However, at that time I was completely aware of what I was thinking: the images of that wretched little thief and the amazing Rong Jinzhen — the difference between them enormous — changed the direction of my thoughts, providing me with a clear direction to follow. Without a doubt, putting these two images together and abstracting them according to their vigour or mass, what you are left with is the gap between good and evil, heaviness and weightlessness, importance and insignificance. I thought of Rong Jinzhen, this man who had not been brought down by either a high-level cipher or a clever cryptographer, but had now been felled by the inadvertent actions of a lowly thief. He had withstood all the long days of torment and pain in trying to decipher PURPLE and BLACK, but when brought face to face with the actions of an insignificant crook, he barely lasted a couple of days before collapsing.
How was it that he was felled by the first blow?
Could it be that this thief had some unknown power, some unknown strength?
Of course not.
Was it because Rong Jinzhen was weak, frail?
Exactly!
It was all because that little criminal ran off with something Rong Jinzhen considered to be sacred as well as secret: the notebook! This thing was of the greatest importance to him and yet so insubstantiaclass="underline" like a person’s heart that can’t survive any blows — even the slightest knock can bring about death.
Now I’m sure you understand this. In normal situations, your most precious and sacred belonging, the thing you value most, ought to be kept in the safest, most secure place possible. In the case of Rong Jinzhen’s notebook, it should have been placed in the safe-deposit box; putting it in his leather attaché case was a mistake, a moment of negligence. But looking at it the other way round, if you think the thief was an actual enemy agent, a member of X country’s secret service whose mission it was to steal Rong Jinzhen’s notebook, then as a secret agent, it would be most unlikely that he would imagine that Rong Jinzhen could place that oh-so-important notebook, containing information requiring the utmost protection and vigilance, inside a completely unsecured leather briefcase. Consequently, his primary objective would not have been the attaché case; it could only have been the safe-deposit box. In essence then, if we were still to consider that the thief was some agent or other tasked with stealing the notebook, then having it placed in Rong Jinzhen’s leather briefcase was an ingenious means of avoiding calamity.
Later on I hypothesized again that if Rong Jinzhen’s action — placing the notebook in the leather attaché case — wasn’t unintentional, but rather deliberate, and he had become entangled in an actual special operation, then he was not simply the victim of a thief. Think about it for a moment. The cunning in his placing the notebook in his briefcase couldn’t be more sublime: the aim must have been to lure the special operative into a most sophisticated trap, right? This train of thought brought me back to BLACK. I thought, what if the creator of BLACK had taken the most vital means to decipher it — the key — and instead of hiding it out of the way, burying it deep within the cipher itself, had left it out in the open; had deliberately not put it in a safe-deposit box, but rather a leather attaché case. In that case Rong Jinzhen, this man who had searched so strenuously and persistently for the key to BLACK, was like the secret agent looking for the notebook in the wrong place.
As this thought flashed through my mind, I couldn’t help but become excited.
To tell you the truth, in terms of logic, my idea was completely absurd; but its absurdity latched on precisely to the two strange phenomena I mentioned earlier. Of these two, the former seemed to suggest that BLACK was extremely abstruse — this would be the reason why Rong Jinzhen had been unable to take the last step to decipher it; the latter seemed to suggest that BLACK was extremely simple — this would explain why over the course of three years no errors in the cipher had been discerned. You see? Only the most uncomplicated of things can exercise the right of unconstrained movement; only they can seek and obtain beauty.
Of course, strictly speaking, there are two kinds of simplicity possible in these circumstances. One type is an artificial simplicity. The bastard who created BLACK possessed a rare ingenuity: he was able to create any old cipher he pleased, a cipher that was incredibly uncomplicated for him, but for me was extremely sophisticated, impenetrable. The other type of simplicity is a genuine one that uses cunning as a substitute for sophistication: it baffles you with its ultrasimplicity, it conspires against you, entraps you; it places its key right in front of you, in a leather attaché case.
You can imagine what happened afterwards. If BLACK possessed an artificial kind of simplicity, then I wouldn’t be able to decipher it because the person we were up against — the person responsible for creating it — was a genius of the kind we might not see for another thousand years. Later, I realized that Rong Jinzhen had been ensnared within this simulated and obstinate sort of simplicity; or to put it another way, he had been entrapped by this bogus minimalism, he had been bewitched and deceived by it. That said, it was actually quite logical that he would have been deceived: it was practicably inevitable. On the one hand. . how should I put it? Hmmm, like this perhaps. Imagine that you and I are involved in a boxing match and you’ve just knocked me to the mat. Then, from my corner, another person jumps into the ring to fight you. Now you outmatch this person in every way, but at the very least he is going to be better than me, right? Well, Rong Jinzhen was in this kind of situation. He had deciphered PURPLE, he was the winner in the ring, he had proved his formidability; in his mind he had already come out on top against a superior opponent, and he was ready for the next one. On the other hand, speaking in terms of logic, only an artificial simplicity could successfully bring together and unite the two strange phenomena found in this cipher; otherwise they would be contradictory, in opposition. It was here at this point that Rong Jinzhen committed the error that all geniuses make, because from his point of view for such a high-level cipher to exhibit such an obvious contradiction was beyond the realm of possibility; it was unthinkable. He had broken PURPLE, he was fully aware of the deliberation and meticulousness needed in its construction. So, coming face to face with such a contradictory cipher, his mind was unable to analyse the two elements, unable to open them up; the most heroic efforts left him unable to do more than touch the fringes. That is the strength of artificial simplicity: all a genius could do was to touch its fringes.
In sum, this was where Rong Jinzhen encountered the most damage to his intellect: he had become hopelessly enthralled by this synthetic simplicity and was unable to extricate himself from it. This also demonstrates precisely Rong Jinzhen’s strength and courage in challenging such a redoubtable opponent. His mind thirsted to engage with this genius in hand-to-hand combat, to fight him at close quarters!
I am not like Rong Jinzhen. For me, such artificial simplicity was frightening; it made me despair. Thus this one route for deciphering BLACK was blocked. But since one route was blocked, another one was naturally laid open at my feet. So the real simplicity — that the key to deciphering BLACK was indeed stowed away in a leather attaché case — flashed before me. I felt a supreme happiness, as though I had finally found a way out of my predicament; as if a hand had appeared from out of nowhere to lift the curtain from before my eyes and throw it upon the ground, then trample on it. .
Yes, yes, I was so overjoyed, so excited — whenever I think of this I can’t help but get extremely excited. Over the course of my life, this was my greatest moment, and because of it, my life now is calm, undisturbed, peaceful and long. It was as though heaven had gathered up all the good fortune in this world and out of pity had bestowed it upon me. I felt small; I was only half-conscious; I felt that I had returned to the protection of a mother’s womb. It was a real blessing, like everything being given to you by someone else: you didn’t have to ask for it and you didn’t have to reciprocate; like a tree that simply gives its fruit.