Turing's Delirium Read Free Page A

when she was a girl. Now it bores her. Information issues forth so slowly from her teachers' mouths. Her girlfriends gossip about parties and pimple-faced boys who press themselves against the girls' bodies when they dance, about nights that go beyond what is allowed and wind up in public parks or motels. She is looking forward to being in front of her computer and updating AllHacker. Thanks to her contacts, she has the exclusive on the suspicious deaths of two hackers a few weeks ago and is covering everything that happens concerning the Resistance. Newspapers such as
El Posmo
and
La Razon
use AllHacker to inform their readers about the Resistance but hardly ever cite it as their source.
    The city slips past the windows, a brief trip through a landscape that is being torn down and rebuilt every day, one that does not know how to stay still. A thin woman in pink running shoes walking her Pekingese. Two men surreptitiously holding hands. A police officer taking a bribe from a taxi driver. A drunk sprawled on a bench. A construction gang in yellow hardhats tearing up a sidewalk in order to lay fiberoptic cables: work that will begin again as soon as it is finished, because during installation another, even more powerful cable will have been invented. Walls are covered in Coalition Party posters that call for protests against a government
co-opted by the interests of multinational corporations.
Globalization is blamed for everything these days. Now you can declare your patriotism by blowing up a McDonald's. No wonder the fast-food chain wants out of the country.
    As the bus draws closer to the suburbs in the western part of the city, there is more space and it is easier to breathe. Flavia sits down next to an old woman reading
Vanidades
(the title of an article: "Jackie Kennedy Onassis—Forever on the Cover of Magazines"). Flavia has the urge to tell the woman that all heroines are somewhere else. Passive consumerism is passé; it's important to create your own role models now, ones so private that sometimes no one else even knows them.
    She watches the e-mails, video messages, and short-text messages pile up on her Nokia. She quickly reads a few. Most are just the usual junk. But every so often she receives something of real value, so she tries to scan them all. Last week some stranger sent her an e-mail suggesting that Nelson Vivas and Freddy Padilla, the two hackers who died suspiciously, had belonged to the Resistance. The sensational part was the suggestion that the person responsible for their deaths was Kandinsky, the leader of the Resistance. Why? Because Kandinsky was a megalomaniac who did not allow dissent, and Vivas and Padilla had dared question the way the Resistance was being run. Flavia does not usually publish news from unreliable sources; however, this exclusive, if true, was both tempting and explosive. She managed to publish it in a piece that, while not directly accusing Kandinsky, at least suggested the possibility that his group was involved. Predictably, she received several insulting and threatening e-mails in response. In the hacker community, Kandinsky was idolized for his cyberhacktivism, for the way he attacked government and multinational corporation Web sites as a form of protest against their policies. Flavia admired Kandinsky, but she knew that she had to remain objective when reporting on him.
    Vivas and Padilla had worked on the Web version of
El Posmo.
They were both murdered on the same weekend. Vivas was stabbed early Saturday morning as he left the
El Posmo
building, and on Sunday night Padilla was shot in the back of the head at the front door to his house. The media had reported the two murders as separate incidents united only by chance. Apparently neither one had any known problems or enemies; there were not enough clues even for speculation. That both had belonged to the Resistance, according to the e-mail, was interesting to Flavia, since it suggested that their connection went