Turing's Delirium by Edmundo Paz Soldán Page A

the games or, more accurately, to understand the programmers who made the games. Asheron's Call was his specialty. The hours would fly by and he continued to miss classes, lost in the medieval scenery of fantasy.
    At the Internet café he frequented most regularly, near Suicide Bridge, he was admired by several teenagers. One of them, older than he, called himself Phiber Outkast: freckled, full lips, well dressed, never without his Ray-Bans. One night Phiber Outkast was waiting for him at the café door and walked home with him in silence. As they neared his house, under the glow of a streetlight in the small square, Phiber said that his ability shouldn't be wasted on games. He said that a lot of money was to be made on the Internet.
    Kandinsky looked at him without saying a word. Insects buzzed around the streetlight. He asked Phiber to explain. Exactly that, said Phiber Outkast. A lot of money can be made on the Web. It's a question of focusing your knowledge appropriately. If he wanted to develop his talent, he could take classes at the same computer institute that Phiber attended.
    Kandinsky would have liked to resist temptation. By this time he was seventeen years old, in his last year of high school. Shouldn't he graduate first?
    He thought of his dad's clothes, always stained with grease. Years had passed and he still hadn't gotten ahead. He would inflate soccer balls and repair tires for the rest of his life. He would take refuge in his house, light a few candles to the Virgin of Urkupiña—there was an altar with a plaster effigy of her in the kitchen—crossing his fingers that his luck would improve. He would be content with the victories of San José, soccer triumphs that were seen as necessary, just redemptions.
    Kandinsky's mom would continue to work for a pittance at homes so big they were obscene. In such a poor country, there were those who lived as if they were Americans. Or like the vision they had of life in the United States: the land of plenty, of glorious materialism.
    Esteban, his younger brother, no longer went to school. Instead, he helped his dad repair tires and sometimes went to the Boulevard, where he would earn a few pesos watching over cars parked outside an empanada shop.
    At home the cold seeped in through the broken windows each night.
    "Let's talk tomorrow," Kandinsky said under the streetlight. Phiber Outkast sighed, relieved. He knew what that meant.
    Â 
    Located in the Enclave, the institute was a shabby three-story building that at one time housed the
El Posmo
newspaper offices (when it was called
Tiempos Modernos
); there were cracks in the walls and rubble on the stairs. You had to be one of the first to arrive in order to get one of the few computers, all assembled locally. In an atmosphere like that, Kandinsky learned more from his classmates than from his teachers: several computer languages, a little about programming, dozens of tricks for Microsoft software and online games. His classes, paid for by Phiber Outkast, were at night; he always went home as soon as they ended.
    His classmates were hackers who specialized in minor jobs—free phone service for a month, access to an Internet porn site, illegal copies of software, the occasional credit card scam. They would tell him their secrets freely and then look at him suspiciously when he showed them, without trying, that he knew more than they did. It didn't matter. He wasn't interested in making friends; he had decided to leave the institute at the end of the semester. His final project consisted of a program to acquire the passwords to private accounts on the Net illegally. He justified it by writing in his final essay that the flow of information on the Internet should be free and there shouldn't be any secrets. Passwords infringed on this free flow of information and should therefore be attacked. The director called him into his office and, returning his work, said, "This is not an institute for hackers,