Turing's Delirium
 
First Mariner Books edition 2007
Spanish edition copyright © 2003 by Edmundo Paz Soldán
English translation copyright © 2006 by Lisa Carter
All rights reserved
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this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
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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'.64âdc22 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 mÃo.
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'sÃlaba que no esté llena de ternuras y temores; que no sea en alguno de esos lenguajes el nombre poderoso de un dios.
â
JORGE LUIS BORGES,
La Biblioteca de Babel
Â
The king hath note of all that they intend,
By interception which they dream not of.
â
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Henry V
Â
All information looks like noise until you break the code.
PART Iâ
NEAL STEPHENSON,
Snow
Crash
Chapter 1
A
S 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 cardâgreen, meaning Beyond Top Secretâwithout 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 RamÃrez-Graham arrived (you had once called him "Mr. RamÃrez" and he had corrected you: "RamÃrez-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. RamÃrez-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. RamÃrez-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 technocratâpardon the contradictionâwith 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 RamÃrez-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 haircutâhe 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 dirtyâfingerprints, coffee stainsâand 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.
RamÃrez-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 useâthey 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'tâyou 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.
