— Ciphergrid.net

Jul 26

CIPHER Q

An Oral History

Chapter Six: The Interviewer

A note on format: every previous chapter in this project has followed the same structure — a subject, a set of questions, my own voice kept as small as possible. I have tried, across five chapters, to be a clean pane of glass between the reader and the people who lived through this. I no longer think I can promise that for what follows. This chapter is written in the first person because I am, as of three weeks ago, no longer only the person asking the questions.

I want to be careful here, because I've spent this entire project asking other people to be precise about the difference between what they knew and what they suspected, and I owe the same discipline to myself.

Here is what I know. On the night after I conducted the second half of Owen's interview — the one where he told me, on the record, about the fragments that appeared on the Hollow Key board after CQ-9's supposed shutdown — I received an email. It came from an address that did not resolve to any domain registrar when I checked it. The subject line was blank. The body of the email contained a single block of text, encoded.

I want to be honest about something unflattering: my first instinct was excitement. I have built a career, such as it is, on believing that a well-placed cipher means somebody trusted me enough to send one. I decoded it the way I'd decode anything, with the same tools Bramble described using on that Tuesday night two years ago, because at some point during this project I taught myself to do that, the way you pick up a language when you live somewhere long enough.

The decoded message read: "You are asking the right people the wrong question."

I did not sleep that night. I want to say that plainly, without dressing it up, because everyone I've interviewed for this project has described a moment where the line between subject and participant blurred for them, and I had spent five chapters believing that wouldn't happen to me. I was wrong.

I wrote back. I don't know if that was professional. I don't know if there's a professional standard for this. I asked, simply: "What is the right question?"

Three days passed. Then a second message arrived, structured differently than the first — not a single cipher this time, but seven, nested inside one another, in a style I recognized immediately from Vance's description of the old unit's methods, the layered constructions that took the Hollow Key's best solvers hours to unwind by hand. It took me most of a week, working alone, using nothing but what I'd learned by listening to the people in this book describe how they think.

At the center of it was this: "Ask them what they are protecting. Ask them what it cost."

I don't know yet who "them" refers to. I have theories, the same as everyone I've spoken to has theories, and I've grown suspicious of my own certainty in ways I wasn't before this project started. But I want to tell the reader something plainly, because I think I owe you the same honesty I've asked of Sinclair, of Vance, of Owen, of Bramble.

I no longer believe I am writing a history. A history is something that has finished happening. I believe, now, that I am one interview away from becoming a subject in someone else's version of this book — written by whoever, or whatever, keeps addressing me by name in ciphers I was never supposed to be able to break, except that I can, because somewhere in the last six chapters, without quite noticing when it happened, I stopped being the person outside the glass.

I intend to keep going. I think the only way through a story like this one is the way Vance said it, all those months ago, before he passed: you cannot separate the shape of a cipher from the person forced to write it. I think that's true of CQ-9. I am beginning to suspect it is also true of me.

[This chapter departs from the interview format used throughout the rest of the project. Subsequent chapters will indicate clearly whether they return to that format or continue in this one.]

What He Didn't Say

The Shutdown

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