in the air by thick cables, you move without moving, in peace.

  There is something special about this elevator. Its green walls, simple efficiency—a solid nucleus of stable movement. What would you do without it? What would people do without them? Otis, six passengers, 1000 pounds. You stare at the name. You spell it out: O-T-I-S. Backwards: S-I-T-O. It is a message striving to break free, and it is destined only for you. I-O-T-S. I'm Obliged To Say. Who's obliged to say what?

  The general archives are in the basement. You are the link between the present and the past. You hang your jacket on a broken coat rack. You take your glasses off, clean the lenses with a dirty handkerchief, and put them back on. You pop a piece of spearmint gum into your mouth, the first of many. Never chewed for more than two minutes, they are thrown out as soon as the first flavor is gone.

  You feel the need to urinate. That sense of having to go immediately has been with you since adolescence. It's one of the worst manifestations of your anxiety, the way in which your body compensates for your apparent immunity to emotions. All of your underwear is stained the color of burned grass. You suffer from it even more now that you work in the basement; the architect never thought to put a bathroom on this floor. Perhaps he assumed that whoever would work in the archives could take the elevator or stairs up to the bathrooms on the ground floor—a normal human being, someone who might go once or twice a day and not be bothered. But what about someone who is incontinent? How insensitive.

  You open the bottom drawer of your desk and take out a plastic cup with a smiling Road Runner on it. You head to a corner of the room, your back to the archives. You lower your zipper and urinate into the cup: six, seven, eight amber drops. That's why you don't like to go to the bathroom; the result is usually incompatible with the sense of urgency. It's better to accumulate drops in the cup and then casually pass by the bathroom to dispose of your fragrant treasure at lunchtime.