Waterfalls || Yeonbin

chapter 3: lunch

October 23, 1939

Someone had smuggled an Enigma machine from Berlin, and that's the only one we have. 'We' meaning me and my four other colleagues that were put on this taskforce. They call us MI6. Makes sense really. There are only five sections of the military, and this is supposed to be entirely secretive, so why not make it part of a nonexistent branch.

This machine is truly remarkable. I know we're fighting the Germans currently, but I really have to commend them on a truly brilliant creation. They change the settings every night at midnight and the first message to be intercepted is at six in the morning for the weather, which is just in German because why take the time to encrypt a weather announcement? So, Hugh and John are able to translate the weather for us, since I don't know German, but that's the only unencrypted message they send out every day. Today's message was:

Slightly cloudy in Berlin with a slight chance of rain. Sunny in Auschwitz. Raining in Budapest. Heil Hitler.

I always roll my eyes at the end, realizing that millions of people bow down to the person that's making our lives a living hell. Women in the operating room intercept hundreds of messages per day and our job is to dechipher them, but that's impossible when you don't know what the settings for the machine will be.

To put this in perspective, we have fourteen hours a day in order to figure out the settings until we have to start from scratch. And if you're thinking we could just try every setting, that's an impossible feat, considering there are one-hundred and fifty-nine million, million, million different possibilities. That's eighteen zeros on that number. Now, if we were to try every single possibility, how long do you think it would take? If the five of us tried one possibility every minute, twenty-four hours a day, how long do you think it would take?

Well, in just a single day, if we were to work non-stop for twenty-four hours, the five of us would only get through seven-thousand two-hundred different possibilities. So, we're not talking days, or even months. We're speaking in units of years... billions of years to go through every option.

I don't think the rest of our team seems to like me very much, always avoiding me and giving me strange looks throughout the day. Hugh is our team leader, and my desk is in the corner, away from everyone else. We all chose where we wanted to sit on the first day, and that was the last desk left. Yet, I quite like the peace and quiet away from everyone.

I have an idea. I have faith that we can break Enigma, but not with humans alone. Humans are no match for this machine, including myself. The only thing that could beat this, is another machine. Which is why I'm designing a computer that will be able to go through the different possibilities way faster than we ever could. Five-hundred times faster, to be exact.

I'm only a few pieces of paper into my design while everyone else is still trying to decode it by hand. I mean, not that I have proposed this idea to them in the first place. As I said, they don't seem to like me very much, but we're only a few days into this operation. Daniel is watching over us as our Lieutenant and technically our boss, even though he has his own office in the next building over.

"I'm famished. Anyone up for some lunch?" I heard Hugh ask, making me look up from my design for a moment. They were all agreeing, standing up and grabbing their suit jackets hung over their chairs. I just pursed my lips and looked back down at my drawing.

I heard someone walking closer to me, "We're going to get some lunch." I heard John say, but it didn't seem to pertain to me, so I kept my head down in my sketch.

"Soobin..." He said, making me look up. He was standing off to the side, around the corner from my desk, "I said, we're going to get some lunch."

I nodded, "I heard you."