Ah, but the mood of that beautiful moment was fleeting — I couldn’t hold onto it. I try to remember, but my mind is a blank. I can only call to mind that at the time I never even had the chance to confirm my assumption. One reason is perhaps because I feared that it would be exposed; another was perhaps because I was superstitious about the time of day: three in the morning. I had heard that after three in the morning the world belongs to both men and ghosts — this is when the soul and the spirit are at their most powerful. That’s how it was: in the middle of the night, in my silent office, I was like a convict repeatedly pacing back and forth, at once listening to the excited beating of my heart while trying to calm myself down — up until that fateful time, up until three in the morning. Afterwards, I finally pulled out a calculator (the one gifted to Rong Jinzhen by Headquarters, the one capable of over 40,000 calculations) and devoted myself to confirming my absurd and bizarre assumption. I don’t know how much time it took, I only remember that once I deciphered BLACK, I stormed out of the cave in a frenzy (at that time our offices were still underground in a mountain cave), fell to the ground and wailed loudly, worshipping heaven and earth. It was still dark outside, just before dawn.
Fast? Of course it was fast! Don’t you see, the cryptographic key to BLACK was in a leather attaché case!
Ah, who would have imagined it: BLACK had no real lock on it!
The cryptographic key was the number zero!
It was nothing!
Absolute nothing!
Er — um — I don’t know why I am explaining things in so much detail. Let me make an analogy. Let us say that BLACK is like a house concealed far, far away, high up in the vast sky. There are countless doors to this house, all of them identical down to the smallest detail and all of them locked. What is more, only one of these many doors can actually be opened. You can waste an eternity amid all of these doors, none of which you will ever be able to open and which look just the same as the real door. If you fancy entering this building, you must first search through the boundless universe to find where it is hidden and then you must locate the one single door that opens, out of an uncountable number of fake doors. Should you find the real door, you still have to hunt for the one key that can open it. At that time, Rong Jinzhen had not found the key. He had found the house, he had found the one real door, but he had not found the key.
Now, when I talk about searching for the key, as I just said, this involves trying one key after another in the keyhole. Generally, to forge such keys cryptanalysts rely upon their own intellect and imagination: they create a key and try it; if it doesn’t work, they create another and try that, and so on and so forth. This was how Rong Jinzhen spent the year up to the point where he lost his notebook. You can just imagine how many keys he must have gone through. Even to get to that point, you should begin to realize, a successful cryptanalyst doesn’t only need genius; he also needs the luck of the gods. You could say that a talented cryptanalyst has an unlimited number of keys in his mind and there must be one that will ultimately work. The problem is you can never know for certain when you will come upon that key: will it be when you first set out, in the middle of the work, or in the final stages? It is all a matter of serendipity.
Serendipity is dangerous enough to destroy everything!
Serendipity is miraculous enough to create everything!
But in my opinion, the danger and luck supposedly attached to this type of serendipity doesn’t exist, because in my mind there are no keys, I cannot manufacture them. As a result I felt none of the pain and fortune of searching them out. Now at that time, if that door was truly and firmly locked, if it had in fact required a key, then you can imagine what the result would have been — it would have been forever impossible for me to open it. It is very incongruous, but the door did indeed appear to be locked tight when in actual fact it wasn’t; it was nothing but a false façade, all I had to do was push a little and it swung open. That was all there was to it. The key to unlocking BLACK was so bizarre that people were unable to believe it; they dared not trust it, and even when the door swung open and I saw everything that was inside, I still had some difficulty believing in what I saw. I thought it must all be unreal — a mirage, an illusion, a dream.
Ah, this cipher was truly the work of the devil!
Only the devil possesses such barbarous courage and traitorous gall!
Only the devil possesses such an absurdly malicious intellect!
The devil had deftly dodged Rong Jinzhen’s attack, but had no answer for mine — me, the common man, the pleb. Still, heaven knows and I know that all of this had been made possible by Rong Jinzhen; thanks to his notebook I had been carried high up into the ether, to pass through disaster and reveal the hidden secret of BLACK. Perhaps you might say that this was unintentional, but you tell me — in this world, which ciphers aren’t decrypted by a mixture of hard work and luck? All of them are deciphered by this mixture, if not why do we say that decrypting ciphers calls for a luck that comes from far beyond the stars? Why do we say that they require auspicious smoke to be emanating from a person’s ancestral tombs?
Indeed, in this world there is not a single cipher that has not been decrypted with equal parts of ingenuity and good fortune!
Ha ha, young fellow: you never thought that today you would discover my own secret, eh? I should explain that all the things I’ve told you today are my secrets, my own personal secrets: I’ve never told anyone else. You must be wondering why I told you these things which I have never mentioned to another person. Why should I reveal to you my own inadequacies? I’ll tell you. I am nearly eighty years old now: who knows when Death will make its call, and I need no longer live with all this undeserved glory. .
[End of interview]
Finally the old man told me that the reason why our enemy created BLACK — a cipher with no key — was because they had felt so dejected after PURPLE had been deciphered and they had realized that they were at a dead end with their work. They understood, after just one confrontation with Rong Jinzhen, that his was a talent to be reckoned with. If they continued to stubbornly persist in challenging him, their own destruction was assured. As a result they risked universal commendation and in their madness brought forth this singularly freakish and malicious cipher: BLACK.
However, they never realized that Rong Jinzhen had his last countermove ready and waiting for them. To use the old man’s words: Rong Jinzhen had passed through destruction — amazingly, he had already passed on to his colleagues the secret of BLACK’s freakish birth by means of his notebook. In the history of cryptography he was one of a kind.
Now when I look back on everything, when I reflect on Rong Jinzhen’s past and present, when I think of his mystery and genius, I cannot help but feel enormous reverence for the man and also a limitless desolation, a limitless mystery.
Rong Jinzhen’s Notebook
As the name makes clear, this final section consists of one of Rong Jinzhen’s notebooks, or at least excerpts from it. The following pages are like an index, completely independent of the previous five sections. These pages reveal no new information, nor do they have some secret connection to what has already been written. You can choose to read this section or not. If you do, perhaps it will add some further details to the story, but it really doesn’t matter — the words that follow have no bearing on how we have come to understand Rong Jinzhen. In other words, this section is like our own appendixes: it doesn’t really matter if we have them or not. For this reason — I would like to emphasize this — I consider this section an ‘appendix’. Its essence is that of an afterword or coda; nothing more, nothing less.