The Cynical Career Counselor Explains Your Future as a

Cryptographer

Hi there--I saw your picture in the paper for winning that math contest last week. So, you want to be an engineer? Quantum physicist? What's that? Cryptographer? Hmm. You sure you don't want to turn that brain into something more... traditional? Okay, if that's what you want.

Yeah, of course I know the difference between codes and ciphers. Ciphers are how my ex-wife used to communicate with her therapist behind my back when they went off for their 'extra sessions' so he could violate his code of ethics. Sorry, I'm not a bitter man, usually, but sometimes... Anyway, I know that codes are word replacements and such while ciphers are about replacing individual letters or something like that.

You've got the sort of mathematical intelligence that will make you the most popular partner in the college recruiting dance. Still, the people you want to talk to won't come to your typical high school career fair. I mean sure, the military will be there, but that's not who you want to talk to. Army intelligence might work, but you're better off sending your SAT scores and a little resumé info to the CIA, since if you're as good as I suspect you'll be, they're going to come looking for you.

They'll do a full check of your background, from your internet surfing history to the papers you wrote in 10th grade. You'll be deemed safe, and taken for a series of psychological and intellectual assessments that indicate you are too valuable to ignore, but not as mentally strong as the Agency would like.

You're sent to a small college which has unusually prestigious mathematics and languages faculties, which you learn is solely because they are funded by various intelligence agencies to provide discrete high-level training for their recruits.

There you prove both your math skills and your aptitude for picking up new languages quickly. After your first year you find yourself in some deliberately misnamed statistics courses which really focus on honing your ability to decipher and decode all manner of cleverly-disguised communication. You are not surprised to find you have a knack for this sort of thing, and soon you've zipped through four years of college in less than three and you're off to start your secret work protecting freedom.

You are sworn to uphold the secrecy of what you learn, and since you're more about the puzzles than the rationale, you don't care much if you're discovering Al Queda strategy or stealing technology from "allies"--you just enjoy the challenge of testing your mind.

The problem is, you become so immersed in looking for hidden meanings, you can't shut it off. You meet a girl who works in the Agency's document classification office, and the two of you fall in love and marry after a brief courtship. At first things are fine; you both have sufficient security clearance to allow you to have real conversations at the dinner table, but soon everything she says seems to convey hidden subtext as your paranoia grows.

She leaves you, and you have to give up the condo near Langley the two of you shared. You need a change so you request a transfer to New York, where you'll analyze all sorts of communications between various U.S. diplomats. You decide to take a cheap apartment in a not so great part of Brooklyn, and your daily commute exposes you to a plethora of tag graffiti that immediately appeals to your cryptographic instincts.

Soon you're noticing all sorts of subtle characteristics of the public face of gang communications. You develop the ability to quickly 'read' the tags, and you notice that one particular latino gang is boasting of some of their more dramatic crimes before they are actually committed. The agency warns you not to get involved in such local crime enforcement, but you can't help yourself. You also discover the tattoo parlor down the street, and begin hanging out at the coffee shop next door so you can spy on the various tattoos to determine who's associated with what gang, who's been in prison, and who has actually committed murder.

Eventually some local gang members figure out you've been reporting their graffiti messages--let's face it, you aren't going to be taught much spycraft as the CIA wants you for office work--and you only escape death when a patrol car pulls up as you are being beaten by six men.

You recuperate and the agency decides to send you overseas to work in the London office. They make sure you're not in a neighborhood where you'll be distracted by gang tags, but you develop a new obssession--the conspiracy theorist's eclectic appreciation of all things 'templar'. Soon you're hanging out near the old Knights Templar compound and taking weekend trips to scout out old libraries for glimpses into the secrets of everyone from the Jesuits to the "Illuminati". You don't care much for the religious aspect of the conspiracy theories, but you develop a conviction that there is some sort of secret organization manipulating world events for their shadowy purposes.

You begin working overtime and take a second job at a university on weekends--saving all the money you can. Then, when you think you've got enough to survive on for a year or two, you get the Agency shrink to sign you a 'stress leave' note and you vanish.

You get some of the sketchy underworld types you've been learning about to provide you with some different i.d., and you travel as your paranoia leads you, first to Area 51, then to the Vatican, and later to Jerusalem. You visit every crop circle farm and check out ancient mountain art in Peru--the big pictures that can only be properly seen from the air. Your paranoia manufactures a new theory--it's not something from this world that you need to discover, but rather an intergalactic conspiracy whose communication you must find and decode to save the world from some unknown fate.

You read everything you can on Atlantis, then head to radiotelescope installations so you can listen to and record the crackles, pops and hisses that come from space.

You are completely frustrated--always feeling that the answer is so close, yet just beyond your reach. You check yourself into a psych ward for a rest, and when their people discover your real name and enter it in their computer files, it triggers a visit from your employers who have begun to wonder if you are too much of a liability in your mentally fragile state to allow you to keep your freedom.

They leave you there for a few more weeks, trying to figure out what to do, while making sure your 'keepers' know that you are not to be released under any circumstances. It's during that time that you finally make your great breakthrough.

The method by which the global controllers are communicating is through an incredibly subtle and sophisticated code hidden in the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle. It's a combination of letter placement, shapes of the black squares, and words in the clues that all come together almost accidentally in your subconscious, as you complete the puzzle one Sunday, as has been your custom for years.

You realize there is a prediction of an explosion at an refinery that will suddenly drive up the price of oil. This will lead to speculation in the gold market, and the message is for all of the members of the global conspiracy to sell both their investments in oil and gold and wait for further instructions.

Sure enough, three days later the explosion transpires as predicted. You are suddenly very afraid, but decide to feign a return to 'sanity' for your employers, who cautiously take you back and send you to work in their offices in Switzerland. This is an ideal place for you to be, since as a center of world banking, Switzerland is awash in constant financial and economic news. You continue to follow the instructions encoded in the Sunday crossword, and cross-reference it with those individuals who seem to always 'luckily' sell or buy the affected commodities just in time. This gives you a list of the global conspirators, but you have no idea what to do with it.

You turn to the only person in the Agency you ever trusted--your ex-wife. By this time she has remarried, but she agrees to meet you, and you sneak away from work and fly to Philadelphia where she is running the small international consulting firm she started when she left the Agency a few years earlier.

You explain your discovery to her, trying to sound as rational as possible. You can't tell if she believes you or not, but when you try to explain the nuances of the crossword code, she excuses herself and promises to call you within the week.

You are disappointed and a little angry when she doesn't live up to her word, and you send her a scathing email. That is your fatal mistake. Her email is being closely watched. She had been discretely trying to verify your suspicions on her own, but she wasn't discrete enough, and the day before she was to contact you, she died in an accident that you recognize as typical of the Agency's tradecraft.

You 'go to ground' just before a hit team arrives--taking off in the middle of the night and heading to Italy, where you hope to throw yourself on the mercy of the Jesuits, the one group that your favorite conspiracy novelists characterize as aware of yet unsullied by the global conspiracy.

Unfortunately, your novelists were wrong. Actually, they are part of the conspiracy, and maintain the Jesuit fiction to drive desperate men like yourself into the heart of an organization which they have fully infiltrated. You will die from a tragic fall while touring an historic Byzantine bell tower.

When they bury you back in your home town, they'll hide a dirty joke in code in the epitaph they order for your gravestone. It will become a favorite screensaver for global conspirators for years to come.