Turing's Delirium Read online

  You put the cup back in the drawer.

  The pile of papers on your desk seduces you; bringing order to chaos, partially winning the battle against it, and being ready for the next onslaught is a game that lasts for days and months and years. Cryptanalysts' desks tend to be impeccable, with papers stacked on either side, pens and reference books lined up one next to the other, the computer monitor standing guard, the keyboard on the shelf hidden beneath the desk. It is the reflection of a pristine mind that does its work with great dedication to logic.

  You turn on the computer and check your e-mail at both the public and the private address. You spit your gum out, put another piece in your mouth, and all of a sudden at your private address you find an e-mail consisting of a single line:

  RZWIJWJWDTZWMFSIXFWJXYFNS JIBNYMGQTTI

  You notice the sequence FWJ XYFNSJI. Frequency analysis won't take more than a few minutes. Each letter has its own personality, and even though it seems to be out of place, it is betrayed, whispers, speaks, shouts, tells its story, misses its place on earth—paper. Who could have sent you this message? From where? You don't recognize the address. That's strange—only about ten people know your private e-mail. Someone has managed to get past the Black Chamber's firewalls and is teasing your heart with a crude message.

  All messages from within the Black Chamber come encrypted to your private address and your computer deciphers them automatically. Perhaps something in the program failed. You hit a couple of keys to try to decode the message. No luck. It isn't encrypted using the Black Chamber's software, which confirms your suspicions: the message was sent by someone unknown.

  It is a taunt. For now, you had better do what you do best: frequency analysis. The j has to be a vowel: a? e? o? Common sense tells you it's an e.

  You soon know: it is a simple code ciphered by substitution, a variation that, according to Suetonius, was used by the emperor Julius Caesar. Each letter has been moved five spaces to the right, so that the j is really an e, the g is a b, and so on. XYFNSJI spells stained.

  MURDERERYOURHANDSARESTAINEDWITHBLOOD

  Who's the murderer? You? Why are your hands stained?

  Chapter 2

  BLACK STORM CLOUDS on the horizon threaten rain. Flavia says goodbye to her classmates and gets on the blue bus that will take her home. A black leather bag with books and magazines; in her pocket a silver Nokia, which she checks impatiently every other minute. It's one o'clock and she's hungry.

  There is hardly any room on the bus. She grasps a metal pole and squeezes between a fat, bald man staring at his cell phone—someone else who's obsessed with Playground—and a mustached woman. There is the smell of cheap perfume and sweat. The driver has chosen to entertain himself with blaring tropical tunes. She should listen to music on her Nokia, create her own sound barrier against the noise that is bombarding her, but she hasn't downloaded anything new lately and she's not interested in the songs that are in memory. Maybe she should log on to Playground. No, better not. A screen larger than the one on her cell phone is better for Playground.

  Uncomfortable, she lifts her eyes and reads the ads above the windows: cybercafés, cheap Internet connections, lawyers. It becomes increasingly difficult to rest your eyes on blank space, where no one is offering anything. The world is overrun with people and things; you have to look within or project yourself onto some virtual reality in order to escape.

  "Fares, bus fares," intones the collector, a shy, snotty-nosed kid, as he makes his way through the bus. It's so old-fashioned. Elsewhere you simply have to slide a card through a slot in order to pay your fare, or a code entered on a cell phone will take care of it.

  Flavia hands the collector her coins. Children shouldn't be allowed to work. What stories could be read in his eyes? Life on the outskirts of the city, five siblings, his mom working at the market, his dad a street vendor. Chicken soup his only meal each day. Progress was evident in Rio Fugitivo, but it was simply an island in the middle of a country that was very much behind the times.

  School had been her escape when she was a girl. Now it bores her. Information issues forth so slowly from her teachers' mouths. Her girlfriends gossip about parties and pimple-faced boys who press themselves against the girls' bodies when they dance, about nights that go beyond what is allowed and wind up in public parks or motels. She is looking forward to being in front of her computer and updating AllHacker. Thanks to her contacts, she has the exclusive on the suspicious deaths of two hackers a few weeks ago and is covering everything that happens concerning the Resistance. Newspapers such as El Posmo and La Razon use AllHacker to inform their readers about the Resistance but hardly ever cite it as their source.

  The city slips past the windows, a brief trip through a landscape that is being torn down and rebuilt every day, one that does not know how to stay still. A thin woman in pink running shoes walking her Pekingese. Two men surreptitiously holding hands. A police officer taking a bribe from a taxi driver. A drunk sprawled on a bench. A construction gang in yellow hardhats tearing up a sidewalk in order to lay fiberoptic cables: work that will begin again as soon as it is finished, because during installation another, even more powerful cable will have been invented. Walls are covered in Coalition Party posters that call for protests against a government co-opted by the interests of multinational corporations. Globalization is blamed for everything these days. Now you can declare your patriotism by blowing up a McDonald's. No wonder the fast-food chain wants out of the country.

  As the bus draws closer to the suburbs in the western part of the city, there is more space and it is easier to breathe. Flavia sits down next to an old woman reading Vanidades (the title of an article: "Jackie Kennedy Onassis—Forever on the Cover of Magazines"). Flavia has the urge to tell the woman that all heroines are somewhere else. Passive consumerism is passé; it's important to create your own role models now, ones so private that sometimes no one else even knows them.

  She watches the e-mails, video messages, and short-text messages pile up on her Nokia. She quickly reads a few. Most are just the usual junk. But every so often she receives something of real value, so she tries to scan them all. Last week some stranger sent her an e-mail suggesting that Nelson Vivas and Freddy Padilla, the two hackers who died suspiciously, had belonged to the Resistance. The sensational part was the suggestion that the person responsible for their deaths was Kandinsky, the leader of the Resistance. Why? Because Kandinsky was a megalomaniac who did not allow dissent, and Vivas and Padilla had dared question the way the Resistance was being run. Flavia does not usually publish news from unreliable sources; however, this exclusive, if true, was both tempting and explosive. She managed to publish it in a piece that, while not directly accusing Kandinsky, at least suggested the possibility that his group was involved. Predictably, she received several insulting and threatening e-mails in response. In the hacker community, Kandinsky was idolized for his cyberhacktivism, for the way he attacked government and multinational corporation Web sites as a form of protest against their policies. Flavia admired Kandinsky, but she knew that she had to remain objective when reporting on him.

  Vivas and Padilla had worked on the Web version of El Posmo. They were both murdered on the same weekend. Vivas was stabbed early Saturday morning as he left the El Posmo building, and on Sunday night Padilla was shot in the back of the head at the front door to his house. The media had reported the two murders as separate incidents united only by chance. Apparently neither one had any known problems or enemies; there were not enough clues even for speculation. That both had belonged to the Resistance, according to the e-mail, was interesting to Flavia, since it suggested that their connection went beyond mere chance.

  She puts on her earphones and looks for the news on the screen of her cell phone. Lana Nova, her favorite broadcaster, comes on. The virtual woman has her black hair in a ponytail, which accentuates her Asian features. Through the earphones Flavia can hear Lanas synthesized, enveloping voice, one that can move you simply by repo
rting on the weather. No wonder teenagers have taken to watching the news and papering their rooms in posters of Lana.

  For the second consecutive day there have been enormous protests against the hike in electricity rates. GlobaLux, the Italian-American consortium that won the bid to take over the power company in Río Fugitivo just a year ago, defends its actions by saying that the crisis has left it no alternative. It says the rate hike will allow it to finance construction of a new power plant. The Coalition is calling for a general blockade of streets and highways on Thursday. The protests in Río Fugitivo have spread to other cities. There have been violent confrontations between industrial workers, students, and police in La Paz and Cochabamba. A pylon was blown up in Sucre. Business owners in Santa Cruz are calling for community protests. Opposition politicians and indigenous leaders are demanding Montenegro's resignation, saying the months remaining of his term in office will be enough to destroy the country. It is early November. There will be an election in June of next year and a new president in August.

  She hears nothing about the Resistance that she hasn't already reported, and not a word about Vivas and Padilla. Luckily, her competition is in rough shape.

  She turns off her Nokia. Now that the bus has emptied she spots him. Sitting at the back, leaning against a knife-slashed seat, she sees the same guy she saw yesterday. About her age, maybe? Eighteen. Tall, curly hair, bushy eyebrows, earphones, and a yellow MP3 player in his hands. What music is he listening to to escape from the bus driver's tropical beat? The news? A soccer match in Italy or Argentina?

  Suddenly a pair of eyes pin her to her seat, just as had happened yesterday. She tends to ignore men, but there is something in the way he looks at her that is unsettling. She passes a hand over her hair, making sure it is stylishly unkempt. Her dreadlocks are tousled as if she has just woken up. She moistens her lips with her tongue. Oh, how ridiculous she must look in the school uniform that the nuns continue to insist on: the blue, knee-length skirt, white shirt, blue vest, and, horror of horrors, the tricolor tie that is a designer's nightmare. Is she really any less interested in boys than her friends?

  As she gets off the bus it starts to drizzle, the rain lightly tickling her face. She forces herself to keep her back to the bus, a small victory over the young man she pictures with his face pressed against the glass, ready to savor the moment when Flavia will turn around to look at him one last time.

  A garbage can swarming with blue-green, flies is in the bus shelter. An emaciated dog growls listlessly at anyone who passes by. Flavia thinks about Clancy, her blind Doberman, wandering through the house, running into walls as he anxiously awaits her arrival. The neighbors complain about his howling early in the morning; her mom has suggested that it might be time to put the old dog down.

  She has five blocks to go before reaching her neighborhood. The streets are quiet and Flavia likes to feel as if she owns them, walking down the middle of the potholed asphalt, equidistant from the sidewalks flanked by dusty loquat trees. She walks, then jumps along an imaginary hopscotch, wonders what her dad must be doing right now at work, and discovers—annoyed, embarrassed—that she is not alone.

  "From alpha to omega, from zero to infinity," comes a husky voice that is too old for the body of a young man. "A game with multiple theological and metaphysical connotations."

  When had he gotten off the bus? She hasn't heard him walking behind her. For a moment she feels afraid. She is four blocks from her protective refuge, the gated community where two measly policemen guard the entrance.

  "No connotations are necessary to have fun playing hopscotch," she says, affecting the most disinterested expression she can muster.

  "You might like to remain on the surface of things, take them as they come," the young man says, "but it's not possible. Everything means something else, and that something might be what transcends—the mandala we're all searching for."

  The drizzle is no longer gentle; the rain is now soaking and bothersome. Flavia continues on her way. She wants to run home but has to pretend to be calm. You never know. And, she has to admit, it's a strange fear, one that urges her to run from and yet stay near this stranger.

  "I'm Rafael. You're Flavia, aren't you? Don't ask me how I know. Other names? Other identities? It's impossible not to have them. I have at least eight on the Net."

  "Let's just leave it at that right now."

  "No big deal. I'll find them out soon enough."

  She walks without looking at him, feeling as if his presence is a threat. Now it is Rafael who keeps quiet, and she feels obliged to talk.

  "You know which school I go to, but I don't know where you go."

  "I left school a long time ago, 'just Flavia.' If you're interested, one day I'll show you what I do for a living. It has to do with information."

  "You're a reporter?"

  "No. There are those who'll pay a lot to obtain privileged information, and there are those who have to go to great lengths to get that information. At some point all of this might be useful to you. But first, just Flavia, you have to be very careful. Sometimes you're not. Sometimes you report news without being sure about it. And that makes some people angry. It's not a good idea to make light of dangerous subjects."

  Flavia stops and looks at him. Is he a hacker? Which one? From the Resistance? A Rat? Or both? Is he threatening her? He is as nervous as she is; his lower lip is trembling, and his gaze does not seem as firm as it did on the bus. The rain on his curly hair, on his face, has made him lose his composure. He looks like a man with an important secret, weighed down by it. She is not afraid of hackers or of the Resistance either, even though he is dangerous if he's a Rat. It is a Rat's job to inform, and they have grown in number over the past few years; the continuous scandals that surround them, their threat to a citizen's privacy, have displaced them, made them illegal. Some are hackers in order to get information, while others prefer more traditional ways—rummaging through the trash, paying servants, or bribing colleagues.

  "I should go," Flavia says. "But there's always tomorrow. I hope at some point you can be a little clearer."

  "There isn't always tomorrow."

  "You're being fatalistic."

  "I am a fatalist."

  Rafael shakes her hand and says goodbye. Flavia watches him walk away until he is out of sight in the pouring rain. Then she turns and runs home.

  Chapter 3

  MY NAME IS ALBERT. My name is not Albert.

  I was born ... Not. Very. Long. Ago.

  I was never born ... I have no memory of a beginning. I am something that happens. That is always happening ... That will always happen.

  I. Am. An. Emaciated. Grimy. Man ... Gray. Eyes ... Gray. Beard ... Singularly. Vague. Features ... I. Express. Myself. With. Untutored. And. Uncorrected. Fluency. In. Several. Languages ... French. English. German. Spanish. Portuguese from Macao.

  I am connected to several wires that allow me to live. Through the window I watch the day pass by on the avenue. Jacarandas in the window box as well as on the sidewalks ... No wonder ... The avenue is named ... de las Acacias.

  Where are the acacias? Good question.

  In the distance. The mountains. Of Río Fugitivo. Ocher-colored. Not like other mountains. That I remember. From a village. In a valley. Bluish mountains. Markets. Medieval towers. The ruins of fortifications. A river. I don't remember which village it is ... But the image is there ... There's a boy. Who runs and runs.

  It's not me. I can't be me ... I have no childhood. I never have.

  I can speak and sometimes do. I prefer not to. Pronouncing just a few words takes all my energy. Which can lead to thoughts about my fragility. About my possible demise. But that's not how it is. It never is. There's no death for me.

  I am an electric ant. Connected to the earth. And yet more Spirit than anyone ... I am the Spirit of Cryptanalysis. Of Cryptography. Or are they the same?

  My ears are ringing. And there are voices in the room ... Saying ... That ... I ... N
eed ... This. Isolation ... This. Peace ... It's very good. For. Collecting. Your. Thoughts. Peace. There must be a path. That they follow. Somehow. Thought. Must become. Thought ... Somehow. The mixed-up. Associations between ideas. Must have some hidden logic. So that the image of a nun. Is followed by that of a piano. And all of that leads us. To decide whether or not to spare the lives ... Of our fellow men.

  Delirious logic.

  Responsible for my actions. For everything that led me to this bed.

  There were feelings. There was intuition. But reason. Made the final decisions.

  I'd like to know how it happened. To help this silence.

  But the footsteps never stop echoing. I hear them. They resound in here. In this amplifier that is my head ... They wait for my words. They wait. And wait.

  My name is Albert. My name is not Albert.

  I. Am. A. Mechanical. Ant.

  As. I. Recall ... My. Work. Began ... In the year 1900 B.C. I was the one who wrote strange hieroglyphics. Instead of the usual ones. On the tomb of Khnumhotep II. I wrote them on the last twenty columns ... Of the two hundred twenty that were inscribed. It wasn't a secret code. That was fully developed ... But it was. The first intentional. Transformation ... Of writing ... At least ... Of the texts that are known.

  Ah. Exhaustion. I was so many others. Impossible to list them all.

  Markets. Medieval towers. The ruins of fortifications.

  The year 480 B.C.... At that time I was called Demaratus. I was Greek and lived in the Persian city of Susa. And I was witness to the plans that Xerxes had for invading Sparta. Five years to prepare a military force capable of destroying the insolence of Athens and Sparta. I decided to scrape the wax off some wooden tablets. To write of Xerxes' plan on the tablets ... And then cover them in wax again. The tablets were sent to Sparta. And Xerxes' guards did not intercept them ... There, a woman named Gorgo. Daughter of Cleomenes. Wife of Leonidas. Guessed that the tablets contained a message. And she had the wax scraped off. Thus Xerxes lost the element of surprise ... The Greeks began to arm themselves. When the Greeks and Persians confronted one another. On September 27. Near the Bay of Salamis ... Xerxes thought he had won. He thought he had surrounded the Greeks. When in reality he had fallen into the trap they had set for him.