Imitating the Imitation game.
Alan Mathison Turing, a cryptanalyst who worked for the Government Code and Cypher School during the Second World War at Bletchley Park, made it possible to break the German ciphers. In order to change the settings of the encrypted messages that the Germans would leak, ‘Alexander’ (the Turing Machine) as he called, rose to power. The Turing machine cracked the wiring of Enigma rotors. Enigma, a German handle that was probably unbreakable until Turing.
Had gay rights been legal back then…
Turing proposed to his fellow colleague Ms Joan Clarke, of course a cryptanalyst. He soon learnt the sterility of living a lie and admitted his homosexuality to his wife. Considering it to be a very sensitive decision, it took him time to build up the words and break them through; to which his lovely wife responded, “ It’s not the sexual pleasure that I look upto in the marriage we practice, it’s the puzzles I enjoy solving before you finish them.”
Alan Turing, disheartened convinced Clarke that regardless of how far they have reached, together and separately the truth is in shame which must not be. There might not be as many people who ‘came out’, courageous was him, to stand up and talk about Alexander. Alexander, his school friend introduced encrypted messages to him and how it requires just a key to decode them. They’ve grown up together in school and life.
Soon did he wish to disclose his growing love for him, soon did Alexander die of an accident, soon did a part of Turing die with him, very soon he began to work bloody hard to get past it; soon was the rise of “The Turing Machine”.
However, Alan happened to not have himself live a progressive social life, for there was never a justified reason that would not remind him of the times with Alex. He would always look in retrospect and picturise Alexander. There were other men not just in Bletchley Park not just in London not just in England but in the Swastik city of a certain country, Germany too who were interested in Alan’s methods of learning and his person.
And with the daily messages (cypher coded) that London received from Germany, came another letter by one of the Nazi server from their battleship. They had an eye on this team who were working on The Enigma, it turned out the machine had a system inbuilt that would alarm the quarters whenever unauthorised users try their hand on it. But Alan’s way of methoding the code out was not something that even a thousands of minds brought together would do justice to. The machine he built up was of great interest to Germany, and this countryman from his native who was all for Turing sent him message he was sure would be decoded. Alan, astonished by the act started exchanging messages to this (rivalry) mate, little did he know it would cost him to lose his workplace where the ultimate machine was being built. After weeks of sending letters they decided to meet in downtown London. They recognised each other by their habits and found themselves dining and laughing after years of shying away. Turing left London the other night to spend holiday at his certain friend’s place.
Maybe it was just one of those pictures he saw while seeing others socialise.
-Ravi Patel