Turing's Delirium (16 page)

The atmosphere in the Bletchley Room is frenzied. The computers are on, the screens glowing like aquariums; people are coming and going. You miss that hustle and bustle. Romero Flores, a cryptanalyst with a perpetual tic in his right eye, approaches. He acts as if he is your friend, but you hate the way he stares at the photo of Flavia on your desk and tells you that you have a verrrrrry beautiful daughter.

"You're late. The boss was looking for you."

"Just what I need. Whenever they say it's urgent, it's never anything important."

"It is this time. They need your memory, Turing."

"The memory of the archives, you mean."

The red diagonal stripes on his tie ... What did the red and blue mean? Was he trying to say that Turing was going to be reprimanded by Ramírez-Graham?

Once again the elevator ride, the descent into that infinite well of information, that well of infinite information. Otis, green walls, maximum six passengers, 1000 pounds, last inspected nine months ago. Could it launch you into the abyss without haste? Yes, according to a calculation of probabilities. How many seconds have you spent in this elevator? All together they added up to minutes and hours, even days: a worthy sum of life.

You take your glasses off; the bent frame makes your eyes hurt. You put them back on. A spearmint Chiclet in your mouth. Less than a minute later, you throw it into the garbage. You check the news. Slowly, the government's communication services are beginning to work again. The electronic graffiti that was posted by the hackers has been mostly erased. You should have stayed at home.

Your first trip to the basement had been six months after you started work at the Black Chamber. That afternoon you had gone into Albert's office to discuss the week's news. You had already become his protégé. He assigned you the lion's share of the work and were his salvation when a ciphered message resisted interpretation by others. Your coworkers were jealous of that preference. It didn't matter to you. Nothing mattered as long as you could be near Albert, do what he told you to do.

That afternoon Albert came out of his office and asked you to accompany him. You walked down the narrow hallways toward the elevator. He continued speaking in his captivating voice with his strange accent, Spanish at times inflected by foreign syllables and intonations. Where was he really from? He spoke of how much there was to be done in Rio Fugitivo. Once you were in the elevator, he said, "The government has given me carte blanche, but there's no money. With more money, I'd perform miracles." "You should take it with a grain of salt, boss. You've already done plenty." "Our enemies never sleep, Turing." The door opened. You did not know where you were. Stumbling in the darkness, you followed him. "I'm going to turn this floor into the general archives. So much paper accumulates. We have to begin to organize it, file it all." Albert stopped and turned around, bringing his face close to yours. You felt an anxious tremor in your lips. You looked down at the floor. "Turing, look at me. There's no reason to be ashamed." You lifted your gaze. His lips drew closer to yours. You tried to dissociate yourself, become detached from the moment, see yourself from afar as if someone else were in the basement with Albert, but you discovered that you did not want to distance yourself entirely. You wanted to please Albert. You wanted your boss to be happy. He deserved nothing less.

His mouth stopped before touching yours. Was he testing you? Did he want to see the extent of your submission? What you were capable of? He already knew: you were capable of anything. No more proof was required; there was no need to kiss you. He turned back around and continued speaking of his plans to install an archive in the basement. Nothing had happened.

There were other incidents similar to the one in the basement, but Albert never actually touched you. You told yourself that unlike the real Alan Turing, you were not attracted to men, although you did have to admit that you felt slighted when nothing happened. You were extremely disappointed when you found out that there were other men and women in Albert's life, but you did nothing to tell him of your feelings. In time you discovered that his interest in you was purely intellectual and you quietly accepted your role. Something was better than nothing. The threats of physical contact became fewer as the years passed but never disappeared entirely.

"Wake up, Mr. Sáenz."

Baez is in the room, Santana next to him. Ramírez-Graham's acolytes. You detest them. They think that everything begins and ends with a computer; without one, they couldn't add up a simple sum. With such mediocrity in charge, how did the government expect to combat the signals that crossed in the air, the electronic pulses that smelled of treason, that oozed conspiracy?

"Mr. Sáenz, you're late."

You hate that Baez doesn't call you Turing. Is that his way of saying you are beneath him, that you are just an old civil servant who hasn't been fired solely because of compassion? No, not only that, it's the secrets that you keep, the files you've seen, the orders that have been given or the fury that has been unleashed as a result of your work. Arrogant upstart had barely learned his first incoherent words when you were writing—better yet, deciphering—your years of glory. And to top it all off, now they call you a criminal, a murderer, and without even showing their faces. Cowards.

"I had to drive carefully. The power is out in some areas of the city."

"All right, OK," Baez said, "but you really must leave a little earlier in order to arrive on time. Punctuality is key. There's no time to waste. All right? OK?"

"We haven't had much luck with the virus," Santana interjects. "But we do have the source code for the software that posted the graffiti on the government sites, and we've found certain suggestive indications."

Source code? Software? Sites? Santana's Spanglish is a joke ... He should save himself the trouble and simply speak in English.

"It's a lucky break," Baez says, "but we all need it. Like the boss says, a criminal's fingerprints can be found even in software."

Not always, you think. Hopefully not this time. So you want to see Ramírez-Graham defeated? That would imply that the government would be defeated. You'd better erase those thoughts from your mind. But it's impossible to confront thought, to prevent it from taking whatever route it chooses. Albert had been on to something in his search for the algorithm that allowed thought to think. Behind the disordered associations of ideas was an order that had to be found, the narrative trigger that was the source of supposed mental chaos. Just like machines, like computers, the human brain had certain logical processes that led thought from one point to another.

"We need," Santana says, "to compare what we have with other graffiti that has similar code. All codes from other attacks were stored on a computer that was infected, but luckily they had all been printed and filed. You must know where they're stored."

You remove your crooked glasses. It is rumored that Ramírez-Graham is in danger of losing his job. He has been unable to catch the men—young men, adolescents, children?—in the Resistance. Ever since they came on the scene, they have played an offensive game of chess against Ramírez-Graham, destroying his pawns, maiming his bishops, and now they are about to take his queen and checkmate his king. Ramírez-Graham walks through the hallways carrying the files of information he has managed to amass, puzzles that are invariably missing a piece and cannot be completed. That's the price of such arrogance. You admit it: in this case, and only this time, you are on the side of the creators and not the decipherers of code.

"Can I see what you have?"

"Whatever you need," says Santana. "Just hurry. Did you know that the boss has decided to turn to your daughter? They say she's very good."

"No, I didn't know. And yes, she is. She has helped us before. During Albert's time—oh, not more than two years ago. Thanks to her, we caught a couple of hackers."

"Crackers, you mean."

If they think that mentioning Flavia will bother you, they are wrong. On the contrary, you are filled with pride: she is your flesh and blood. Albert was the first to realize how talented she was. Ruth and you thought her dexterity with computers was just a sophisticated teenage hobby. Flavia would go places, and you with her.

Baez hands you a black file. Why black, you ask yourself, and not yellow, as always, or blue, or red? You shouldn't read too much into the colors. You open it: pages of binary code, zeros and ones in rigorous formation, capable in their repetitive simplicity of hiding the complete works of Vargas Llosa or the detailed figures from the latest census. The zeros and ones, are they forming any kind of figure? Nothing obvious. You can think of several cases where the creators of code left messages in them, signatures, distinctive signs, mocking or disdainful phrases. They think they're so smart and can't help one final gesture of superiority. What would your work be without these small weaknesses of passion? It is impossible to tame desire completely.

You look up the map of the archives on your computer. To those who were in charge of this floor before you, filing meant simply accumulating information in a disorganized manner. And just as it is easy to lose a book in a library, it is also easy to lose information in an archive. The map on the blinking screen is quite incomplete—black spots on the skin of the tiger. You know, and sigh sadly because of it, that a good deal of information has been lost forever.

One section contains different source codes that have been found on hacked computers. You type
graffiti
and
Resistance.
Just in case, you type
Kandinsky.
Box 239, top shelf, row H. Your memory is the computer's memory. With nary a gesture to betray your sense of triumph, so that Baez can suffer a little bit more, you open the door to the archives, turn on the light, and lose yourself in its narrow aisles.

The arthritic wood creaks, and the poorly ventilated enclosure smells musty. On the shelves are boxes containing papers, diskettes, Zip disks, CDs, videos, DVDs, cassettes. Like museum artifacts, collected you have no idea how, there are also eighteen-inch acetate disks, precursors to vinyl disks that were used during World War II and that can be listened to only on a machine called a Memovox (there is one at the National Archives Building in Washington). Diskettes that can no longer be read because they were written using programs such as Lotus, comprehensible only to those who studied computer science in the seventies. Optical disks that were in fashion in the eighties and have disappeared from the market. The information age produces so much information that it winds up suffocating itself and becoming obsolete. The speed with which technology changes results in new equipment that quickly replaces what came before. Thanks to digital technology, more and more data are being accumulated in less space; what is gained in quantity is lost in the fragility of the new media, in their inability to persist. Today information is being stored as never before in the history of man; today information is being lost as never before in the history of man. At times you wander through the aisles without noticing it. Other times you feel every drop—bit, pixel—of information, what is lost and what still exists, and you feel close to a mystical ecstasy, to the rapture that a mischievous god has in store for you.

You come to the stand you were looking for. You open a few boxes and take out several files, hold them in your hands. They aren't heavy, but you feel them push you to the floor. You kneel down, pressing the files to your chest, look left and right and up—box after box in the process of decay.

You touch your old skin, lined with wrinkles. You too are information that is decomposing irreversibly. You feel that there, up above, someone wants to speak to you. You have no idea what that someone wants to say. Perhaps it doesn't matter.

F
LAVIA OPENS THE REFRIGERATOR
and takes out an already-bitten apple. She lies on the sofa and turns on the television. She watches the news: nothing about the hackers who were killed; no news about the Resistance; an interview with the Aymara leader of the coca growers, who announces the formation of a political party and declares himself "future president of the country." She switches to a channel with Japanese cartoons—
Haruki,
about a frog or a toad that survived a nuclear attack. How were the Japanese able to universalize their pop culture so easily? Soon there would be Haruki backpacks, Haruki pajamas, Haruki sandals ... She mutes the volume on the television and turns on the stereo: the Chemical Brothers, "Come with Us." Techno goes better with the images.

The pictures that surround her in the living room have a single theme, stormy nights in the impressionist style. Who would have imagined: the French spent thirty years painting flowers and trees and created a style that still persists today. Her parents' old-fashioned taste is incongruent with the world of anime and the Chemical Brothers. She would rather have something else on the walls. Lichtenstein, for example. But even that's not enough; something closer to her taste would be digital art, pictures that can't stay still.

She reads her e-mail on her silver Nokia. The guidance counselor at school has written, asking where she is:
It's 9:15
A.M
. and you're not in class.
Oh, the miseries of technology, which connects her to the world and prevents her from completely escaping it (unless technology is used for that very purpose).

The house is empty. The closed curtains block out the morning light. More than once she has thought she was alone, only to discover Mom locked in her room. Maybe she's home now? She should go up and check. She eats her apple with great relish.

Flavia understands her parents less and less. They seem so distant from the beauty of the world. Dad ... he's been different for a long time now. Or maybe he was always like that and she is only just realizing it. Mom has imprisoned herself in an exhausting straitjacket. The two of them used to do things together; they would find any excuse to go to the supermarket or the mall and between purchases would tell each other their secrets, as if they were friends. As far as Flavia was concerned, her mom
was
her best friend; she had never managed to relate that well to girls her own age. But the intimacy and trust had ended. Maybe it had simply been a phase between the ages of ten and thirteen, when a girl was reaching puberty, her body and mind transforming, and she needed, as never before, the support of someone older to stave off her fears and reaffirm her confidence.