[application] sorry for the delay totally forgot :'c

[modulo]

→ OOC

□ Name: Disco

□ Age: 19 as of 7 October 2013

□ Contact: AIM: rudehedgehogs

plurk: walkingsportsgym

email: mayonakatv@gmx.com

□ Journal: @modulo

□ Do you play anyone in Ariel?: nop nop

 

→ IC

□ Name: Herr Doktor Professor Rudolf von Hacklheber; Rudy for short.

□ Journal: modulo@dw

□ Series: Cryptonomicon, a novel by Neal Stephenson.

□ Canon point: Chapter 60, “Rocket.” He is sneaking the “dead” Enoch Root away in a blanket, for reasons better explained in the history section.

□ History:

Cryptonomicon is a story about three different men. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is a Princeton-educated autistic savant of a mathematician for the Allies during WWII, Bobby Shaftoe is a haiku-writing American soldier, and Randy Waterhouse is a modern-day technophile who becomes embroiled in a mess trying to run his start-up. So, then, how does Rudolf von Hacklheber fit into all of this?

We first meet Rudy during Lawrence’s college days, as Alan Turing’s new lover whom he takes along on a bike ride. After a long ride full of Lawrence being autistic, they stop to “drink schnapps and talk about math.” Rudy mentions an endeavor by Leibniz to kick-start the use of formal logic; Alan pointedly says “well, since nobody knows about this endeavor, can we assume that he failed?” (Hilariously enough, this endeavor is written about extensively in Stephenson’s trilogy, the Baroque Cycle. In this universe, it really does exist – and spectacularly fails!) After some more discussion about the practical applications of mathematics, the discussion devolves into Rudy and Alan flirting, and our main character rides off to go consider what he’s learned.

Some years pass. Between then and now, the narrative introduces us to Enoch Root, a character this mun feels it’s important to expound on. Nobody quite knows what Enoch Root is, and neither the ~4,000 pages of canon he’s in (comprising both Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle) nor the author himself will tell us. Two things are for certain, though: he is immortal, appearing in canon from the 1700s to the late 1990s, and he is a priest/philosopher. The only one who knows this in Cryptonomicon, though, is Rudy – Enoch Root used to tutor Rudy’s grandfather, who figured out Root’s immortality, and the secret was passed on through the von Hacklheber line. Root purports to be one of the mysterious Societas Eruditorum, which the author also leaves ambiguous, but whose name Rudy drops multiple times. Root is obviously surprised, knowing Rudy knows something he shouldn’t.

He returns when former German lieutenant Gunter Bischoff and the aforementioned Bobby Shaftoe are trekking through the Swedish forest, having Issues with a young woman named Julieta. They come across the wreckage of a test plane with a German man sobbing uncontrollably over it, yelling “Angelo! Angelo! Angelo! Mein liebchen!”

Turns out that’s Rudy, whose lover just died trying to escape to Sweden with him. About two weeks later, Rudy, Bischoff, Shaftoe and a couple of others call a meeting. Rudy painstakingly explains the extent of his involvement in the German hierarchy, which is seen as “hell” through the eyes of a morphine-addled Shaftoe. The Enigma machines come up, to which Rudy’s response is:

"Don’t even talk to me of that shit," von Hacklheber says. "I dispensed with it almost immediately."

"What do you mean, dispensed with it?" Root asks.

"Proved that it was shit," von Hacklheber says.

"But the entire Wehrmacht still uses it," Bischoff says.

Von Hacklheber shrugs and looks at the burning tip of his cigarette. "You expect them to throw all those machines away because one mathematician writes a paper?"

He goes on to expound on how he figured out the Enigma had been broken; he managed to crack theoretically random Allied one-time pads, which rely on balls printed with numbers picked out of a bingo cage. As it turns out, the woman picking these numbers wasn’t closing her eyes when she picked the balls out, thus skewing the distribution of letters chosen. Bischoff replies that it’s still “mostly random,” to which Rudy snaps out “Mostly random is not good enough!”

When he’s asked whether he made his superiors aware of the information he gained, he goes ‘hell no!’ and proceeds to explain how he had fallen into the trap of Reichsmarshall Hermann Goring. The Gestapo had come in the night for a remarkably unimpressed Rudy, who goes so far as to point out that nobody’s scared of the night anymore, so really, shouldn’t they work in the daytime instead?  He’s thrown onto a train and introduced to Angelo, who has been tortured by the Nazis and is now nearly wrecked – but his hands still work, so their plans for escape are still on.

Angelo is carted out, and Goring enters, tut-tuting at Rudy for his ‘homosexual behavior’ and making sure to remind him that he could be placed in a concentration camp for that sort of transgression – but no, Goring has a once-in-a-lifetime offer for him! In exchange for not killing him, Goring wants him to develop a cryptosystem much more secure than Enigma, one that can never be broken.

So he developed this cryptosystem, what the Allies would later dub ‘Arethusa’; however, he crippled it into a much weaker version, dubbed ‘Azure/Pufferfish’ by the Allies, to give to Goring. He and Angelo planned to escape, with the results shown earlier.

Rudy, then, proposes a conspiracy – to go separately to Manila, all of them, and steal the gold the Nazis have stored there. He doesn’t need the money at all; he just wants to stick it to the Reich. Considering everyone else wants to stick it to the Reich, too, they agree to the plans.

There’s a bigger problem at hand, though, as Bobby Shaftoe figures out: Julieta’s pregnant. The kid could be Bobby’s, Gunther Bischoff’s, or – surprise! – Enoch Root’s. (Isn’t he supposed to be celibate, being that he’s a priest? He replies that his relationship with the Church is ‘complicated.’) Another problem: the Russians are on their way, and one of them has to marry Julieta to give her diplomatic immunity. Some complicated but not particularly relevant events play out, and Enoch Root ‘dies’. Rudy returns to the room holding an old cigar box.

After everyone’s evacuated the room post-Enoch’s death, Rudy walks out with a man in a blanket – most likely Enoch Root, who has not really died. He and Blanket Man, as he is literally called in the text of the novel, ride off towards Rudy’s cottage.

--- (This is the canon point I’m taking Rudy from, but I’m including the later portions for reference.) ---

Rudy embarks on a submarine journey with some German sailors who are in on the conspiracy; when he returns to the narrative it’s with an eye-patch, long hair, and a beard. Somewhere in this lapse of time, he’s even struck up a relationship with Bischoff.

He eventually runs into Lawrence, who by this point has broken Arethusa and figured out the conspiracy; the German sailors are hilariously puzzled by how happy they are to see each other. Rudy asks how Lawrence broke Arethusa; he responds by revealing that he broke Azure/Pufferfish, and figured that they were both based on zeta functions. It’s at this point that Rudy points out he intended the Allies to break Azure/Pufferfish all along; he knows as well as anyone, if not better, that basing the key to the code on the date is incredibly dumb.

However, he didn’t intend Lawrence to break Arethusa, and he’s justifiably stunned when he finds out Lawrence went to have an interview with Goto Dengo and let some ‘information’ slip that then found its way into a message. In this way, looking for the key words he planted, Lawrence broke the code. Rudy is briefly worried that Lawrence used human ‘computers’ to do his calculations, thus letting everyone else know Arethusa was broken, but au contraire! Lawrence actually used a mechanical computer and burned all the punch-cards afterwards. He doesn’t end up joining the conspiracy, but Rudy promises to endow a chair for Lawrence at the college where he plans to work, and one for Alan at Cambridge. They embrace and, for the final time, go their separate ways.

□ Personality:

Rudy's a somewhat young man who has the bearing of someone much older. He stands tall, speaks (for the most part) eruditely, and thinks every move through with painstaking thoroughness. He’s got a fair amount of money, but surely not enough to buy his own life;

 

If we consider Rudy's first love, it's probably math. In his younger years, he doesn't know how to shut up about Leibniz' work on formal logic, mathematical notation, or anything else (a point of national pride that's made heartbreaking by his complete loss of faith in his country, and also a nod to the Baroque Cycle). Even though he's calmed down in his middle-age, he's still able to create a near-unbreakable cryptosystem under coercion, then significantly cripple it before giving it to the Axis. Rudy also has a good heaping of common sense; he managed to figure out how to crack a supposedly impossible-to-crack one-time pad by looking to human nature – a human will not pick chips for encryption perfectly randomly.

 

Of course, he didn't make his Nazi superiors aware of his discovery; he's a man with secrets he doesn't think the Axis worthy of. The very minute the Enigma crypto-machine is mentioned, he's quick to say 'it's shit, I clearly proved it was shit, but nobody listened to me and here we are.' Rudy is bitter at many things: bitter at not being listened to, bitter at Hermann Goring for blackmailing him into providing for a regime he describes as “appalling,” bitter at the Third Reich for having no place for a homosexual dissenter. Damned if he has any loyalty to Germany now, much less is willing to give them his intel.

 

Especially not with how arrogant Rudy can be. He has unfailing confidence in his abilities, and he openly laughs at the idea that more than ten people on the planet could even come close to his level. He doesn’t even seem to consider that his conspiracy might not work out, not with how carefully he’s planned every tiny move and communication. When Bobby Shaftoe asks if the Reich ever figured out how Rudy crippled his cryptosystem, his reply is “tch, like anyone here could figure that out. The only one who could figure that out is Alan Turing.” (As a side-note, one almost gets the feeling that he’s competing with Turing – something that would be much more grave if Rudy had any loyalty to his side, and works to the Allies’ advantage now that he doesn’t.)

 

And he loves just as fiercely as he works – perhaps more, considering the world's collective attitude towards homosexuality in 1942. Even when the Gestapo shows up and sticks him on a train, even when his beloved Angelo is tortured and he's blackmailed into being the pawn of a Reichsmarshall, he still manages to find a way to escape with him... but after Angelo’s death, which emotionally wrecks him, he becomes noticeably more reckless; he has nothing to lose anymore. (He becomes less reckless shortly before his death, when he is implied to be the lover of submarine pilot Gunther Bischoff, and he gives his own life to give Bischoff a chance at escape.)

 

He has quite a sense of humor, but it's bone-dry and tends to fly over people's heads. The only one who's shown to get his jokes in canon is Alan Turing, who often joins in. (They go looking for the “Pine Barrens” with Lawrence, who stops at a gas station to ask where the Pine Barrens are. Rudy, stone-faced, starts looking around and goes “Vere are ze Pine Barrens?” Alan replies “I should look for something rather barren-looking, with numerous pine trees.”) Rudy is the sort of man who, when the Gestapo shows up at his door, mentions that now that people are more scared of the Gestapo than they are of the dark, they should really work in the daytime instead.

 

Essentially, Rudy is irreverent, with no regard for hierarchy or respect for superiors, only using his extensive knowledge of German bureaucracy to go on at length about how dumb it is. He can’t stand the arrogance of a regime that, in his mind, doesn’t even have the skill to back it up; perhaps if there were a place for him, if there were a place for other great minds, he’d be more inclined to allow them their pride.

 

In Ariel, perhaps he will find a more worthy opponent.

 

□ Age: Approximately 30; I’ll take him as 27, given real-life events alluded to during his time in college.

□ Gender: Of the dudely persuasion.

□ Appearance:

Using James D’Arcy as PB.

Rudy is a tall man, described as “aquiline,” with slicked-back blonde hair (when it will behave) and sharp blue eyes. He wears small, circular glasses and tends to keep clean-shaven. One might place him as older than his years, though; there are firm wrinkles set into his face, and a couple of grey hairs are sprinkled across his head.

He dresses perhaps a bit more lazily than a man of his position should, wearing button-up shirts without ties and slacks. It’s rare to find Rudy in a suit, unless he’s getting something from it (read: sex).

□ Abilities/Powers:

·         Actual math wizard! Math is Rudy’s thing, particularly cryptography – he’s at the level to not only realize the cryptosystems the Third Reich is using are horribly insecure, he can create his own using zeta functions, then cripple it when the Nazis want it from him.

·         Cunning! Rudy knows how to navigate an oppressive regime like it’s second nature – which, to be fair, it sort of is. Better yet, he knows how to undercut and circumvent these regimes; he’s a cryptographer, after all!

·         Mechanical acumen! He’s not as much into the mechanical stuff as, say, Alan Turing – but he knows his way around nuts and bolts well enough to design his own mechanical computers. Of course, his skill is dated to around 1943, but what can you do.

□ Personal Items:

·         One bound volume, containing the scrawlings of Rudy’s life-work, detailed calculations for the Arethusa (and, by extension, Azure/Pufferfish) zeta-function cryptosystem and blueprints of various computing machines. Leaflets from the White Rose are carefully folded and slipped between the pages.

·         One letter, addressed simply to “beloved Rudy,” signed “Angelo.”

·         One copy of the Cryptonomicon, a fat tome of all the cryptography knowledge straight up to 1945 or so. The last person to contribute is one Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse.

·         One copy of Rousseau’s On The Social Contract.

□ First Person Sample:

If there’s one thing I can say about this place, there’s a lot more sex shops than I’m used to. [A quick eye-roll.] One on every corner, really… I’m not quite sure how to take it in. There’s even something for the more aberrant of us.

[He gives a wry laugh, almost self-mocking, before he thinks to clarify himself.] We who are inclined to our own sex, that is; I suppose it’s not nearly as “aberrant” here.

[But enough of the sex talk. He clears his throat and straightens his back; time for business.] It seems that this dimension – whatever it is – is much more mechanically advanced than mine. I’m looking for anyone who can… [He taps his chin thoughtfully, spending a second to think of the proper phrasing.] Fill in the blanks, so to speak, with regards to the differences between my mechanical computers and your electrical machines.

Specifically, if you know of a thing called the universal Turing machine… [The excited smile creases his cheeks.] Let’s talk.

□ Third Person Sample:

http://theloonybin.dreamwidth.org/13231.html?thread=6566575#cmt6566575

(If this isn’t long enough, just tell me, and I’ll be happy to provide another!)