Borderless Deceit (21 page)

Eventually I did determine that Zadokite Port sat in Jaime's lab. Weeks had gone by. I was still doing daily random sweeps and happened to tag Irving Heywood's computer. Entering was simple. Poor Heywood, I remember thinking, feeling smug and superior. What a throwback he is, what an overbearing
atavus extremus
, what a walking, breathing fiasco. But then I saw I was the fool. Because Heywood had engineered his own quite credible level of deception. It
was the aura he cultivated, I mean his steady imbecility. Two weeks it took me to realise that he should be checked out too.

I found items in Heywood's computer labelled Zadokite Port. They were easily traced to their origin, Jaime's lab, confirming she was the threat. Coldly, I planned a reprisal. I took some time, for I intended it to be brutal. And then in the middle of it, as if she sensed she was in my thoughts (and sights), she came to me. Unexpectedly Jaime stood at my door, smiling, then laughing, saying she knew everything.
Everything, Carson! Absolutely everything! Interested in doing some listening?
I had no choice.

And so I learned that on the day when my guard was down, Jaime duplicated the files on my hard drive, adding them to the classical literature she had already gleaned from the back-up tapes. What a fine library she was acquiring. Suspecting that meaning beyond what the great authors intended lay locked away, she set about finding the key.

It took her three vexing days.
It drove me right up the wall. I mean, I nearly went gaga
.

At first she drove her massive computing capacity to the limits. Again and again, she ran the TABU program, the one she claimed was her brother's, setting it to cope with ever higher levels of encryption. Her Targeted Analysis of Binary Usage raced through my collection of fine literature by treating it as chaos. It tried to force the monumental randomness of centuries of literary creativity into simple predictable patterns. Of course, TABU failed. For instance, and to point at the futility of using Jaime's brother's program on my files, take a simple sentence of historical importance, say from the Magna Carta:
To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice
. What comes out when TABU – a program designed to extract kernels of meaning out of some meaningless mix – is applied to words so simple and yet so elegant and full of power? What happens when you apply a decryption engine to mankind's magnificent literary output? No, TABU was no match for the classics. It couldn't be. In a world rendered beautiful through elevated thought and the power of abstraction, TABU had no impact. It amounted to no more than a wisp, a piece of fluff carried by an air current against a thick brick wall. No wonder that Jaime, who had
been in her lab from early morning to late at night for two days running, began seething with frustration. Still, as her efforts failed, she was becoming steadily more determined.

On day three she tried to think what I might have thought. What would I think that would be unthinkable for others? She had a notion and applied it to “The Gettysburg Address.” First, she scrambled all of Lincoln's letters into a meaningless soup, then applied TABU to that. Strings of new words – the greatest game of Scrabble every played – were deposited into a new file. She had a peek. What she saw was no longer “The Gettysburg Address.” There were words, yes. But did they have meaning? No. The re-ordered letters from Lincoln's speech were pointless: bleeping…blurting…she…advanced…away…from…him… “It was awful,” she told me when she came to my cell. “It read like modern poetry.” Then she burst into hilarity. Her mien, her posture, the irrepressible energy in her voice – it sprang from knowing she had triumphed. Soon enough I was admitting her pride had been earned, that she had a right to show it.

After a dead end with “The Gettysburg Address,” Jaime used Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar
to see if arithmetic analysis might work. She took a word count of the play and created dozens of progressions – 2,4,6,8 or 3,6,9,12 or 3, 8, 15, 24, and so on and so forth – extending them up to the number of words used in the play. She extracted the words in the text which corresponded with the numbers in her progressions. No luck. No meaning resulted. She shifted the application of the number progressions to other words, for example, treating the second word of the play as the first, then doing the same with the third and the fourth. But whatever permutation she thought of, randomness was the result. All she stared at were piles of mumbo-jumbo.

She persisted. Once more Jaime opened all my files, one by one, to scroll through the literary works with the hope that something would stand out. Only then did she notice a file that was different from the others. It contained no words, only numbers, many series of numbers. She studied them and applied various forms of numerical analysis. The result: the number series were not progressions. They were random, meaningless, like the words she had extracted thus far. All the series started low, then ramped up. She counted the series. There were 73. She counted the number of files she had deciphered
and stolen: 147. Since one was the number file, 146 files of text remained, each one containing one famous literary work: 146 files containing words, 73 series of random numbers. Why would one be twice the other?

She pushed on. Jaime did word counts of each of the classics and matched the numbers in each series with the words placed at such positions in the texts. It led to some 10,000 new documents varying in length – from 2,000 to 20,000 words – enough to constitute a good length essay, or a short book. The problem was, she had extracted plenty of words, but none added up. All the words from all the texts remained steadfastly random.

So linking my numbers with words in the classics led nowhere too.

If not words, then maybe the components of words. Try a focus on letters.

Jaime next took all the famous texts and ascribed a number to each letter. How many letters are there in, say, Galileo's
Dialogue on Two World Systems
? A million, plus or minus a few tens of thousands? None of the numbers in the series file got anywhere near that high. A direct relationship between my numbers and each letter in the classics seemed most unlikely.

Jaime then speculated that my numbers applied to a subset of all the letters. But which subset? What kind of filter would allow some letters to be captured but eliminate the others?

By the middle of day three, she was thinking so hard that an ache was starting up at the back of her head. “This sucks,” she muttered as the ache spread to the front. “Man, this really sucks.” For a while she kneaded her forehead so as to keep her thought processes flowing.

Once more she went back to the beginning. One fact seemed meaningful – the existence of two files with texts for one number series. Considering this, she asked herself: “What can you do with the letters in two books?” Add them to create an even larger pool of letters, or subtract them to get a smaller one. Either way, only still more or fewer random letters would be left. Adding and subtracting letters was surely a dead end too. But what about comparing? Maybe a comparison of letters in a pair of classical works would lead to a subset of letters that could be used to form words that produced meaning. “I'll chase that one for a while,” Jaime said, snapping her fingers.

She printed out
The Idiot
, which she thought was apt given that she was getting nowhere. Then she did the same with
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
, which was appropriate too. She had at least that distance to travel, she thought darkly, not even having found a way to start the voyage yet. She looked at the first sentence of each novel.

Dostoevsky:
Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o'clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed
.

Verne:
The Year 1866 was marked by a bizarre development, an unexplained and downright inexplicable phenomenon that surely no one has forgotten
.

If these two samples of words were linked in a way that implied new words with meaning, what could the relationship be? The word
the
appeared in both, as well as
was
and the article
a
. But such simple words would be ineffective building blocks for creating meaningful messages.

Jaime continued studying the two sentences. The letter
T
, she saw, began them both. Interesting that the first letter in both texts was common. Jaime reflected on such commonness. Were other letters in both novels occupying identical positions? No doubt yes. Possibly quite a few. How many? And, if that kind of commonness were extracted from two works of literature and used to form a string of letters, a new pool, with each letter in that pool subsequently identified by a number, would that allow the creation of new strings of words that provided meaning? Jaime experienced a first stirring of excitement.

Working quickly, she removed capitals, numbers, spaces and punctuation marks from both sentences. She turned them into two strands and pasted them onto a new screen.

towards the end of november during a thaw at nine o clock

one morning at rain on the war saw and peters burg railway was

approaching the latter city at full speed

and:

the year was marked by a bizarre development an

unexplained and downright inexplicable phenomenon that

surely no one has forgotten

The first letter,
t
, was the same. She proceeded to compare the others. In the 39th position an
n
was common. Letters 48 and 49, an
n
and an
e
, were the same, as was 64 another
n
, 108 a
t
and 110 an
e
.

tnnente

“Hey,” she said to herself, “this could be hot.”

The first hundred letters or so of Dostoevsky's and Verne's famous novels, deploying this form of comparison, yielded seven letters in identical positions. Suppose a million letters were used to write each book. It could be that 60,000 letters, more or less, would occupy identical positions in the texts. A unique string of letters. No two other literary works could form the same result. And letters required to create words could be identified in that unique string, and lifted out, by using the numbers. When Jaime hit upon this notion – matching filtered letters with the number series – she believed she had her first decent working hypothesis in more than two and a half days of effort. The ache in her brain stopped getting worse.

One hundred and forty-six literary titles. Which ones, when paired, might produce meaning using the seventy-three series of numbers?

What were the possibilities? 146 works of literature could be paired in more than ten thousand ways, and each of these would have to be uniquely linked with one of the 73 series of numbers. The total number of combinations would be close to eight hundred thousand. She couldn't even be sure that her assumption – the stripping away of the spaces and punctuation marks from Verne's and Dostoevsky's novels – had been right. So, to cover various scenarios she began writing three computer programs for letter by letter comparisons of the texts. One would treat them without alterations (leading to the lowest probability of identical letters in common positions). In a second program, numbers and punctuation would be removed before textual comparison would start. In a third, there would be no spaces between words either, as in her trial sample. Jaime had been clawing at the smoothly polished exterior of the world's literary heritage for nearly three days solid. Now she sensed she had identified an edge that could be grabbed.

Hours went by. The work was painstaking but her mood bouncy. Concentrating quietly in her lab, she periodically disturbed the silence by humming out her favourite childhood tunes.

The programming done, Jaime selected two works –
Tom Jones
and
Anna Karenina
– interesting characters, not bad guinea pigs for running through a computer. Within minutes letters in common positions in both texts poured onto the screen. As expected, the third program produced the longest list. Now she issued an instruction to link these filtered letters to the numbers in each of the 73 series – the ninth common letter, the thirteenth, the twenty-seventh and so on. In this way new letter strings, pages of them – one for each of the three programs and for each of the number series – rolled out, but it was gobbledygook. No words. No meaning. For Carson's idiosyncratic way of storing knowledge
Tom Jones
and
Anna Karenina
had absolutely nothing in common.

Jaime was undeterred. The procedure was not necessarily unsound. There were thousands of permutations, not only through the separate pairings of all the files, but vastly more through matching each pairing with each of the number series. A hit on the first try would have been highly improbable. Even with all the possibilities exhausted, the absence of a result wouldn't really mean the paired-text hypothesis was flawed. Carson could have hidden information in other ways. He could have linked texts by starting the letter matching process at the back of the literary works and going to the front. Or linked one that began with the front with another starting at the back.

Jaime scanned the list of Carson's files once more. Had he read all these books and plays and essays, she wondered? Was literature his secret obsession? Did a passion for reading prevent him from having other passions? And, if she gained entry to his secrets, might she stumble onto other insights? His true character for instance. Carson Pryce, cold and emotionless on the outside, an apparent misanthrope, was definitely a hermit. But what was he once he had secluded himself behind a locked door? A case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, but in reverse? He'd used Stevenson's book as one of the 146. But also
Lady Chatterley's Lover
. Was there another Carson to be discovered in all this?