Authors: Matilde Asensi
“Do you have some map of Tiwanaku, Root?”
“I haven’t needed one until now.”
“Well, if we have to locate the Gate of the Sun and understand what Cieza says, we should download one from the internet.”
“Later we will,” I told him without moving. “It’s time to eat.”
His face lit up, and he tried to jump from the chair as if he were starving to death, but the short arpeggio accompanying the message that appeared on the screens cut off his attempt.
After almost four days of incessant searching at top potency, the system had just finished completing the password for Daniel’s computer.
If someone had told me that my brother would someday be the president of the United States, I wouldn’t have believed them. If they had sworn it, certified it, and shown me documents accrediting such a success, in the end I would have had to accept it, of course, but I would have maintained my reservations until the day he took office, and even then I would have thought it was a strange dream that I would wake up from.
Well, that’s exactly what I felt when I had before my eyes the password chosen by my brother to protect his computer:
(–`Dån¥ëL´ –)
Twelve characters, no more no less, double the normal number, and, what’s more, the most unpredictable and impossible to guess. No one used that kind of password, no one had that much imagination—or that much prudence—no one was, in short, that recherché, especially because few applications allowed you to use chains that long, much less typographical symbols that peculiar. Only very sophisticated programs or flimsy little programs written by mediocre hackers, allowed such cryptographic exhibitionism, but, even more than the fact that the program
allowed it, what impressed me was that Daniel had come up with that fantastical and technologically prudent display so unlike him. Live and learn….
Jabba and Proxi couldn’t believe their eyes. Both expressed, first, their great astonishment, and second, their absolute certainty that Daniel had not invented that password.
“No offense, Root,” Proxi told me, like an expert on the subject, dropping a hand on my shoulder, “but your brother doesn’t have the computer skills necessary to be familiar with these ASCII passwords
8
. You know, I’d bet my life he copied it from somewhere, and I’m sure I’d still be alive in the morning.”
“Either way, it’s the same,” I stammered, still stunned by the discovery.
“Yes, of course. That’s the least important thing right now,” Jabba agreed, hoisting up his pants as far as his belly allowed. “What we have to do now is save a security copy of the password and go eat.”
Of course, we didn’t pay him the least bit of attention, so he stayed there, proclaiming his hunger to the desert while Proxi and I delved into the guts of the laptop with a strange feeling of insecurity as to what awaited us there. Once I had control of the computer, I skimmed the contents of the hard drive, and what got my attention was the large quantity of storage that was occupied by the few folders in the root directory, but the mystery was solved when I found inside those folders the subdirectories infinitely split with innumerable image files and giant applications (one of which was the password barrier) that we quickly moved to the central computer, so that we could tear into them with six hands from different terminals.
When any computer program is used, it’s generally run in its executable form which is to say, translated to the cold binary language that the computer employs: long series of ones and zeros whose meaning is impossible for a human being to understand. To accomplish this, intermediate languages are used, languages that, in the form of algebraic code, tell the computer what the programmer wants it to do. In that code there are usually comments and explanations inserted that the processor ignores when it’s time to complete a task and that serve to help other programmers understand the function of the application and to facilitate the work of revision. So, when we had the password program in front of us, we understood that we were looking at something completely unexpected.
A computer program has many similarities to a piece of music, a book, a movie, or a gourmet dish. Its structure, its rhythm, its style, and its ingredients allow the author behind it to be identified, or at least understood. A hacker is none other than a person who practices computer programming with a certain type of aesthetic passion and who identifies with a certain kind of culture that can’t just be reduced to a way of being, dressing, or living, but also to a special way of seeing code, of understanding the beauty of its composition and the perfection of its function. For a program’s code to possess this beauty, it only has to fulfill two elemental rules: simplicity and clarity. If you can make the computer execute an order with only one instruction, why use a hundred, or a thousand? If you can find a brilliant and clean solution to a concrete problem, why copy bits of code from other applications and cobble them together with patches? If you can classify the functions one after the other in a clear way, why complicate the code with jumps and turns that only serve to slow down its functioning?
Regardless, what we had in front of us was the dirty work of one or several inexpert programmers who had taken scissors to other applications and had stuck thousands of lines of useless code into a program that, almost by miracle, worked well. It looked like one of those high
school papers that were written by copying entire pages from books and encyclopedias until they rendered a legible pastiche adorned with a lavish conclusion.
“What the hell is this junk?” Jabba cried, shocked.
“Have you seen this code’s comments before?” Proxi asked, touching her screen with her index finger.
“It seems familiar…,” I muttered, biting my lips. “It’s very familiar. I’ve seen this before.”
“Me too,” the mercenary confirmed, punching the cursor to scroll up and down quickly.
“I could swear that it comes from the East,” I ventured. “Pakistan, India, the Philippines….”
“Philippines,” Proxi said without any hesitation. “From AMA Computer University, in Manila.”
“Remind me to give you a raise.”
“When, exactly, do you want me to remind you?”
“It was just an expression.”
“No, no, none of that!” Jabba wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass. “I heard what you said.”
“Fine, whatever, okay!” I babbled, turning my seat to face them. “We’ll talk about it when we finish with this business, really. Now, give me more information on the programmers, Proxi.”
“Students from the last IT class. AMA Computer University is the most prestigious in the Philippines; it’s located in the financial district of Makati, and from its classrooms have come authentic geniuses like the deplorable Onel de Guzmán, author of the virus “I Love You,” that infected forty-five million computers all over the world and that had me working like crazy for a month to keep our systems from getting infected. These kids program to pay for their school or to get work in the West. They’re clever, they’re poor, and they have access to the internet. They need to make money and get noticed.”
“And how did Daniel get a program like this?”
“I’ve done a search on the code’s comments, looking for clues.” Jabba announced, “but there’s nothing, and I really doubt it’s published in some computer magazine because they tend to be very careful about what they take. The name of the program doesn’t say much either: ‘JoviKey…’. Maybe ‘Jovi’s Key?’ Impossible to know. The only thing that occurs to me is that Daniel could have found it on the internet, but that seems unlikely to me because the programs they put on the internet for free tend to have a copyright, and this one doesn’t.”
“And that’s not normal,” Proxi commented, lifting her finger in the air like a Christ Pantocrator.
“No, no, it’s not,” I admitted, perplexed.
Unwillingly, around three in the afternoon we took a break to eat on the terrace, but within a half hour we had returned to the office to continue weeding through the content of the laptop. Magdalena brought us our tea and coffee in the study, and we passed the afternoon in a blur, opening applications, studying them, and examining photographs and texts.
And there everything was. We had not been wrong. We had followed precisely in Daniel’s footprints, reproducing in one intense and difficult week what he, completely alone, had researched for six months. But his efforts had been worth it, because the discoveries we found in the stored documents were really impressive. He had done a brilliant job, an immense undertaking, so it wasn’t strange that he had ended up exhausted and with his nerves shattered.
According to what we deduced from his chaotic notes and sketches, my intelligent brother, while working on the Quechua
quipu
from the Miccinelli Documents that Marta Torrent had
given him, had run into a million and one large obstacles that convinced him that the language normally used to write with knots was not pure Quechua. Researching, he discovered in Garcilaso de la Vega a reference to the secret language of the
Orejones
which, although it had influences and borrowings from Quechua, turned out to be basically Aymara. Starting at that moment—and as we three would later on—he discovered everything that was strange about that language, so he abandoned the cords to concentrate on the
tocapus
, the little squares featured in textile designs, since his reading of Guamán Poma and the other chronologists led him to believe that this was the writing system of the “Sacred Tongue,” as he called it. He studied hard, and the more he learned, the more sure he was that the whole thing encompassed an ancient mystery related to the power of words. He discovered the Yatiri, discovered Tiwanaku, and, to our surprise, discovered a strange veneration of heads on the part of the Aymara, which he connected to the aforementioned power of words. Which led him to dedicate himself to collecting photographs of deformed skulls, and is why Piri Reis’ map had got his attention. Daniel supposed that, in ancient times, perhaps several millennia BC, the Aymara (or Colla, or Pukara) had worshiped some god that looked like the big-headed Humpty Dumpty; and so he had set out to uncover the age of the map in order to discover at what moment in history the Aymara had developed their devotion to a megalocephalic god which he identified with a later and more humanized Staff God even though he wasn’t sure that that representation really symbolized a god, as everyone said, much less Viracocha, who he claimed was an Incan invention created very close to the time the Spanish arrived.
He must have made numerous attempts to interpret the texts written in the
tocapus
, because there were hundreds of scanned pictures of textiles and ceramic objects with that decoration. He had desperately collected more and more examples, looking for the key that would allow him to confirm that those geometrical designs really were a writing system. The subdirectories with those digital pictures were interminable, and the system they were filed under seemed not to make the least bit of sense, since their names were made of long strings of non-consecutive characters.
But then we found the computer program that finally revealed the key to him. It was called “JoviLoom” (maybe “Jovi’s Loom?”) and, like its twin, “JoviKey,” it lacked a copyright, and was made of millions of instructions, obviously stolen, and on top of that, it was badly structured and even more badly linked together; although, again and unexpectedly, the monstrosity worked, and invaded, all by itself, almost the whole hard drive. We would have needed a few more heads and several weeks of work to be able to examine the whole thing. However, with the investigation that we did we had enough, and our first and obvious conclusion was that those Filipino hackers were admirers of Bon Jovi, the famous hard rock band from New Jersey.
“JoviLoom” was basically a data-base management program. So far, completely normal. Also unremarkable was that it managed images rather than sequences of information, because there were hundreds of programs that did the same thing. Again, all in order. The strange thing was that upon opening it two vertical windows came up next to each other; the one on the left looked at first like a list of samples of more than two hundred little
tocapus
arranged in rows of three, which could be selected one by one with the cursor and dragged to the window on the left, to reproduce the design in any material. Then, after confirming that you’d finished “weaving” the text you wanted, the program converted the image into a continuous line of
tocapus
, and searched this string looking for identical chains. If it found two that were the same, it separated the line into pieces, starting with the first letter (or
tocapu
) in the chain (or word) found and restarted the search beginning with the second
tocapu
of the design. What “JoviLoom” was
doing, in short, was something similar to what was done in that game called alphabet soup, looking for sequential coincidences, be they vertical, diagonal, or upside-down. So, for example, in a rectangular cape decorated with a certain number of
tocapus
, innumerable combinations and permutations could be extracted, giving a series of matrices as a final result (just like in the game) that encompassed the supposed words that it found and that “JoviLoom” relocated and separated, according to a logical order based on their original placement. Once the text was composed in this way, meaning once it was adapted to the Latin grammatical form, all that was left was to translate it, but “JoviLoom” didn’t do that; it limited itself to generously offering a chaotic version made up of Aymara roots and suffixes in apparent tumult. Apparently, one single
tocapu
could represent a letter (only consonants, incidentally) or a syllable of two, three, or even four letters, or even a whole word, from which we deduced that each of them could have a symbolic meaning, representing a concept or thing, and a phonetic meaning, representing a sound. But “JoviLoom” also sometimes put together two or three
tocapus
when it was supposed to offer one suffix or root.
“It seems to me,” Jabba began, very invested in his role, “that they must be compound words, like ‘kickoff’ or ‘milestone.’”