Turing's Delirium Pa - Softcover

Soldan, Edmundo Paz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618872590 ISBN 13: 9780618872596

Publisher: Mariner, 2007

Synopsis

The setting: Bolivia in the near future. Miguel "Turing" Saenz, a veteran cryptanalyst, is the most famous code-breaker in the employment of a secret government organization known as the Black Chamber. He is leading the pursuit of the Chamber's latest target: Kandinsky, a "cyberhacktivist" leader who is staging a war against both the government and the country's transnational corporations as part of an antiglobalization revolution. As Turing finds himself drawn into a web of murder, intrigue, and deception, he begins to suspect that his work is not as innocent as he once believed.

About this title

About the Author

Edmundo Paz Soldán is the author of six novels and two short story collections. He was awarded the 2002 Bolivian National Book Award for Turing's Delirium and a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship. He has won the National Book Award in Bolivia, the prestigious Juan Rulfo Award, and was a finalist for the Romulo Gállegos Award. He is an associate professor at Cornell University. One of the few McOndo writers who live in the United States, he is frequently called upon as the movement's spokesperson by the American media.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Turing's Delirium

By Edmundo Paz Soldan

Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright © 2007 Edmundo Paz Soldan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618872596
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 ruth1. 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. Sáenz."
"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 fi red? You put yourself in
his shoes: you can't be 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 Étienne 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 Río 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 fl ock to the house, attracted
by her distant, languid beauty.
The Vigenère 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 fl
ow 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 it's
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:
RZWIJWJWDTZWMFSIXFWJXYFNSJIBNYMGQTTI

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 fi ve 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?

Spanish edition copyright © 2003 by Edmundo Paz Soldán, English
translation copyright © 2006 by Lisa Carter. Reprinted with permission by
Houghton Mifflin Company.



Continues...

Excerpted from Turing's Deliriumby Edmundo Paz Soldan Copyright © 2007 by Edmundo Paz Soldan. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mariner
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0618872590
• ISBN 13: 9780618872596
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 306