Cryptonomicon

Chapter 93 PROJECT X

It is early in April of the year 1945. A middle-aged nipponese widow feels the earth turning over, and scurries out of her paper house, fearing a temblor. Her house is on the island of Kyushu, near the sea. She gazes out over the ocean and sees a black ship on the horizon, steaming out of a rising sun of its own making: for when its guns go off the entire vessel is shrouded in red fire for a moment. She hopes that the Yamato, the world's greatest battleship, which steamed away over that horizon a few days ago, has returned victorious, and is firing its guns in celebration. But this is an American battleship and it is dropping shells into' the port that the Yamato just left, making the earth's bowels heave as if it were preparing to throw up.

Until this moment, the Nipponese woman has been convinced that the armed forces of her nation were crushing the Americans, the British, the Dutch, and the Chinese at every turn. This apparition must be some kind of bizarre suicide raid. But the black ship stays there all day long, heaving ton after ton of dynamite into sacred soil. No airplanes come out to bomb it, no ships to shell it, not even a submarine to torpedo it.

In a shocking display of bad form, Patton has lunged across the Rhine ahead of schedule, to the irritation of Montgomery who has been making laborious plans and preparations to do it first.

The German submarine U-234 is in the North Atlantic, headed for the Cape of Good Hope, carrying ten containers holding twelve hundred pounds of uranium oxide. The uranium is bound for Tokyo where it will be used in some experiments, still in a preliminary phase, towards the construction of a new and extremely powerful explosive device.

General Curtis LeMay's Air Force has spent much of the last month flying dangerously low over Nipponese cities showering them with incendiary devices. A quarter of Tokyo has been leveled; 83,000 people died there, and this does not count the similar raids on Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.

The night after the Osaka raid, some Marines raised a flag on Iwo Jima and they put a picture of it in all the papers.

Within the last few days, the Red Army, now the most terrible force on earth, has taken Vienna and the oil fields of Hungary, and the Soviets have declared that their Neutrality Pact with Nippon will be allowed to expire rather than being renewed.

Okinawa has just been invaded. The fighting is the worst ever. The invasion is supported by a vast fleet against which the Nipponese have launched everything they have. The Yamato came after them, her eighteen-inch guns at the ready, carrying only enough fuel for a one-way voyage. But the cryptanalysts of the U.S. Navy intercepted and decrypted her orders and the great ship was sent to the bottom with 2,500 men. The Nipponese have launched the first of their Floating Chrysanthemum assaults against the invasion fleet: clouds of kamikaze planes, human bombs, human torpedoes, speedboats packed with explosives.

To the irritation and bafflement of the German High Command, the Nipponese government has sent a message to them, requesting that, in the event that all of Germany's European naval bases are lost, the Kriegsmarine should be given orders to continue operating with the Nipponese in the Far East. The message is encrypted in Indigo. It is duly intercepted and read by the Allies.

In the United Kingdom, Dr. Alan Mathison Turing, considering the war to be effectively finished, has long since turned his attentions away from the problem of voice encryption and into the creation of thinking machines. For about ten months—ever since the finished Colossus Mark II was delivered to Bletchley Park—he has had the opportunity to work with a truly programmable computing machine. Alan invented these machines long before one was ever built, and has never needed hands-on experience in order to think about them, but his experiences with Colossus Mark II have helped him to solidify some ideas of how the next machine ought to be designed. He thinks of it as a postwar machine, but that's only because he's in Europe and hasn't been concerned with the problem of conquering Nippon as much as Waterhouse has.

“I've been working on BURY and DISINTER,” says a voice, coming out of small holes in a Bakelite headset clamped over Waterhouse's head. The voice is oddly distorted, nearly obscured by white noise and a maddening buzz.

“Please say it again?” Lawrence says, pressing the phones against his ear.

“BURY and DISINTER,” says the voice. “They are, er, sets of instructions for the machine to execute, to carry out certain algorithms. They are programmes.”

“Right! Sorry, I just wasn't able to hear you the first time. Yes, I've been working on them too,” Waterhouse says.

“The next machine will have a memory storage system, Lawrence, in the form of sound waves traveling down a cylinder filled with mercury—we stole the idea from John Wilkins, founder of the Royal Society, who came up with it three hundred years ago, except he was going to use air instead of quicksilver. I—excuse me, Lawrence, did you say you had been working on them?”

“I did the same thing with tubes. Valves, as you would call them.”

“Well that's all well and good for you Yanks,” Alan says, “I suppose if you are infinitely rich you could make a BURY/DISINTER system out of steam locomotives, or something, and retain a staff of thousands to run around squirting oil on the squeaky bits.”

“The mercury line is a good idea,” Waterhouse admits. “Very resourceful.”

“Have you actually gotten BURY and DISINTER to work with valves?”

“Yes. My DISINTER works better than our shovel expeditions,” Lawrence says. “Did you ever find those silver bars you buried?”

“No,” Alan says absently. “They are lost. Lost in the noise of the world.”

“You know, that was a Turing test I just gave you,” Lawrence says.

“Beg pardon?”

“This damned machine screws up your voice so bad I can't tell you from Winston Churchill,” Lawrence says. “So the only way I can verify it's you is by getting you to say things that only Alan Turing could say.”

He hears Alan's sharp, high-pitched laugh at the other end of the line. It's him all right.

“This Project X thing really is appalling,” Alan says. “Delilah is infinitely superior. I wish you could see it for yourself. Or hear it.”

Alan is in London, in a command bunker somewhere. Lawrence is in Manila Bay, on the Rock, the island of Corregidor. They are joined by a thread of copper that goes all the way around the world. There are many such threads traversing the floors of the world's oceans now, but only a few special ones go to rooms like this. The rooms are in Washington, London, Melbourne, and now, Corregidor.

Lawrence looks through a thick glass window into the engineer's booth, where a phonograph record is playing on the world's most precise and expensive turntable. This is, likewise, the most valuable record ever turned out: it is filled with what is intended to be perfectly random white noise. The noise is electronically combined with the sound of Lawrence's voice before it is sent down the wire. Once it gets to London, the noise (which is being read off an identical phonograph record there) is subtracted from his voice, and the result sent into Alan Turing's headphones. It all depends on the two phonographs being perfectly synchronized. The only way to synchronize them is to transmit that maddening buzzing noise, a carrier wave, along with the voice signal. If all goes well, the opposite phonograph player can lock onto the buzz and spin its wax in lockstep.

The phonograph record is, in other words, a one-time pad. Somewhere in New York, in the bowels of Bell Labs, behind a locked and guarded door stenciled PROJECT X, technicians are turning out more of these things, the very latest chart-topping white noise. They stamp out a few copies, dispatch them by courier to the Project X sites around the globe, then destroy the originals.

They would not be having this conversation at all, except that a couple of years ago Alan went to Greenwich Village and worked at Bell Labs for a few months, while Lawrence was on Qwghlm. H.M. Government sent him there to evaluate this Project X thing and let them know whether it was truly secure. Alan decided that it was—then went back home and began working on a much better one, called Delilah.

What the hell does this have to do with dead Chinese abacus slaves?

To Lawrence, staring through the window at the spinning white-noise disk, the connection could hardly be clearer. He says, “Last I spoke to you, you were working on generating random noise for Delilah.”

“Yes,” Alan says absently. That was a long time ago, and that whole project has been BURIED in his memory storage system; it will take him a minute or two to DISINTER it.

“What sorts of algorithms did you consider to create that noise?”

There is another five-second pause, then Alan launches into a disquisition about mathematical functions for generating pseudorandom number sequences. Alan had a good British boarding-school education, and his utterances tend to be well-structured, with outline form, topic sentences, the whole bit:

When Alan finishes with this perfectly structured whirlwind tour of the Surprising World of Pseudo-Randonmess, Lawrence says, “How about zeta functions?”

“Didn't even consider those,” Alan says.

Lawrence's mouth drops open. He can see his own semitransparent reflection in the window, superimposed on the spinning phonograph, and he sees that he has got a sort of mildly outraged look on his face. There must be something conspicuously nonrandom about the output of the zeta function, something so obvious to Alan that he dismissed it out of hand. But Lawrence has never seen any such thing. He knows that Alan is smarter than he is, but he's not used to being so desperately far behind him.

“Why… why not?” he finally stammers.

“Because of Rudy!” Alan thunders. “You and I and Rudy all worked on that damn machine at Princeton! Rudy knows that you and I have the knowledge to build such a device. So it is the first thing that he would assume we would use.”

“Ah.” Lawrence sighs. “But leaving that aside, the zeta function might still be a good way of doing it.”

“It might,” Alan says guardedly, “but I have not investigated it. You're not thinking of using it, are you?”

Lawrence tells Alan about the abaci. Even through the noise and the buzz, he can tell that Alan is thunderstruck. There is a pause while the technicians at each end flip over their phonograph records. When the connection is reestablished, Alan's still very excited. “Let me tell you something more,” Lawrence says.

“Yes, go ahead.”

“You know that the Nipponese use a plethora of different codes, and we still have only broken some of them.”

“Yes.”

“There is an unbroken cipher system that Central Bureau calls Arethusa. It's incredibly rare. Only thirty-some Arethusa messages have ever been intercepted.”

“Some company code?” Alan asks. This is a good guess; each major Nipponese corporation had its own code system before the war, and much effort has gone into stealing code books for, and otherwise breaking, the Mitsubishi code, to name one example.

“We can't figure out the sources and destinations of Arethusa messages,” Lawrence continues, “because they use a unique site code system. We can only guess at their origins by using huffduff. And huffduff tells us that most of the Arethusa messages have originated from submarines. Possibly just a single submarine, plying the route between Europe and Southeast Asia. We have also seen them from Sweden, from London, Buenos Aires, and Manila.”

“Buenos Aires? Sweden?”

“Yes. And so, Alan, I took an interest in Arethusa.”

“Well, I don't blame you!”

“The message format matches that of Azure/Pufferfish.”

“Rudy's system?”

“Yes.”

“Nice work on that, by the way.”

“Thank you, Alan. As you must have heard by now, it is based on zeta functions. Which you did not even consider using for Delilah because you were afraid Rudy would think of it. And this raises the question of whether Rudy intended us to break Azure/Pufferfish all along.”

“Yes, it does. But why would he want us to?”

“I have no idea. The old Azure/Puffeffish messages may contain some clues. I am having my Digital Computer generate retroactive one-time pads so that I can decrypt those messages and read them.”

“Well, then, I shall have Colossus do the same. It is busy just now,” Alan says, “working on Fish decrypts. But I don't think Hitler has much longer to go. When he is finished, I can probably get down to Bletchley and decrypt those messages.”

“I'm also working on Arethusa,” Lawrence says. “I'm guessing it all has something to do with gold.”

“Why do you say that?” Alan says. But at this point the tone arm of the phonograph reaches the end of its spiral groove and lifts off the record. Time's up. Bell Labs, and the might of the Allied governments, did not install the Project X network so that mathematicians could indulge in endless chitchat about obscure functions.