Ternary Dreams

A monastery south of Kyiv. An asylum before the war, a killing site under German occupation, and then, for three winters, the birthplace of continental Europe’s first stored-program computer. Feofanija Verbytska, hired at eighteen as a lab girl, knows every stone of the place. She winds copper wire around ferrite cores, first at the MESM in the monastery ruin, then in Moscow at the Setun, the only ternary computer ever built in series, a machine that counts in three states: minus, nought, plus. In 1959 the KGB lays her murdered father’s file on the table and sends her as a swallow to the American National Exhibition. Her assignment is Thomas Reiner, an IBM engineer. In a hotel room the next wall is wired to overhear, the operation slips its own script: the third state between order and feeling, between loyalty and betrayal. Sixty years later her granddaughter sits in the same forest, under shellfire, learning a dead language: the number system of a machine that was sawed apart. Each decoded notebook opens another year. What did Fanya do, and for whom did she write it down, in a code only a reader who thinks in three states can break?