Turing's Delirium (2 page)

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 ordained 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.

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?

B
LACK 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.