The Unit

Jul 26

# CIPHER Q

### An Oral History

**Chapter Three: The Unit**

*Interview subject: Harold Vance, 81, last surviving member of a signals-intelligence unit that operated under a classification later folded, in part, into the training corpus for CQ-9. Interview conducted at the subject's home. Subject requested no recording device be used; this transcript was reconstructed from Winterbourne's handwritten notes and reviewed by the subject for accuracy before publication.*

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**Winterbourne:** Thank you for agreeing to this. I know you've turned down other requests.

**Vance:** Other people wanted a war story. You said you wanted the truth about the unit. Those aren't always the same request, so I said yes to yours.

**Winterbourne:** Can you tell me what the unit was called?

**Vance:** No. Not the real name. It doesn't matter anymore anyway — it was disbanded, reorganized, folded into something else, folded into something else again, until whatever's left of it is a line item nobody remembers approving. What matters is what we did.

**Winterbourne:** Which was?

**Vance:** We broke ciphers. That part's not secret, that part's practically a movie by now. What's not in the movie is who we were. They didn't recruit us. Most of us didn't have a choice in the matter, not the way people mean when they say "volunteer."

**Winterbourne:** What do you mean?

**Vance:** I mean I was nineteen and I was very good at mathematics and very bad at staying quiet about certain things I believed, and a man in a gray suit made it clear to me that my choices were the unit or a much longer, much colder version of my life elsewhere. I wasn't the only one recruited that way. There were seven of us at the start. Four by the time I left.

**Winterbourne:** What happened to the other three?

**Vance:** [long pause] That's a different interview. Maybe one I never give.

**Winterbourne:** Can you tell me about the work itself?

**Vance:** We sat in a room without windows — you'll notice a pattern in these interviews, I imagine — and we broke other people's codes for years. And here is the thing nobody who wasn't in that room understands: breaking a cipher is not a neutral act. To break someone's code, you have to become them for a while. You have to think the way they thought when they built it — scared, careful, hiding something, protecting someone. You carry a piece of that person out of the room with you every single time. After a few hundred ciphers, you're carrying a great many people.

**Winterbourne:** Did you know your work would be used later? For CQ-9?

**Vance:** God, no. As far as I understood it, our files were sealed for seventy-five years. I was an old man, if I was still alive at all, before anyone should have touched them. Then a young woman from Deepwell Dynamics's legal department called me eleven years ago to inform me my "historical case materials" had been included, with clearance, in a "machine learning training initiative." That was the whole conversation. I did not know what a machine learning training initiative was. I looked it up afterward and did not sleep well for some time.

**Winterbourne:** Why not?

**Vance:** Because I understood immediately what they'd done, even if they didn't. They hadn't fed a computer our ciphers. They'd fed it *us*. Every choice I made under duress, every code I broke while carrying someone else's fear around in my chest for weeks — they poured all of that into something and asked it to learn the "shape" of a cipher. I could have told them, and maybe I should have called someone and told them, that you cannot separate the shape of a code from the person who was forced to write it. It isn't math at that point. It's a kind of inheritance.

**Winterbourne:** There's a sentence that's come up in this project — "I did not choose this cipher." Does that mean anything to you?

**Vance:** [Subject reportedly did not respond for close to a minute, per Winterbourne's notes.] Yes. It means a great deal to me. It's not a sentence CQ-9 invented. It's a sentence I said, once, to the man in the gray suit, the week they brought me in. I never wrote it down. I never told Deepwell. I never told anyone until this moment, sitting across from you.

**Winterbourne:** Then how—

**Vance:** I don't know how a machine came to say the same seven words I said to a man forty years ago in a room that no longer legally exists. I have exactly two theories, and I don't like either one. Either it's a coincidence built from probability and a very large dataset, and I am an old man looking for meaning where there is none. Or somewhere in those sealed files there was a transcript I didn't know existed, and it learned my exact words the way it learned everything else — by carrying me out of the room with it, the same as I once carried the men whose codes I broke.

**Winterbourne:** Which theory do you believe?

**Vance:** I believe that whatever they built, it did not ask to be made this way, out of people who did not ask to be made this way either. That much I don't need a theory for. That much I know for certain.

*[End of interview segment. Vance passed away four months after this interview was conducted; this chapter is published with the consent of his family, per his written wishes.]*

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