V=IR: Part Three - Occam's Razor

[x-forge.livejournal.com]

At the Tesla Club, Forge and Doug find Milan's machine - but the supposedly brilliant codebreaker is suspiciously absent.




The atmosphere in the Tesla Club was an odd mix of conviviality and veiled tension, as seemed to be the case whenever one scientist's work was being publicly compared to his peers', or held up for recognition. In this case, the work in question was one Forge had serious doubts about, and was in the midst of a discussion with one of the Club's trustees to that effect.

"I'm telling you," he insisted, tapping one finger against a sheaf of technical papers clenched in his metal fist, "there is no way that a mechanical solution to asymmetrical key encryption can be done on a manageable scale."

"And I assure you, Mister Forge," the elder statesman insisted in a bemused voice, "Francisco Milan was able to demonstrate his machine's capabilities to our committee. In fact, he was incredibly helpful in breaking the cryptography on one of our archival documents."

Forge was the member, he was just a guess. So Doug had stayed rather diffidently in Forge's shadow for most of the evening. The name caught at his brain, and he tapped a few quick commands into his Blackberry, then slid it back into his pocket. "Archival documents?" he asked curiously, inserting himself slightly into the conversation. "What sort?" Forge's introduction of him carried at least some weight, he was hoping.

The trustee looked over the rims of his glasses at Doug. "One of our more prized pieces in the collection, if you must know. A page from Nikola Tesla's apocryphal Lost Folio. Certain recovered pages can be verified to have been written in Tesla's own hand between 1905 and 1924, although the piece in our collection was written in a beautifully elegant form of cryptography that we have been unable to solve for over fifty years." He removed his glasses, wiping them on his tie absently. "Mister Milan's device was able to resolve the first part of the cipher by a brute force mechanical method, I witnessed the results myself. Tonight we have provided a test packet, encoded through public-key encryption, to test his amazing clockwork device. It should be extraordinary."

Throughout the explanation, Forge's attention had been wandering, but his ears practically pricked up at the end. "Wait, you mean the device is here? It's portable? That's impossible."

"Mister Forge, I believe many of your accomplishments had been decried as 'impossible' by your peers," the trustee chided. "A word to the wise: hubris has never served the cause of science."

"Hubris is often the only method to advance the cause of science," Forge contradicted. "But I look forward to observing Milan's creation. You say he actually decoded a page from the Lost Folio?" A nod was his only response. He looked over his shoulder at Doug. "Wow," he mouthed.

Doug hazarded an internal guess that the Lost Folio was some important historical document belonging to the club, as he'd never heard of any such thing. But brilliant minds could be extremely possessive and secretive. He was occasionally guilty of those baser instincts himself. "Will Signore Milan be demonstrating his discovery?" he asked, attempting to lead the trustee by his somewhat innocent tone. He looked around the room, and didn't see anyone with the body language of a person who'd discovered some revolutionary new device. Everyone looked anticipatory, as if waiting for Milan to reveal himself.

The trustee looked sheepish and checked his watch. "Er, yes. He's forty-five minutes late, in fact. Highly unusual, given the funding involved with his project."

"Is Milan's device here?" Forge asked, following Doug's lead. "Maybe he's just calibrating it?" The trustee shook his head, indicating a coffin-sized object covered by a dropcloth, resting behind a roped-off partition. Curious, Forge raised an eyebrow at the trustee. "May I?" he asked.

After a moment of deliberation, the trustee nodded, motioning Doug and Forge forward behind the ropes. "I admit, as a biologist I am not particularly familiar with the engineering involved, but it appears that young Signore Milan has adapted a variation on the ENIGMA machine, the Allied codebreaker from World War 2. The workmanship is exquisite, I must say." With that pronouncement, he drew back the dropcloth to reveal what looked like a typewriter on steroids. Systems of levers and irregularly-toothed gears intermeshed and seemed to replicate almost infinitely, from the size of dinner plates to patterns of linked wheels and wires finer than an eyelash.

Quietly, Forge leaned forward, eyes narrowing. "It's reminiscent of ENIGMA, yes. Adjustable cyclic gears, logarithmic advancement, but it's..." He closed his eyes, wincing slightly, then cocking his head towards the device. "Mechanical binary logarithm, polyalphabetic shuttleboard substitution, but it's missing... here. And here..." he pointed, eyes still closed. "It doesn't work. It's missing the specific processionary gears that something like ENIGMA relies on. This is a pimped-out version of the ENIGMA machine that's on display to the public, nothing more. Sir, Francisco Milan is a fraud."

The trustee's eyes widened, and he turned his back to the main room, isolating Doug and Forge with his gaze. "That is a serious accusation, Mister Forge. Francisco demonstrated the machine, using the information from the page of the Lost Folio."

It was at this point that Doug's Blackberry blinged cheerfully. Ducking his head sheepishly at the trustee's fulminating look, he quickly pulled it out and tapped a few keys. His eyes widened as his search string dutifully gave forth its results. "So -that's- where I knew his name from," he murmured to himself. He handed the Blackberry to Forge, with a relevant section highlighted.

Forge perused the small screen, then looked to Doug for confirmation. "Sir, on the matter of serious accusations, Francisco Milan is suspected by the Italian government of electronic fraud and tampering that led to the July crash of their stock exchange network. If he's angling for the Wardenclyffe Prize, complete with that sizable grant that accompanies it, I would think this casts some doubt on his motives."

The trustee shook his head. "He said that he was not interested in the grant money, I remember that distinctly. His guest was funding his research, a Mister... oh, what was the name. Rather debonair fellow, quite a contrast to Mister Milan. Ah yes, Cortez. His given name escapes me, but I remember him well. His money funded Mister Milan's project - but this is true what you say? Fraud and stock tampering? My God, man! And we gave him access to the Folio..."

"It sounds to me as though access to the Folio was what Milan and Cortez were after," Doug posited. "And since they got what they wanted, I imagine they've already made themselves scarce. The real question is what this device has to do with things. Obviously Milan was using the device as a cover for his true motivation. Did he share any of his observations on translating the Folio?" he asked. The name Cortez niggled at the back of his brain, and he tapped at his lower lip, deep in thought.

"He was going to share his findings tonight..." the trustee mused. "This is disastrous. I... if he..." His voice grew low as he glanced back out to the crowd. "Scholars of Nikola Tesla believe there is truth to the rumors that many of his legendary unfinished experiments were not so... unfinished. And the Lost Folio is supposed to be the key. The scientific community, well... one of the characteristics of eccentricity is the desire to believe things beyond the realm of probability, yes?"

Forge nodded. "You think Milan and this Cortez guy are after the possibility of Tesla's research being more than just theories? God, if that potential could be found... he's not the one to do it. Where do you think the Folio would have led them?"

"I do not know," the trustee said. "As I explained, it was in a code we had been trying to decipher for decades, Mister Forge."

Doug's nose actually twitched at the last comment. "A code?" he asked, trying to keep his voice even so as not to show too much of the violent curiosity he was experiencing about this Lost Folio business. "I don't suppose we could take a look at the Folio? To see if we can't figure out what it is Milan got out of it?"

"We did not let him peruse the original, but we have a reproduction here for display..." The trustee rummaged around under the dropcloth, handing a laminated replica of what looked like a handwritten journal page to Doug. The writing seemed to be almost random, with sweeping lines and half-smeared ink blots obscuring parts of the text, which interspersed mathematical symbols with English and Cyrillic lettering.

"Did Mister Forge tell you that I was able to crack a two hundred fifty six bit encryption?" Doug asked with a half-smile. "You remember, right, Forge? The time I had to decode the Castillian Cockroach's medical records." He looked at the journal page and frowned, already pushing his power to try and determine a pattern. "I'm going to need a desktop computer, a ream of paper, a very large table, and about an hour," he said. "And a freaking huge bottle of aspirin to combat the migraine this is going to give me."