In the United Kingdom, Dr. Alan Mathison Turing, considering the war to be effectively finished, has long since turned his attentions away from the problem of voice encryption and into the creation of thinking machines. For about ten months—ever since the finished Colossus Mark II was delivered to Bletchley Park—he has had the opportunity to work with a truly programmable computing machine. Alan invented these machines long before one was ever built, and has never needed hands-on experience in order to think about them, but his experiences with Colossus Mark II have helped him to solidify some ideas of how the next machine ought to be designed. He thinks of it as a postwar machine, but that’s only because he’s in Europe and hasn’t been concerned with the problem of conquering Nippon as much as Waterhouse has.