Turing's Delirium Read Online Free PDF Page B

better to be a little fish in a big pond or a big fish in a little pond.
    The vice president explained what the Black Chamber was.
    "It was created for the challenges of national security during the seventies and has now become obsolete. President Montenegro, who gave the order for its creation, has come to realize that and has put me in charge of making it useful in this new century. In my opinion, one of the main challenges to national security is cybercrime. Sí, incluso en Bolivia, mark my words. Because I say these things, people think I'm ultra-modern, when the truth is that in Bolivia one has to face problems that are premodern, modern, and even postmodern. Both the government and private industry increasingly depend on computers. Los aeropuertos, los bancos, el sistema telefonico, you name it. We don't really believe in these things and consequently not even one tenth of a percent is spent on computer security. It will be our downfall."
    Ramírez-Graham was seduced by the vice president's words. All of a sudden he saw himself assuming a post that was vital to the interests of a nation.
    "Make me an offer I can't refuse," he found himself saying, without entirely having digested the consequences of his reply.
    The vice president made him an offer that, while not spectacular, was tempting.
    "But I'm not even Bolivian," Ramírez-Graham said. "I suppose a government institution should be run by Bolivians."
    "I can make you a Bolivian in the blink of an eye."
    Ten days later, when his new passport, ID card, and birth certificate from Cochabamba arrived by courier at the door, he was stunned at the confidence with which things were done in his second homeland. That very same day the vice president phoned. Ramírez-Graham simply could not say no.
    He drinks his coffee and remembers his first few days in charge of the Black Chamber—how he cursed his decision when he discovered a reality that was much more precarious than he had imagined. Unknowing, he had brought Mathematica on his laptop, thinking he would have time to program. Impossible. It was frustrating to want to sit down and work with his numbers and not be able to.
    As for Rio Fugitivo ... What would Svetlana have said? He missed her. There was a photo of her on his desk—curly black hair, prominent cheekbones intensely rouged, lips that seemed to depart from their natural position, preparing at once for a sullen frown or a passionate kiss. Not a day went by when he didn't e-mail her, not a week when he didn't phone her, but she never answered. They had been dating for ten months when one day she told him she was pregnant. His mouth hung open, his eyebrows arched, and he spoke the words he would later regret: he wasn't ready to have children. Svetlana stormed out of the apartment. The next day when he phoned her sister's house, he learned that she was in the hospital and had lost the baby. Her sister told him that it wasn't his fault; Svetlana had been distracted while driving after she left the apartment and had collided with a taxi. Still, Ramírez-Graham couldn't help feeling guilty, a feeling that only grew when she wouldn't see him at the hospital or later at her sister's house. It was during that time that he received the vice president's offer. He thought perhaps it would be best to stay and try to win Svetlana back, but his pride prevented him from doing so. He accepted a two-year contract at the Black Chamber.
    He watches the soporific movements of the angelfish in the aquarium. Back and forth, ebb and flow. At times he thinks that the reason he left the NSA was his impotence at the direction things were taking. The agency, one of the American government's central organizations during the cold war, was drowning in irrelevance, plagued by both budget cuts and new data-encoding systems that were practically invincible. The NSA continued to intercept messages from all over the world, at an average of two million per hour, but it was