50. Too Clever by Half

Autumn came. Nigel was beginning to wonder if Mateo really would be able to do anything beyond work as a skilled technician. In his defense, he’d never pretended otherwise.

He seemed sane enough now. A little grimmer, but not plunged in that uncharacteristic funk that drove him to forgo everything but his shift and sleep the days away. He’d become more invested than ever in the outcome of the war, even if (because?) the news clearly frightened him. In a way, that made Nigel optimistic, that he considered this time the exception and not the rule. Then, he’d been somewhat blasé about a song on his music player that had worried Nigel. Some hideous orgy of violence and slavery, the cheery tone of the song evidently satirical. Mateo hadn’t paid any attention to the lyrics and had been hazy on the historical details, as usual, but he’d been clear that it happened — would happen? — in the Sixties and was “real real bad.” And he’d mentioned once that his mother had grown up in a war zone.

Maybe the years between his time and Mateo’s were an unrelenting litany of world-wide horrors and Mateo had simply grown up insulated from them in his remote Driftless. Or used to them. Certainly there were wars and rumors of war in 2005.

More likely neither were true, neither the worst case or the best, and things muddled along, depending on where you lived. At the moment that sounded heavenly to Nigel.

Then, he had more immediate concerns. Since the entry of the Americans into the war, a few of them had come to work at Station X. Mateo’s cultural differences couldn’t be chalked up to being foreign to them. But he needn’t have worried. Mateo’s remote upbringing was a good smokescreen, and the fact that the total number of Americans was quite low meant their paths rarely crossed, and made it a moot point. He was direly relieved — he’d almost called Tineye to ask for advice.

Mateo was warily friendly with the Americans he did bump into, but seemed to find them only slightly less foreign than the Britons of the present day that he’d grown so accustomed to. He was still clearly foreign himself, in accent and manner and (decreasingly) vocabulary, but he fit in well, meshing like a gear, rather than tangling or jamming. His success with Nia was tribute to that.

He was generally agreeable a fault, even when working the night shift, which made his rare spurts of temper or even disagreement all the more noticeable.

Once Nigel had met him for lunch in a state of sputtering disbelief that a fellow technician “hadn’t known!” that the atrocities on the continent were mostly racial in nature. When Nigel, confused, had pointed out the accounts coming from the Ministry of Information had mostly recounted political dissidents being killed, Mateo had said something along the lines of “the last thing this time needs is more bullshit,” then gotten up to walk halfway around the lake and back to cool off. He’d returned in more somber mood but told Nigel “it wasn’t your fault” he didn’t know, and that Nigel wasn’t “like those crazy people you run into sometimes whe—where I come from.”

Well. Better to be seen as a fool than a knave, Nigel supposed. Maybe it was another area where Mateo’s historical schooling was weak, and he was simply mistaken, but he seemed very sure and not open even to questions in his current mood, and gave his lunch to Nigel and went back inside without another word. It was striking, since he generally viewed any interest in politics, future or present, with amused tolerance or simple indifference. The next day he’d cooled down considerably, at least, and didn’t snap at anyone, even if he seemed more preoccupied and grimmer than before.

Distraction for him came in late in the year, in the form of a new project.

***

This Professor Newman guy turned up when what passed for winter was coming in. Mateo tried to wrack his brains, but nothing. Nigel still wanted to pull him in as an assistant in case he had some cool future idea. Sure, he’d said. Nigel was boss when it came to this stuff. No discussing any of it with Nia off the clock, even though she and a bunch of his teammates were assigned to this build, he’d reminded him. Mateo had put up with that. Of course he wasn’t going to talk shop with her any more than she talked shop with him. But Nigel was just generally worried about security, good for him, so Mateo was willing to just say “Sure, lips are sealed. Thirty years or until I die, whichever comes first.” That had calmed him down. Nigel could be a little twitchy sometimes, but he was a good guy, just under a lot of pressure. Heck, the whole world was under a lot of pressure in this stupid time.

Mateo got more real information about a project in the next week than he’d gotten in nearly the past year. Admittedly, he was a little twitchy himself now. The pressure was on him too.

They were trying to build something that — as far as he understood — could brute-force a coded message, or at least narrow it down. Which, holy cow. That was such a modern idea he almost felt dizzy, like somebody was about to pull out a laptop out of a handy wormhole and start taking notes on it.

“That’s going to take really fast processing, do you guys even have that back now?” He didn’t say it but he thought it really loudly. How was the encryption? You had plenty of modern (future?) stuff that you couldn’t brute-force in a million years, even with fast computers, not these glorified light switches these geniuses were stuck babying. On the other hand, they sure couldn’t brute-force it by hand, the math would take a million years.

He knew they broke the new code eventually with something called Colossus, but maybe the current plan was a dead end rather than a step in the process. Problem was, he had no idea. If he blocked this, somehow, he might well make it worse.

They were talking about codes, the “tuny” or “tunafish,” a code name for a code, apparently. Nigel looked a little glazed, too, but not as glazed as he, Mateo, was feeling. He knew one thing, he was never going to say computing back now was basic, ever again. Then, nobody would be dumb enough to trust their bigshot military messages to something simple.

The best he could pick up was that the code was made by a machine with a bunch of wheels that could be tweaked to throw some quasi-random number fun into the whole mess even before you factored in a new key for every message. Thing sounded hard to build, let alone hack. From a distance. With nothing to go on but some stolen messages and math and brains. Mateo was getting a headache just trying to follow the discussion. Nia looked to be following it, but she was a math person.

The part he did get was that they wanted to encode the info off one of the code machine wheels — as well as they could figure it out — and then test the wheel starting positions by brute-forcing it against a coded message they already got.

He felt a nudge and glanced down at Nia’s notebook.

Will take MILES of tape.

Tell me about it, Mateo scrawled back. He really hoped he didn’t ever get stuck feeding it through.

***

Miles of tape or not, the new machine started coming together over the next few months.

To Mateo, it looked like a server rack maybe about as tall as him and about as wide as he could reach. Two years ago he would have thought the parts jamming the rack looked like 60s Radio Shack rejects, but now he knew what most of it was. There wasn’t a screen or even an LCD display anywhere in the mix, which still kinda wigged him out, like those cave fish without eyes.

There was another big metal framework, about the same size across as the server rack thing, joined on vertically at the corner like two walls of a room. They’d nicknamed it “the bedstead” since it basically looked like one flipped up on end, and that was where the sprocketed rolls of punched tape — the intercepted message and the tape version of the hypothetical code wheel — were fed around.

***

“Paper tape is evil. It hates us all and wants us to die,” Nia said.

Mateo kept looking for the snapped end of it somewhere in the pile. He wasn’t even sure if this was the wheel tape or the message tape. They’d both broken. Another test failure. Fine, they’d just found another problem in the testing stage for the designers. Better than finding it later, right?

“Good, that’s how I feel about it.” He came up with what he thought was the end, but it was actually another section that had self-destructed and ripped apart.

“Why don’t we use CLOTH?”

“If you want to invent a way to hem around each punch-hole in a reasonable time and still make it smooth enough to feed through, please, invent it and go tell Mr. Newman. If I never have to see a half-mile of paper tape again I’ll die happy.”

“Vinyl, then.”

“It distorts around the punch-holes.” She joined him to hunker in the bird’s nest of snarled and shredded paper tapes.

Mateo muttered under his breath. It was even money if he hated the guy who wrote the original message or the paper tape more at this point.

He heard familiar footsteps that stopped dead.

“Good mor—oh good lord, not again.”

“Morning, Mr. Flowers,” said Nia. “I don’t know about good.”

“What was it this time?”

Flowers was the new wiz in town, some kind of phone switchboard pro, and he looked just like what you’d get if you told somebody “Draw me a pale nerd dude from the 40s, but not like, a freaky one.” He was a pretty chill guy, Mateo thought.

He was nice about it, but he definitely had (correctly) pegged Nia as the brains of the operation when it was a choice between her and Mateo. He squatted in the paper tape, found an end, and started carefully pulling it out of the pile and coiling it up. “It couldn’t keep it synchronized?”

“That, and it was just moving too fast.”

Flowers sighed, and nodded.

The whole electric eye readers turned out to be a good idea to speed things up after all (so there, Nigel) courtesy of some Welsh wiz, but they still had to deal with the stupid tapes. They had to synch up exactly so you could actually test the (maybe) wheel against the (definitely) message.

And those suckers were right up to the edge of what pulleys and paper tape could do. They’d tweaked the pulley and wheel system a zillion times, but they were basically playing whack-a-mole at this point. It felt like running Pong on an abacus. Making it a slicker abacus only helped up to a point, it was still freaking Pong on a freaking abacus.

It turned out that him and Nia and Nigel all had the same stress dream that the enemy nerds had wised up and stuck another wheel on their code machines before they figured out this one, which was A. hilarious and B. terrible.

Mateo had called them black-hat hackers on autopilot, which cracked the other two up. Turned out there actually was a bunch of freaky enemy special forces types who wore black hats sometimes.

“I’ve no idea if any of them work on codes, though,” Nigel had admitted. “That’s probably a boffins-only job on both sides of the channel.”

Boffins — nerds, basically — and one seriously lost HVAC repairman. Mateo realized he’d zoned out searching through the paper, and shook himself.

“Sorry, what was that?”

“I said this tape’s a loss,” Nia said. She sounded wiped. “We’ll have to repunch them both for the next test run.”

“Yeah, you’re not wrong.”

Flowers poked the remaining pile with his toe, lost in thought. Mateo started gathering it up.

“It’s just information!” Mateo was pretty wiped too, and having a kind of frustrated 2005 computing moment back now when it wouldn’t do any good. “That’s all this is. I mean, that’s all that matters. It doesn’t have to be ... like this.”

“How do you mean?” Flowers said, looking at him quizzically. He seemed very politely surprised it was the parts wrangler speaking up and not Nia, but this was Station X and everybody talked (and listened) to everybody.

“He worked on some machines with very advanced mechanisms in America,” Nia murmured tactfully. Which was true, technically, darn it. What else would you call a laptop?

“Oh?”

Mateo nodded. “Yeah, sir. My point is it’s all just information, right? You could —“ he tugged his hair with his free hand, then kind of waved it around, almost dropping the ruined paper tape piled up in his arms. “— you could encode this on water pumps, or heck, a crowd of people yelling ‘yes’ and ‘no’ or ... whatever.”

“All of those do sound slow, though,” Flowers said. “And this one here —“ he patted the metal frame “— is already not fast enough.”

“Yeah, true, but my point is ...” what was his point again? “Uh...the message tape, say, is just the same as the message, right? Except it’s written in punched holes instead of letters. And if the key tape is right it’s just the same as those wheels on the, the code machine.”

“Right,” said Flowers. “Granted.” Mateo knew he wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know, but something about his weird future way of blurting it out seemed to get some wheels turning up there for Flowers. Or maybe it was just a fun distraction.

“It’s just a technical problem,” Nia said, because she was a troll and a mathematician talking to a post office engineer and a parts guy. Looked like the software guys and the hardware guys started trolling each other basically from day one. Plus she (and a bunch of other techs) were stuck wrangling the stupid paper tape hardware, which was a process that ate time they really didn’t have.

“God spare us from ‘just technical problems,’” Flowers said, looking tired and amused.

“It’s just too many moving parts,” Mateo said, frustrated, wadding up the tapes so he could lug them off to the incinerator more easily. “What we need is solid-state!” What he wouldn’t give for one lousy 50s transistor right now.

They both looked at him.

“Solid-state?” Flowers said.

Oh right. They didn’t even have the word, did they?

“Yeah, you know. Not all these moving parts.” He shook his head. “Sorry, I’m saying this wrong.” Yeah DUH the moving parts are the problem, you sound like some idiot know-it-all trying to sound smart.

“I mean ... maybe it’s possible to swap out the key tape for something that’s ... you know, sturdier. Faster to process. Couldn’t we just build one out of vacuum tubes? I think you call them valves, but those things...?” he trailed off.

Flowers was looking like Newton in an orchard on a windy day. Ok. Better reaction than he expected.

“You’ve worked with valve computers in America?”

“Uh, yeah.” He just avoided saying “Sure, why not.” Geez, Tineye must have seen him as the human equivalent of those cans with a pull-tab. “Yeah, I did some, uh, stuff with that.”

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