Digital Fortress

Strathmore was a rangy, thick-fleshed man whose muted features somehow disguised his hard-nosed efficiency and demand for perfection. His gray eyes usually suggested a confidence and discretion born from experience, but today they looked wild and unsettled.

"You look beat," Susan said.

"I've been better." Strathmore sighed.

I'll say, she thought.

Strathmore looked as bad as Susan had ever seen him. His thinning gray hair was disheveled, and even in the room's crisp air-conditioning, his forehead was beaded with sweat. He looked like he'd slept in his suit. He was sitting behind a modern desk with two recessed keypads and a computer monitor at one end. It was strewn with computer printouts and looked like some sort of alien cockpit propped there in the center of his curtained chamber.

"Tough week?" she inquired.

Strathmore shrugged. "The usual. The EFF's all over me about civilian privacy rights again."

Susan chuckled. The EFF, or Electronics Frontier Foundation, was a worldwide coalition of computer users who had founded a powerful civil liberties coalition aimed at supporting free speech on-line and educating others to the realities and dangers of living in an electronic world. They were constantly lobbying against what they called "the Orwellian eavesdropping capabilities of government agencies"-particularly the NSA. The EFF was a perpetual thorn in Strathmore's side.

"Sounds like business as usual," she said. "So what's this big emergency you got me out of the tub for?"

Strathmore sat a moment, absently fingering the computer trackball embedded in his desktop. After a long silence, he caught Susan's gaze and held it. "What's the longest you've ever seen TRANSLTR take to break a code?"

The question caught Susan entirely off guard. It seemed meaningless. This is what he called me in for?

"Well…" She hesitated. "We hit a COMINT intercept a few months ago that took about an hour, but it had a ridiculously long key-ten thousand bits or something like that."

Strathmore grunted. "An hour, huh? What about some of the boundary probes we've run?"

Susan shrugged. "Well, if you include diagnostics, it's obviously longer."

"How much longer?"

Susan couldn't imagine what Strathmore was getting at. "Well, sir, I tried an algorithm last March with a segmented million-bit key. Illegal looping functions, cellular automata, the works. TRANSLTR still broke it."

"How long?"

"Three hours."

Strathmore arched his eyebrows. "Three hours? That long?"

Susan frowned, mildly offended. Her job for the last three years had been to fine-tune the most secret computer in the world; most of the programming that made TRANSLTR so fast was hers. A million-bit key was hardly a realistic scenario.

"Okay," Strathmore said. "So even in extreme conditions, the longest a code has ever survived inside TRANSLTR is about three hours?"

Susan nodded. "Yeah. More or less."

Strathmore paused as if afraid to say something he might regret. Finally he looked up. "TRANSLTR's hit something…" He stopped.

Susan waited. "More than three hours?"

Strathmore nodded.

She looked unconcerned. "A new diagnostic? Something from the Sys-Sec Department?"

Strathmore shook his head. "It's an outside file."

Susan waited for the punch line, but it never came. "An outside file? You're joking, right?"

"I wish. I queued it last night around eleven thirty. It hasn't broken yet."

Susan's jaw dropped. She looked at her watch and then back at Strathmore. "It's still going? Over fifteen hours?"

Strathmore leaned forward and rotated his monitor toward Susan. The screen was black except for a small, yellow text box blinking in the middle.

TIME ELAPSED: 15:09:33

AWAITING KEY: ________

Susan stared in amazement. It appeared TRANSLTR had been working on one code for over fifteen hours. She knew the computer's processors auditioned thirty million keys per second-one hundred billion per hour. If TRANSLTR was still counting, that meant the key had to be enormous-over ten billion digits long. It was absolute insanity.

"It's impossible!" she declared. "Have you checked for error flags? Maybe TRANSLTR hit a glitch and-"

"The run's clean."

"But the pass-key must be huge!"

Strathmore shook his head. "Standard commercial algorithm. I'm guessing a sixty-four-bit key."

Mystified, Susan looked out the window at TRANSLTR below. She knew from experience that it could locate a sixty-four-bit key in under ten minutes. "There's got to be some explanation."

Strathmore nodded. "There is. You're not going to like it."

Susan looked uneasy. "Is TRANSLTR malfunctioning?"

"TRANSLTR's fine."

"Have we got a virus?"

Strathmore shook his head. "No virus. Just hear me out."

Susan was flabbergasted. TRANSLTR had never hit a code it couldn't break in under an hour. Usually the cleartext was delivered to Strathmore's printout module within minutes. She glanced at the high-speed printer behind his desk. It was empty.