Turing's Delirium Read Free

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:
    Â 
RZWIJWJWDTZWMFSIXFWJXYFNS JIBNYMGQTTI
    Â 
    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 five spaces to the right, so that the
j
is really an
e,
the
g
is a
b,
and so on. XYFNSJI spells
stained.
    Â 
MURDERERYOURHANDSARESTAINEDWITHBLOOD
    Â 
    Who's the murderer? You? Why are your hands stained?

Chapter 2
    B LACK STORM CLOUDS on the horizon threaten rain. Flavia says goodbye to her classmates and gets on the blue bus that will take her home. A black leather bag with books and magazines; in her pocket a silver Nokia, which she checks impatiently every other minute. It's one o'clock and she's hungry.
    There is hardly any room on the bus. She grasps a metal pole and squeezes between a fat, bald man staring at his cell phone—someone else who's obsessed with Playground—and a mustached woman. There is the smell of cheap perfume and sweat. The driver has chosen to entertain himself with blaring tropical tunes. She should listen to music on her Nokia, create her own sound barrier against the noise that is bombarding her, but she hasn't downloaded anything new lately and she's not interested in the songs that are in memory. Maybe she should log on to Playground. No, better not. A screen larger than the one on her cell phone is better for Playground.
    Uncomfortable, she lifts her eyes and reads the ads above the windows: cybercafés, cheap Internet connections, lawyers. It becomes increasingly difficult to rest your eyes on blank space, where no one is offering anything. The world is overrun with people and things; you have to look within or project yourself onto some virtual reality in order to escape.
    "Fares, bus fares," intones the collector, a shy, snotty-nosed kid, as he makes his way through the bus. It's so old-fashioned. Elsewhere you simply have to slide a card through a slot in order to pay your fare, or a code entered on a cell phone will take care of it.
    Flavia hands the collector her coins. Children shouldn't be allowed to work. What stories could be read in his eyes? Life on the outskirts of the city, five siblings, his mom working at the market, his dad a street vendor. Chicken soup his only meal each day. Progress was evident in Rio Fugitivo, but it was simply an island in the middle of a country that was very much behind the times.
    School had been her escape