SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
“It's okay,” Ange said. “Beef is just a highly processed form of vegetable matter.”
“Riiiight,” Dad said, and forked a couple of sausages onto her plate before sitting down
himself.
It felt curiously wonderful to be having dinner as a family again, with a big plateful of food
in front of me and my parents making bright conversation as though they weren't in a mild,
continuous panic about the mortgage and the grocery bill.
But it couldn't last. I had to say something stupid.
“I saw the coolest thing the other day,” I said. “It was from a history of crypto in World War
II and there was this chapter on the history of cipher machines -- Enigmas and such -- at
Bletchley Park, in England.”
“Which ones were they again?” Mom said.
“The ones the Nazis used to scramble their messages,” Dad said. “Even I know that.”
“Sorry,” Mom said. “I'm a little rusty on my Nazi gadgets.”
“Actually,” Ange said, swallowing a huge mouthful of buffalo sausage, “the Enigmas weren't
exactly `Nazi.' They were developed in the Netherlands, and sold as a commercial product
to help bankers scramble their telegrams.”
“Right, I said. ”And all the Axis powers used them. So the first generations of these were,
you know, beautiful. Just really well made by some totally badass engineers, copying the
Dutch models, but after adding a bunch of cool tricks so they'd produce harder-to-break
ciphers. There were about ten iterations of these things, the Enigma and its successors,
and they kept on adding rotors and doing other stuff to make them stronger. But at the
same time, they were using up all their best raw materials on killing people. So by the
end of the war, you've got this box with twelve rotors, up from the original three, but it's
made of sandwich metal and looks, I don't know, boringly functional, without any of that
flair and craftsmanship of the first generation. I guess they were in a pretty bad mood by
then. They probably spent half their time overseeing slave labor or tending the death-camp
adding machines. So, basically, everything elegant and beautiful in these things was just
sucked out by the war, until all that was left was something you wouldn't call `beautiful'
unless you were totally insane.”
“Woah,” Ange said. “Symbolic.”
I play-punched her in the shoulder. “It was, doofus. It was like a little illustration of the
collapse of everything good in a society. I'll show you the pictures later. Those first-gen
machines were awesome, just amazingly made. They were like works of art. The last
versions looked like they'd been built by someone who was absolutely miserable. You'll
see.”
Mom and Dad didn't say anything. I didn't think much of it, then I saw a silent tear slip down
Dad's cheek. I felt weirdly ashamed and embarrassed. Dad got up wordlessly from the
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