Turing's Delirium (32 page)

In Playground, Kandinsky meets in a private chatroom with the four members of the Restoration whom he chose to accompany him in the next phase of his plan—Corso, Baez, Vivas, and Padilla. The chatroom has 128-bit encryption, one of the most secure oh the market. Kandinsky, through his avatar BoVe, tells them that all their work against the government of Playground has been a preliminary step for what is to come.

 

KANDINSKY
: were at war a new type of war b proud u were chosen 4 the most diphicult part

BAEZ
: whos the enemy

KANDINSKY
: security systems govt sites multinationals w/ investments in the country

CORSO
: whatre the objectives

KANDINSKY
: phinal V no more no less

CORSO
: 2 much

KANDINSKY
: its not 2 late 2 leave

PADILLA
: were with u we just need speciphic objectives

KANDINSKY
: globalux the rest is up 2 u use the whole arsenal virus DoS graphphiti

BAEZ
: were part of the Coalition

KANDINSKY
: were not part of anything but people think of us as the resistance well be the resistance we are the resistance

 

He asks each one of them to act on his own, to prevent the intelligence service from finding similar structures that might get them caught. They will report to him once a week, in a previously agreed-upon chatroom.

They sign off and meet up again in the anarchist neighborhood in Playground, this time together with the other members of the Restoration. They will speak as if their conversation in the private chatroom never took place.

 

The attacks signed by the Resistance begin at the same time as the Coalition's protests against the hike in electricity rates (there are street demonstrations of all kinds in the country's largest cities, but the center of events is Rio Fugitivo). This coincidence will lead the country's main media analysts and advisers to the ministry of the interior to conclude that the groups are working in concert. Traditional uprisings, which were notably successful in the second half of the twentieth century, had managed to unite forces with a new kind of rebellion, one that used digital technology to send its message and to paralyze—sometimes for hours, sometimes for days—information systems belonging to the government and a few large corporations.

The media cover the huge national protests against the government. The leader of the coca growers, through his anti-neoliberal tirades and insults hurled at the
imperialist gringos,
is able to unite the forces of the left that had been dispersed and fragmented for the past fifteen years. The analysts do not consider him a possible candidate for the presidential election next year; they say that his support is limited to rural areas of the country and does not reach the departments in the tropics. The media give the same coverage to the coca leader as to the Resistance's movements. They are fascinated by the figure of Kandinsky and have quickly turned him into a cyberspatial combination of Don Quixote and Robin Hood. There are no photos of him or statements that reveal his identity, which leads to a series of speculations. Some say he must be a foreigner, because of his name and because such technological prowess could only come from abroad; others say that he is actually a local rebel and that even the government should be proud of his work. Hundreds of young people from different social classes appropriate what he represents—his anti-globalization stance, his decision to confront their submissive government—and there is no shortage of hacker apprentices, copycats by the dozen, who try to follow his lead and attack the Web sites of local mayors, a regional development company...

Lying on the mattress in his apartment, watching Lana Nova report the news on his cell phone as he lets his hands rest, Kandinsky loves the media coverage that surrounds his movement. He revels in his subordinates' successful attacks even more. The most creative is Baez, who has implemented an electronic version of what young Argentine and Chilean activists do when they discover where an official from the old dictatorship lives. They go to the official's home and cover the walls in phrases that allude to his past (quotes from victims of torture, resistance leaders), letting the neighborhood and the media know that someone who took part in the massacres lives there. This strategy of attack is known in those countries as
escrache.
Baez has a list of old civil servants from Montenegro's dictatorship and sends them e-mails containing a blunt message:
Murderer, your hands are stained with blood. Ciberescrache,
he calls it. He started out with a few of his colleagues at the Black Chamber. His next step will be to make the names known.

One weekend Nelson Vivas and Freddy Padilla are murdered, a day apart. Vivas is stabbed early Saturday morning as he leaves the
El Posmo
building, and on Sunday night Padilla is shot in the back of the head at the front door to his house. The media report these two deaths as if they were separate incidents; no one seems to know that both men were members of the Resistance.

Kandinsky's first thought is that the government intelligence service is breaking up his organization and that the same fate will soon befall the other members. He decides not to contact anyone for a few days. Nothing happens.

A few weeks pass. There is still no explanation for what happened to Vivas and Padilla. AllHacker, a site that Kandinsky often visits, has dared to speculate that the individuals who were killed were hackers belonging to the Resistance and that the person responsible for their deaths is Kandinsky. The reason: he is a megalomaniac who is more interested in maintaining his own power than in fighting the government. Delirious. Still, something worries him: how did the girl in charge of AllHacker know that Vivas and Padilla were members of the Resistance? Who is her informant? Someone in his inner circle? Or is she working for the government again?

He rules out Baez and Corso. He could not have made such a huge mistake. Still, he will watch them closely.

It has to be the government, which is on his trail and knows more than he thinks it does.

A hack into her Web site will convince him that the person responsible—a schoolgirl named Flavia Sáenz—does not know more than what she reported and is groping about in the dark, with no actual proof for her accusations. One of these days he will play a cruel joke on her and invite her to form part of the Resistance. She needs to be scared, be made to see that they are on her trail.

He meets with Corso and Baez in a private chatroom. He gives them free rein to reinitiate their attacks on Monday of the following week. They will be of a magnitude unsuspected by the government and will continue to increase throughout the week to coincide on Thursday with the Coalition's planned blockade of streets and highways. Corso seems uncertain.

On Wednesday of the following week, in the midst of the Resistance's unbridled attack on government and GlobaLux computers, Corso is shot dead at an Internet café in Bohemia.

Kandinsky feels trapped. He decides to turn off his computers and not leave his apartment until he finds out what's going on. He wonders how he will do that with his computers turned off.

M
Y DESTINY DOES NOT
end in one man ... My destiny continues in all men...

I speak these words on this terrible, mournful day. My body dead but unable to die ... Looking out a window where the colors of evening alight after the rain. The lilac glow of sunset. The green of a tall pepper tree. Waving in the breeze. The washed-out blue of the sky.

The man who shot me has gone ... My chest has been torn open by his lead bullets. My blood is flowing out from more than one hole ... The sheets are being stained with yet another sticky substance. They are used to my dripping saliva ... To the sweat from my pores. To my acidic urine. And now I'm swimming in a reddish pool...

The minutes tick by ... I know that this is not how I will end. At most I will leave this life to return in another ... Perhaps in New Zealand or Pakistan. I will be a cryptographer or a cryptanalyst ... I will again obscure clarity by means of a code. Or reveal it by means of another...

I'm tired. I'm Albert. I was. I am so many more.

Huettenhain. I wasn't Huettenhain.

Approximately an hour passes and the next guard on duty. Dark-skinned and bucktoothed. Finds me ... I hear panic in his voice as he calls his superiors. Asking for an ambulance ... I'd like to tell him to calm down. To trust me. Or at least whoever created me. Whoever created us ... Because the same Creator must have created us all. Or maybe not ... Perhaps a mischievous demiurge created me. Perhaps that's how this cosmic joke can be explained ... Knowing myself to be infinite in a finite body.

Immortal in a mortal body...

I breathe softly. As if my breath doesn't want to be noticed. As if it prefers calm to desperation ... As if it also knows what awaits it. Or what does not.

Two paramedics move me onto a stretcher without a fuss ... To them I'm simply another load. I leave my room. I will miss the window and nothing else ... Not even the photos. Which will soon no longer be mine. They put me into an ambulance ... It might be the last time I travel through the streets of Rio Fugitivo. Its bridges hiding beggars and dead dogs underneath. And suicides. Those who committed suicide...

It's only right that this be my last means of transport. Ambulances are closely linked to my time here. Government security forces liked to use them ... Its paramilitary was moved in them for more than one coup d'état ... An innocent symbol for such a heinous crime.

And I was behind some of those coups. Decoding ... Or inventing decoded messages. So that those who needed to fall fell.

I am an electric ant.

My spirit has no defined morals. Sometimes. Like now. I'm reincarnated in evil men ... Other times in someone who fights evil. Or are they the same?

I was. For example. Marian Rejewski. The Polish cryptanalyst who helped to dismantle the intricate mechanism of Enigma ... That powerful Nazi ciphering machine.

With Enigma ... Pencil and paper were left behind. And technology became responsible for encryption ... The ability to transmit secret messages was mechanized. Enigma looked like a portable typewriter ... One typed a letter on the keyboard ... The keys were connected by cables to rotating disks that mixed up the letters ... Thus, one letter became another. One phrase became another ... And from those disks ran other cables that led to a panel with dim lights ... Each light represented a letter. The lights that lit up were the encrypted letters that made up the encrypted message...

But that wasn't all.

Every time a letter was encrypted. The rotating disk turned one twenty-sixth of a rotation. So that when that letter was typed again ... It was encrypted with a different letter ... And a different light lit up. Each Enigma consisted of three rotating disks. Twenty-six times twenty-six times twenty-six ... Resulting in a total of 17,576 options. Not to mention the reflector ... And the ring ... Which complicated things even more.

It was invented by the German Arthur Scherbius in 1918 ... They went into mass production in 1925. And were used by the German army the following year ... The German army would eventually buy 30,000 Enigma machines. When World War II began. No country could compare with the security of the Germans' communications system ... With Enigma. The Nazis had a great advantage over the Allies ... They lost that advantage thanks to the work of many people. Above all Rejewski...

And the Englishman Alan Turing...

At one time I was both men. I helped to bring down the Nazis.

I was Rejewski. I was born in Bromberg ... A city that after World War I belonged to Poland. And was called Bydgoszcz ... I studied mathematics in Gottingen. I was shy. I wore thick glasses ... I majored in statistics, because I wanted to work for an insurance company ... In 1929 I received an offer to go as an assistant professor to the University of Poznan ... Over sixty miles from Bydgoszcz. I found my true vocation there. I found myself there. The Polish government's Biuro Szyfrów had organized a course in cryptography, to which I was invited ... They had chosen Poznan because it had belonged to Germany until 1918 ... So the majority of mathematicians there spoke German. The biuro's intention was to prepare young mathematicians ... In the intricate art of deciphering the German army's codes ... Until that time it was assumed that the best cryptanalysts were those who worked with language. The arrival of Enigma changed everything. The biuro thought that mathematicians might do better ... And they were right ... At least about me.

The paramedics have given me up for dead. Like so many others on so many other occasions.

The ambulance advances and stops. Advances and stops ... The driver has to get out and speak with those who are still blocking the streets ... I hear bits of the negotiation. Please. Let us through ... We've got an old man who's dying. They ask him for money ... Sometimes they come and peer in through the rear window ... See me lying on the stretcher. With my mouth open...

An electric ant that appears to be lifeless.

We continue on our way.

In order to tackle Enigma. The basis of my theory was the essential fact that the weakness of every cryptographic system is its repetitions ... The basic repetition of Enigma was at the beginning. In the message key ... Which consisted of three letters that were repeated twice for security purposes ... This key determined the position of the rotating disks. Their sequence ... The position of the rings ... Et cetera ... And the key was found in the armed forces cipher manual. The encoder thus indicated which key would be used. The one who received the message read the key and adjusted his machine for the signal that would come ... So that the ciphered text was automatically deciphered.