"I am so clever that sometimes
I don't understand a single word
of what I am saying."

-Oscar Wilde

The silence of the sea was deceptive. With a fishing rod in his hands, Alan stared at the swirling void, as blue as the eyes of the boy next to him.

He smiled weakly at Chris as he lifted a giant perch triumphantly high above his head. That sight made his heart ache, yet he could not avert his eyes. He knew it would be over soon, so he would savour every second.

Alan put down the fishing rod; he had no idea how the thing worked anyway.

The boy was kneeling in the boat, his hand reaching for the water. The tips of his fingers drew lines in the sea as the little boat bobbed on.

A smile played on Alan's face as he attacked Chris from behind with a hug, who laughed and turned around in the embrace.

The little face was so familiar, yet something was missing. As Alan wiped a strand of blonde hair from his face, he got it – this Chris was frozen in time, petrified by Medusa. Still, he couldn't help but say how much he missed him.

But Chris' eyes stared at a point behind Alan, the light in those blue mirrors nowhere to be seen. 'Mine,' the boy whispered.

Even before Alan could turn his head, a bang filled his ears. Instinctively, he wrapped his arms around Chris. The searing heat of the blast scraped along his back just before they were catapulted into the water.

The air was knocked out of his lungs. Alan gasped for breath even before he reached the surface. A stinging sensation filled his entire body. His cry for Chris vanished into the dark void. Floundering, he surfaced again. The boat was nowhere to be seen.

The boy on the other side floated right in front of him, a trail of blood running down his temple.

"How many more deaths," Chris grabbed him by the shoulders, with a strength not fitting his petite body, "before you start using your brain?"

Alan stopped flailing abruptly and looked at him incredulously.

"You're not smart enough, I would have deciphered the messages a long time ago."

Alan knew that all too well.

"Then you also know that all those people are dying at the expense of your folly," he continued mercilessly, as if he could read his mind. "I should have stayed alive, history has made a mistake. It is time to rectify it." The boy pushed him under with his full weight.

Alan let him.

His face was so drenched that for a moment Alan imagined himself still in his dream and gasped for breath, disoriented. A choked scream finally escaped his throat as he pushed a shape away from him.

It was not Chris who was flung across the room. Timothy licked off his muzzle and made his way back to the bed, clearly unimpressed by Alan's panic attack.

He felt his breathing calm as his hands stroked over the purring cypress cat's back. Such dreams had become daily occurrences. That – and the twelve-hour shift they worked daily – caused bags to form under his eyes.

"Timothy," he addressed the cat seriously, "why does Christopher always have to be so mean in my dreams?"

Since Alan did not bear the name Alice and was certainly not in Wonderland, the cat did not reply. The latter calmly continued licking his grey fur.

There was no need to, Alan knew the answer all too well. His own mind was playing games with him and there was nothing that could affect him like Chris' face.

As much as he appreciated the cat's company, it did not make his allergy disappear. A sequence of sneezes followed, preventing him from hearing the soft knock on his door.

A face appeared from behind the door, two probing eyes looking at him from behind round glasses. It was only when Alan rubbed the sleep from his eyes that he noticed Dilly.

With him, he rented a flat in the Crown Inn and although their landlady, Mrs Ramshaw, had a few loose screws, it felt homely.

Timothy did what Alan wanted to do most of all now, the cat hissed and bared its sharp teeth at the man in the doorway.

Dilly was used to that behaviour from the cat and let himself in. "Nightmares?" he asked with a raised eyebrow.

Alan swallowed bile and nodded. He didn't want to elaborate on his dream, so he quickly got out of bed.

He knew Dilly had equally frequent such nightmares, so he praised the maths gods that his colleague did not ask any further questions.

"Do you think Churchill will keep his promise?" asked Alan, trying to change the subject as he began to get dressed quickly. He slept in a undershirt and loose trousers, but still felt extremely uncomfortable.

Dilly's gaze scanned the room before answering. "He is a man of his word, not to mention that he was really impressed with our project. So we can expect new workers."

Alan wondered how you could be impressed by a whole bunch of calculations if you didn't understand any of it anyway.

"Holy Lipschitz, your room is a mess," Dilly felt the need to remark. His tone annoyingly reminded him of Blamey. "The floor is littered with clothes." To illustrate, he fished a pair of socks off the floor.

Alan snatched them from his hands and pulled them silently over his feet.

"And uh," Dilly held up a piece of paper between two fingers, "this kind of booklets."

Finally fully clothed, Alan stepped past him and glanced at the booklet with the not-so-clothed men. "I use it as wallpaper." With that remark, he disappeared out the door.

He had built up more self-confidence over the past few years when it came to his orientation. Now he was firmly convinced that if the people around him had problems with it, they had better learn to live with it. After all, he was not going to change – let alone hide – from them.

To his surprise, Dilly chuckled behind him. "I don't think Mrs Ramshaw won't even mind that much. She keeps hinting to me that her husband died some time ago." The man followed in his wake.

With a smile, Alan reached for his rickety bike lying in the wet grass. Perhaps he had misjudged Dilly after all.

People in Bletchley were already more than used to the sight of a mathematician arriving with a gas mask on his bicycle.

Alan took off the mask, which protected him from his hay fever outbreaks, and looked with Dilly at the beautiful mansion in front of them. In times of war, they got such masks as standard; he might as well make use of them.

Gayhurst Manor was a huge Victorian building, making Bletchley Park look like a small stable. The government had rented some flats for them, which were mainly used to deposit their bombes.

From the moment they set one foot in the building, Dilly was beckoned by a lady. She was standing next to a bombe from which an alarming amount of smoke was coming out, and after a short hand gesture, Dilly disappeared. It was always like that, the little man had to put out figurative and literal fires everywhere.

Alan continued his own way, aiming to find his other colleagues. Out of habit, he scanned the dusty halls for Joan. Although she was usually the one who found him first. Then she tapped him on the shoulder and stared at him with a certain look. A look he knew all too well.

It gave him the courage to continue his plan.

He shook off the thought and looked around. He did not come here as often as he did in Bletchley, but sometimes the cleaning crew had to do their work. On Churchill's orders, the entire mansion was being dusted.

He opened the first door and was startled. Unsurprisingly, the dark room was one of the countless storage lofts, but he did stumble upon two familiar faces.

The first lady was the German linguist who had accompanied them the day before. Her lips were entwined with a woman's whose reddish he could distinguish even in the darkest rooms. Mara had helped construct the bombes. She had also recognised Alan.

Even before he could do it himself, Mara pulled the door back shut with glaring eyes.

Alan muttered another silent apology to the door. With a faint grin, he continued his search. Mara had once told him one drunken evening that she had a crush on someone in Bletchley. Alan had jokingly guessed at Hugh Alexander at the time, but he had seen her blush at the sight of the barmaid.

For a second, he allowed himself to fantasise what it would be like should more than seventy per cent of Bletchley be male instead of female. Perhaps then he too would have a chance at such flings.

Dangerous flings, he corrected himself. Mara was lucky he was the only one always lost in the premises.

Alan abruptly stopped dreaming and walking when he heard a familiar laugh. He turned on his heel and walked towards Hugh's glass-breaking roar.

"I asked you to give me chess lessons, not to destroy me," Joan complained. Her voice came out from under a doorjamb.

Alan pushed open the door and saw the pair bent over a chessboard.

"Why, I can do both at the same time." Hugh winked at her, before turning his gaze to the man walking in.

Joan squinted at him and then triumphantly knocked over her opponent's rook with her horse.

"Careful with that," Alan said with a smile as he threw his waistcoat over a chair, "I don't feel like cycling all the way to the clay pits in Bletchley again." He had modelled the pieces manually from clay, due to a shortage of such luxury items due to the war.

The duo had no ear for it. Hugh, shaking his head, knocked over her queen. "Check," he reported with a smug grin. Joan's deadly look that followed caused him to give a hint, so it didn't look like he was just trying to show his expertise off. "Try to think as many steps ahead as possible, go down every possibility. You can checkmate me in six steps."

Joan hissed, her eyes flying swiftly over the cardboard game board.

As a sign that she could take her time, Hugh grabbed some paper and started scribbling on it.

Alan smiled and pulled out his arithmetic from the previous night to show it to Hugh. He had calculated an interval of how long it could take for the bombe to find a solution. The time interval was incredibly disappointing, even worse than he had expected, sometimes they would have to wait months before the machine could decipher a message.

Hugh shook his head and said they had to find a better solution, but beyond that he clearly had no idea how they could improve the bombe either.

Alan felt remarkably at ease among his fellow mathematicians. They treated him like a normal person, not a lunatic who loved numbers for some reason and was ecstatic because he had found a new version of a proof. Just as Chris had always done.

Joan – still focused on the black and white squares – leaned towards him. "It would be useful if there were a machine that could go through all the possible combinations in chess and pick out the best one. You really should work on that."

The corner of Alan's mouth crept up, she said that every time the chess champion was beating her. It was an idea he often played with in his head. If a machine could decipher the uncrackable Enigma code, why couldn't it also play a game of chess?

Finally, she took hold of a pawn and moved it forward one square. To their great delight, Hugh growled.

Alan placed himself behind the chair to predict Hugh's next move and patted her on the shoulder. She giggled softly and tucked a brown lock behind her ear. Alan had no idea what to do with that so he turned and stared at a graph. His mother always asked if he had defeated any more Grafs, like the German nobleman, but this was a collection of letters linked by the positions in the deciphered message. The whole wall was a jumble of lines and circles, Alan sighed.

The next moment Joan cheered, which told him she had beaten Hugh.

"I let you win, you know," the sore loser remarked.

"Not a chance," she said fervently, "do I see a tear of defeat there?"

"Of happiness, because you finally won a game," he retorted.

Their bickering could have gone on for quite a while, had Gordon not brusquely flung the door open.

The ever-controlled man now had a look of madness in his eyes. He rubbed the sweat off his moustache as Joan set him down on her chair.

"In the name of the Wronskian, what happened to you?" Her face was as worried as theirs. Was there another bomb attack in Bletchley and the alarm didn't work?

Gordon kept up the tension by first wiping his forehead and complaining about how far Bletchley was from Gayhurst. Then his exhaustion turned to excitement. He raised a whole heap of papers into the air and solemnly declared, "Behold, the solution to all our problems. I know how we can crack Enigma in less than a day."

Synchronously, their mouths fell open.