Genocide of One: A Thriller (49 page)

One sentence in the CIA report gave him hope:
Our local operative, Scientist, has learned of our intention to locate Kento Koga
and is becoming increasingly uncontrollable. We feel there is a distinct possibility
that Scientist will actually help the suspect escape, and we are exploring possible
measures to deal with this.

Rubens could only pray this Scientist would betray his handlers and take Kento’s side.

The second update was from Logan of the NSA, and the contents startled him. The encrypted
transmissions from Japan to Africa had finally been decoded.

The moment he received this intel, Rubens raced out of the command center and sped
in his Audi to Fort Meade. The time had come to see exactly what information Nous
had been transmitting by satellite. If this pinpointed Nous’s present position, then
Rubens would have to find a way to suppress it.

It was late at night when he arrived at NSA headquarters, but Logan was there to greet
him. He passed through the same security checks as before and headed to the conference
room. There were three NSA employees in the room, one of whom was the mathematician,
Fisher, he’d met before. The other two were new to him.

Logan first introduced him to an elderly man in black-framed glasses. “This is Dr.
Kenneth Danford, an expert in linguistics.”

Rubens and Danford shook hands. The linguistics scholar’s grip was surprisingly strong.
He was next introduced to a middle-aged Asian man. “This is Tak Ishida. He specializes
in Japanese and Japan-related issues.”

Ishida responded in a perfect East Coast accent. Rubens figured he must be a Japanese
American. From the way he spoke, Rubens also judged him to be quite well educated.
Rubens was impressed by how many different types of people worked for this, the world’s
largest intelligence organization.

Rubens got right to the point. “So what did you find out?”

Fisher spoke in his usual agitated way. “The random number sequence we got from Melvin
Gardner’s computer finally proved helpful. But because the random number sequence
was broken into three fragments, the message we decrypted was also divided into three
types of data. First there was this.”

Fisher held out a sheaf of printouts. Rubens took it and glanced through it. It was
a Mercator map of the earth, including Africa and North and South America. Beside
this were dense rows of numerical values.

“This is a map of the undersea topography and ocean currents in the North Atlantic,
including data on water temperatures and tidal currents.”

Rubens scanned the printouts. The North Equatorial Current, which flowed west from
the west coast of Africa, turned into the Gulf Stream near the North American continent
then changed direction and flowed northeast. A great current of seawater that circulated
in the North Atlantic. Differences in water temperature were indicated by a gradation
from green to red.

“The water temperature this year seems unusually high,” Fisher said.

“Isn’t this public information from the Internet?”

“It is. Put together from observational data from a number of countries. We’ve already
confirmed the existence of a corresponding website.”

“This information was sent from Japan to Africa?” Why would Nous want data on the
North Equatorial Current? Was the movement to the southern part of Africa just a diversion?
Were they really planning to escape by ship near the equator? If that were true, then
they wouldn’t be heading to Japan but to North America.

“We have no idea why this information was sent. One of the other two messages we decrypted
was audio data, the other text data. Take a listen.”

Fisher inserted a CD-ROM into his laptop.

Before the sound started Logan added an explanation. “What you’ll hear is a child’s
voice, we believe. Our analysis indicates it is a girl around five years old.”

Rubens was perplexed. “A child’s voice? Not a middle-aged woman’s?”

“Correct.”

Fisher tapped his keyboard, and they could hear a girl speaking. Rubens listened intently
and was even more confused. “What language is that?”

“Something close to Japanese,” Ishida replied.

“What do you mean ‘close’?”

“The accent is standard Japanese, but the message is unintelligible to Japanese.”

“How so?”

“The grammar is odd, and she’s using lots of vocabulary that doesn’t appear in any
dictionary. But there was one clue we did get.” Ishida passed Rubens the final file.
“This is the text data we decrypted at the same time.”

Rubens looked over the pages, but they were covered with unfamiliar writing, and he
couldn’t decipher it. “Is this Japanese, too?”

“Yes. It seems the child’s voice is reading this writing. As if she’s teaching someone
to read. Before I say anything about this cryptic message, may I explain a little
bit about Japanese?”

“Go ahead.”

“I’ll try to keep it short,” Ishida said. “Because the Japanese had no writing system
until around the third century
CE
, that period is considered prehistoric. Starting in the fifth century they imported
Chinese characters and began using them. At that point the Japanese had not developed
the ability for abstract thought, so they also introduced many abstract concepts as
words from China. Which explains why nearly half the vocabulary used by present-day
Japanese are foreign words from China. Take this, for example.” Ishida pulled over
his legal pad and wrote down two characters. “Each Chinese character has its own special
meaning. Put several together and they form a word and create a new concept. The first
part of this word means things like ‘not protruding,’ ‘still’ or ‘quiet,’ or ‘nothing
happened.’ The second part means things like ‘adding two things,’ ‘two things reconciled,’
‘a calm and settled situation.’ Put these two together and you get the word
, which means ‘peace.’”

Thought patterns of Westerners and Asians are completely different, Rubens realized.
Not that one was superior to the other—just different. “About how many Chinese characters
are there?”

“More than one hundred thousand,” Ishida readily replied. “But Japanese today use
only about two or three thousand.”

“And they remember all of them?”

“They do,” Ishida said, and smiled. “It might seem irrational, but Chinese characters
actually have their advantages. They enter the brain as visual information, so when
compared to phonograms there are fewer steps necessary to connect them with semantic
meaning. In other words, Chinese characters introduce a lot of interesting possibilities.
You can read books and film subtitles faster. You’re rewarded for the difficulty of
learning them. But I’ve gotten off topic.”

Ishida returned to the decrypted text data and pointed out a few words. The Chinese
characters—
—were for Rubens, of course, just odd-looking figures.

“These ambiguous words seem to be entirely new concepts made by combining Chinese
characters. The ones the girl’s voice pronounces—such as
senronkei
,
koronkei
,
zanketsukai
, and so forth—are new concepts.”

“Can’t they be translated into English?”

“As I explained, each character has meaning, and based on that I could hazard a guess.”
Ishida handed over a sheet written in English. “But now an even bigger riddle presents
itself.”

Rubens tried to carefully read through the English translation, but couldn’t follow.

“What in the world?” Rubens asked, his eyes glued to the page. What was written there
was indeed unclear, but it wasn’t pure nonsense, either. “Truth-value transforms randomly?”

“I’ve never heard of a system of logic like that,” Fisher, the mathematician, commented.

“This word
choyuchi
: its meaning is unknown?”

“If you synthesize the meaning of the characters, it means something like ‘a subject
that makes a decision that transcends nonfixed wisdom and knowledge,’ though this
is just a tentative translation. Anybody who could comprehend the meaning would have
to be someone who already understands
choyuchi
-type things.”

Rubens tried connecting some of the fragments to come up with a meaningful thought.
“Doesn’t this suggest what you might call a kind of complex logic? Something that
would correspond to a complex system—like quantum logic, made to parallel quantum
theory?”

“But we don’t know what kind of axiomatic system the complex logic is based on in
this case,” Fisher replied.

“I’d like to give an opinion, if I may.” Danford, the linguist, had been quiet throughout,
but now spoke up. “I was asked to analyze this writing, and at first I thought it
was just nonsense. But if you don’t get hung up on the semantic content and focus
solely on the grammar, you arrive at an odd supposition—namely, that on the grammatical
level this might be an entirely original artificial language.”

“So it does follow certain rules?”

“It does. The grammar is fundamentally different from the natural language that our
brains produce. As I investigated this writing it hit home how one-dimensional our
own language is. Whether writing or speech, it proceeds along a one-directional axis
of time. But this writing doesn’t. It moves back and forth among concepts and propositions
that are on a plane and completes the message that way. The
x
and
y
coordinates indicate the position on that plane, though it’s unclear what the disposition
indicates regarding meaning or rules. And if you read to the end you’ll notice a
z
coordinate, which means that the language itself has strata. If we employed this
kind of grammar, many paradoxes that puzzle us might disappear.”

This very odd conclusion bothered Rubens. “But this message was read by a little girl,
wasn’t it?”

“Correct.”

“Then this isn’t just something you read but a language you can speak as well. Such
a complex grammar wouldn’t be practical.”

“You’re right. For our brains it would be impossible to speak this language.”

“Impossible for our brains?” Rubens felt a sudden shock at Danford’s casual turn of
phrase. He remembered Heisman’s low voice.

You’re overlooking one very critical problem
.

“If you tried speaking this language you’d soon lose the thread of what you were saying.
Because if you don’t memorize the position of the concepts and propositions scattered
in three dimensions you won’t be able to communicate. There’s one more thing besides
the grammar that I should add,” Danford said, oblivious to Rubens’s speechless state.
He pointed with a pen to two words in the translated text. “In the original text the
words
sunani
and
zunani
appear frequently, but these aren’t Japanese, I take it.”

Ishida shook his head. “Those words don’t exist in Japanese. And these aren’t written
in Chinese characters but in special Japanese phonograms, so it’s impossible to reason
by analogy what the meaning could be.”

“If we focus on the words’ function, we see they’re used as conjunctions. But, as
Mr. Ishida points out, because the meaning is unknown we can only understand them
syntactically.”

Fisher, seated next to Danford, smiled as if this were all quite interesting. “That
makes sense. The more conjunctions the more logical constants, right? The language
is different, therefore so is the logic. The person who uses this language has different
patterns of thinking from ordinary people.”