Turing's Delirium (33 page)

A very simple idea came to me ... If the first six letters of a message were the key ... And if the key was the same group of letters repeated twice. Say, DMQAJT ... Then the first and the fourth letters. The second and the fifth. The third and the sixth. Represented the same letters. They were just encoded using different permutations...

You could get a great deal of information about the first six permutations. If you received several Enigma messages each day ... We had at our disposal at least a hundred messages a day. That's how we went about discovering the daily key ... The signal key ... It took us a year ... Then the Germans' communication became clear to us. We spent the thirties struggling with Enigma's keys on a daily basis.

No one should underestimate what we did ... No one should underestimate what I did.

We even built a machine. Called the bomba ... Which could review all of Enigma's initial structure positions in under two hours ... Until it found the daily key. All of this ended in December 1938 ...When the Germans decided to make their machine more secure. And added two more rotating disks. That was enough to make decoding impossible. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland ... The war began. And I could do nothing. Just when I was needed most...

We stop again. The door opens. The light pierces my retinas ... We've arrived at a hospital ... The paramedics carry the stretcher. They go into the emergency room. I should tell them that this is no emergency ... What has to happen will happen.

Maybe I'll go. Maybe I won't.

Deep down it doesn't matter...

Perhaps that's my punishment.

Kaufbeuren. Rosenheim. Names that come back.

The boy ... Where was I a child? There are images of a valley. And of a boy. But I don't know whether that's my valley. Or whether I'm that boy.

I was Alan Mathison Turing. I was born in London in 1912. In 1926, I began to attend Sherborne. In Dorset. I was a shy teenager ... Only interested in science. Until I met Christopher Morcom ... He was also interested in science. We were friends for four years ... Disaster struck in 1930. Christopher died of tuberculosis ... He never knew how I felt about him. I never dared to tell him ... He was. The only. Personal have. Ever. Loved.

I decided to be a scientist. Christopher had won a scholarship to Cambridge ... I wanted one as well. I wanted to do for him what he could not ... I got the scholarship in 1931. I put a photo of him on my desk ... And I concentrated on my studies. Four years later I got my degree ... I went to Princeton for a few years. In 1937 I published my most important work on mathematical logic.
On Computable Numbers.
In it. I described an imaginary machine that would follow predetermined steps in order to multiply. Or add. Or subtract. Or divide. A Turing Machine for a particular function ... Then I thought of a Universal Turing Machine ... Capable of doing everything that each one of the Turing Machines could do...

The first computers would be born from these ideas. Once there was sufficient technology.

It's no coincidence that I wanted to find the algorithms that allow our brain to function ... The logical steps by means of which thought allows itself to be thought ... The order that's hidden behind our disordered associations of ideas...

Each one of us is. In his or her own way. A Universal Turing Machine. The world works like a Universal Turing Machine. There is an algorithm that controls all of the heartbeats in the universe ... Or perhaps it's a few lines of code ... All of the steps. From the simplest to the most complicated ... This will be proven. Once there is enough technology ... It could take years. Decades. Centuries. The only certainty is that I ... Who am bleeding in a tidy hospital room. Will be present.

In 1939 I was called by the Government Code and Cipher School to work as a cryptanalyst. Forty miles north of London. In an aristocratic mansion in Bletchley ... It was the headquarters for the government's efforts to intercept and read enemy messages ... Ten thousand people worked there. We were the inheritors of the prestigious Room 40 from World War I. During my first few months at Bletchley ... The work on Enigma ... Was based on Rejewski's discoveries ... But I had to find an alternative.

The war was quickly complicating the situation. Now Enigma consisted of eight rotating disks. And in May of 1940. The first six letters of the message disappeared ... The Germans had found another way to transmit the key. The bombes I built to tackle Enigma were much more complicated than Rejewski's bombas ... I finished the first design in early 1940. The first one arrived at Bletchley in March of that same year ... It was called Victoria ... And it was capable of scanning, quite quickly, the huge number of signals that were intercepted each day ... Searching for words that the military used frequently. Such as
Oberkommando...
High Command ... Then the decoders went to work.

The basic idea was that Enigma ... Never encrypted a letter using that same letter. So if the letter
o
appeared in the ciphered text ... We were sure that the word
Oberkommando
didn't start there. These words that one assumed might exist in a message were necessary for the bombes to work ... The bombe encoded them with the greatest possible number of options ... If a combination of letters was discovered. Then the bombe could indicate the daily key used for that signal...

It was. In effect. The precursor to a computer.

In the beginning ... It could take a week to find the key. The more advanced bombes might take less than an hour. In 1943 there were sixty bombes in operation ... Thanks to them ... In the first year of the war ... England was already able to read the German army's secret messages ... Thanks to this ... Churchill learned of Hitler's intention to conquer England. And he prepared to defend it...

One of the main reasons for the Nazi defeat. Is. The defeat of Enigma early on.

There is the sound of voices in the room ... I don't understand what they're saying about me. They've put an intravenous line in and soon the anesthesia will course through my body ... The lights go out...

A blurry image comes to mind. That of Miguel Sáenz on his first day of work at the Black Chamber. Hunched over his desk.

He appeared to be so dedicated to his work. So unaffected by distractions ... That he looked like a Universal Turing Machine ... All logic. All input ... All output ... That's when I decided to call him Turing.

He always thought that the nickname was because of his talent for cryptanalysis.

The real reason was different.

C
ARLA HELPS YOU
into the room. You lie down on the bed and she lies down beside you; you shelter your head between her breasts. The reddish glow of a lamp bathes you in the fading afternoon.

"I'm tired. So tired."

"I bet there's more to it than that."

"Anything I say would sound melodramatic and untrue."

You speak without looking at her, as usual. It is easier for you to speak words that veil your feelings, to express them indirectly.

"Try," she insists.

After a long silence punctuated by the sounds of cars in the street, you tell her—this time trying to get straight to the point.

"I've been living a life that's not mine."

"Come on ... That doesn't help me understand anything."

You would like to fall asleep and wake up in another reality. At one time you had a heightened sense of reality; over the past few years it has become ordinary, and all of a sudden, in retrospect, it has become a lie. Albert, your admired boss, was a playwright filling your life with deceitful acts that had fatal consequences. All of your actions are irreversible; there is no way to bring back the victims of your talent for cryptanalysis. Oh, if only you had failed at least once. But Albert chose you because he knew you would not fail. Or perhaps the puzzles he gave you were not very difficult, were intentionally made to match your talents.

And you, who would have given your life for him. And you, who, admit it, are still capable of giving your life for him. How humiliating. How pleasantly, achingly humiliating.

You cling to Carla as if you are about to drown. Can she keep you afloat? That is asking far too much; all you have to do is stroke her arms to feel the infected wounds. With so much methadone in her system, she can't even take responsibility for herself. She has been the one clinging to you these past few months, the one who has made you, among other things, use your credit card—the numbers encrypted in each transaction, the presence of codes in the most insignificant gestures of daily life—to pay for her room at the boarding house, her debts at the El Dorado, her unsuccessful hours in rehab, and yes, don't fool yourself again, the methadone purchased behind your back. Did you really think you could pull her out of her abyss? Or is it that perhaps by being a Good Samaritan you were unconsciously atoning for the guilt that threatened to rise to the surface? Ruth was right after all. And those messages as well: your hands
are
stained with blood.

"Miguel, I can't understand what you're saying."

"I didn't say anything."

"I thought I heard you mumble something."

"Don't pay any attention to me. I must be delirious. Too much work. Too much stress."

"What the hell is wrong with you? Snap out of it. We need to talk."

"I'm listening."

"I'm all out of money, and I don't have anywhere to sleep tonight. They threw me out of the boarding house and kept my suitcase until I pay them."

Her voice is raised. No, please: you are not prepared for another angry outburst.

"I thought they were your friends."

"Even friends lose their patience."

"Didn't you have enough to get you through to the weekend?"

"You think a few pesos last an eternity. I'm tired, Miguel. We can't go on like this."

You know what she is referring to. Lulled by the pleasure of her skin, you said more than you should have. You told her that your relationship with Ruth had run its course and that only a lukewarm friendship remained of your love. You insinuated that if everything continued to go well between Carla and you, it wouldn't be hard to ask Ruth for a divorce. Oh, the things you said, the easy promises. Did you really think that there could be a future for the two of you? Was it one more of your indulgent self-deceptions? You picture yourself in a rented apartment, sitting in front of a computer reading the latest issue of
Cryptology
while Carla, sprawled on the bed, injects herself with a sharp, dirty needle, shouting at you to come help her hold the syringe steady. You feel a mixture of compassion and care for her, but not love. And admit it, you really don't enjoy the sex very much. After all that caged animal frenzy, you are left feeling empty.

"I'm not suggesting anything," she says, and you know that she is lying. "It's just that for a while now I've thought about moving to Santa Cruz. I stayed because you wanted me to stay. Now I see it's all been for nothing."

Her chest smells of one of those perfumes she is fond of, the kind that dulls your senses. Venomous plants or rotting flowers that triumph by demolishing their rival. Ruth is subtler with her perfumes, her selection of jasmine and soft almonds more refined. The sad thing is that you seem to have lost the art of understanding subtleties a long time ago. In the aseptic world of the Black Chamber, in the loneliness of the archives, you missed the smell of Carla and not Ruth.

"I don't know if it's the right time to talk about this."

"Then when? I'm warning you, if we don't make a decision, then this will be the last time we see each other."

There is a threatening tone to her voice. Only you could find yourself in a situation where a drug-addict prostitute feels she has the right to give you an ultimatum. Albert was wrong: you got here because your thoughts were incapable of thinking what they should have thought. There is no logic that imposes order on the world behind the associative paths that your thoughts take. And if there is meaning brave enough to be able to articulate the chaos of events—to cipher the uncipherable, if there is such a word—only a superior being could be at the center of that kind of conspiracy.

Carla strokes your cheeks, and you find yourself about to cry as you haven't cried since you were a child, when the world was young and your feelings were too. When had it become so hard to express yourself? Where had you acquired that shell that allowed you to escape your environment and its ambiguities? Over time you had become someone you never Could have imagined when you were fifteen, when your dad would lock himself in his room with a bottle of whiskey and you would hear the muffled shouts that he never would have uttered in front of his children, the sobbing when he discovered that all those hours of work per week were not enough to support a family, and you mumbled to yourself that you wouldn't be like that, you wouldn't hide from yourself or from anyone.

You kiss Carla. There is, for a few moments, tenderness in the contact between your lips. As often happens, though, her tongue ruins everything as it thrusts into your mouth.

You close your eyes. You are exhausted, absolutely exhausted.

When you open your eyes, you are surprised by the light of day coming in through the windows. It is early morning; you fell asleep. Your bladder is about to burst. Carla stretches by your side.

"Good morning, sleepyhead. We owe a ton for this room, but I couldn't bring myself to wake you up."

"I want to go to church," you say out of nowhere, with a conviction that surprises you. Carla looks at you, confused. You head to the bathroom.

"Seriously," you continue. "I need to be alone for a few hours, but I promise I'll come back for you."

"Don't say it if you don't mean it," she says, sitting up on the bed, looking at you with bloodshot eyes.

Your mind has plotted your course as you slept next to Carla. You don't know whether you have a future with her, but you know that you don't have a future with Ruth. You will go to the chamber and hand your resignation to Ramírez-Graham. You will go to church to confess your sins, even knowing that you do not want any sort of atonement. You will go home and ask Ruth for a divorce. You will pack your bags and rent an apartment. You will take Carla to live with you. You will see if you can rebuild your life, bloodstained hands and all.