Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  In a paneled conference room, a dozen people are waiting, equally divided between table-sitting big wheels and wall-crawling minions. As Randy and Avi enter a great flurry of hand-shaking and card-presenting ensues, though most of the introductions zoom through Randy’s short-term memory like a supersonic fighter blowing past shoddy Third World air defense systems. He is left only with a stack of business cards. He deals them out on his patch of table like a senescent codger playing Klondike on his meal tray. Avi, of course, knows all of these people already—seems to be on a first-name basis with most of them, knows their children’s names and ages, their hobbies, their blood types, chronic medical conditions, what books they are reading, whose parties they have been going to. All of them are evidently delighted by this, and all of them, thank god, completely ignore Randy.

  Of the half-dozen important people in the room, three are middle-aged Filipino men. One of these is a high-ranking official in the PTA. The second is the president of an upstart telecommunications company called FiliTel, which is trying to compete against the traditional monopoly. The third is the vice president of a company called 24 Jam that runs about half of the convenience stores in the Philippines, as well as quite a few in Malaysia. Randy has trouble telling these men apart, but by watching them converse with Avi, and by using inductive logic, he is soon able to match business card with face.

  The other three are easy: two Americans and one Nipponese, and one of the Americans is a woman. She is wearing lavender pumps color-coordinated with a neat little skirt suit, and matching nails. She looks as if she might have stepped straight off the set of an infomercial for fake fingernails or home permanents. Her card identifies her as Mary Ann Carson, and claims that she is a V.P. with AVCLA, Asia Venture Capital Los Angeles, which Randy knows dimly as a Los Angeles-based firm that invests in Rapidly Developing Asian Economies. The American man is blond and has a hard-jawed quasi-military look about him. He seems alert, disciplined, impassive, which Charlene’s crowd would interpret as hostility born of repression born of profound underlying mental disorder. He represents the Subic Bay Free Port. The Nipponese man is the executive vice president of a subsidiary of a ridiculously colossal consumer-electronics company. He is about six feet tall. He has a small body and a large head shaped like an upside-down Bosc pear, thick hair edged with grey, and wire-rimmed glasses. He smiles frequently, and projects the serene confidence of a man who has memorized a two-thousand-page encyclopedia of business etiquette.

  Avi wastes little time in starting the videotape, which at the moment represents about seventy-five percent of Epiphyte Corp.’s assets. Avi had it produced by a hot multimedia startup in San Francisco, and the contract to produce it accounted for one hundred percent of the startup’s revenue this year. “Pies crumble when you slice them too thin,” Avi likes to say.

  It starts with footage—pilfered from a forgotten made-for-TV movie—of a Spanish galleon making headway through heavy seas. Superimpose title: SOUTH CHINA SEA—A.D. 1699. The soundtrack has been beefed up and Dolbyized from its original monaural version. It is quite impressive.

  (“Half of the investors in AVCLA are into yachting,” Avi explained.)

  Cut to a shot (produced by the multimedia company, and seamlessly spliced in) of a mangy, exhausted lookout in a crow’s nest, peering through a brass spyglass, hollering the Spanish equivalent of “Land ho!”

  Cut to the galleon’s captain, a rugged, bearded character, emerging from his cabin to stare with Keatsian wild surmise at the horizon. “Corregidor!” he exclaims.

  Cut to a stone tower on the crown of a green tropical island, where a lookout is sighting the (digitally inserted) galleon on the horizon. The lookout cups his hands around his mouth and bellows, in Spanish, “It is the galleon! Light the signal fire!”

  (“The family of the guy who runs the PTA is really into local history,” Avi said, “they run the Museum of the Philippines.”)

  With a lusty cheer, Spaniards (actually, Mexican-American actors) in conquistador helmets plunge firebrands into a huge pile of dry wood which evolves into a screaming pyramid of flame powerful enough to flash-roast an ox.

  Cut to the battlements of Manila’s Fort Santiago (foreground: carved styrofoam; background: digitally generated landscape), where another conquistador spies a light flaring up on the horizon. “Mira! El galleon!” he cries.

  Cut to a series of shots of Manila townsfolk rushing to the seawall to adore the signal fire, including an Augustinian monk who clasps his rosary-strewn hands and bursts into clerical Latin on the spot (“the family that runs FiliTel endowed a chapel at Manila Cathedral”) as well as a clean-cut family of Chinese merchants unloading bales of silk from a junk (“24 Jam, the convenience store chain, is run by Chinese mestizos”).

  A voiceover begins, deep and authoritative, English with a Filipino accent (“The actor is the brother of the godfather of the grandson of the man who runs the PTA”). Subtitles appear on the bottom of the screen in Tagalog (“the PTA people have a heavy political commitment to the native language”).

  “In the heyday of the Spanish Empire, the most important event of the year was the arrival of the galleon from Acapulco, laden with silver from the rich mines of America—silver to buy the silks and spices of Asia, silver that made the Philippines into the economic fountainhead of Asia. The approach of the galleon was heralded by a beacon of light from the island of Corregidor, at the entrance of Manila Bay.”

  Cut (finally!) from the beaming, greed-lit faces of the Manila townsfolk to a 3-D graphics rendering of Manila Bay, the Bata’an Peninsula, and the small islands off the tip of Bata’an, including Corregidor. The point of view swoops and zooms in on Corregidor where a hokily, badly rendered fire blazes up. A beam of yellow light, like a phaser blast in Star Trek, shoots across the bay. Our point of view follows it. It splashes against the walls of Fort Santiago.

  “The signal fire was an ancient and simple technology. In the language of modern science, its light was a form of electromagnetic radiation, propagating in a straight line across Manila Bay, and carrying a single bit of information. But, in an age starved for information, that single bit meant everything to the people of Manila.”

  Cue that funky music. Cut to shots of teeming modern Manila. Shopping malls and luxury hotels in Makati. Electronics factories, schoolchildren sitting in front of computer screens. Satellite dishes. Ships unloading at the big free port of Subic Bay. Lots and lots of grinning and thumbs-up gestures.

  “The Philippines of today is an emerging economic dynamo. As its economy grows, so does its hunger for information—not single bits, but hundreds of billions of them. But the technology for transmitting that information has not changed as much as you might imagine.”

  Back to the 3-D rendering of Manila Bay. This time, instead of a bonfire on Corregidor, there’s a microwave horn up on a tower on the isle’s summit, gunning electric-blue sine waves at the sprawl of Metro Manila.

  “Electromagnetic radiation—in this case, microwave beams—propagating in straight lines, over line-of-sight routes, can transmit vast quantities of information quickly. Modern cryptographic technology makes the signal safe from would-be eavesdroppers.”

  Cut back to the galleon-and-lookout footage. “In the old days, Corregidor’s position at the entrance of Manila Bay made it a natural lookout—a place where information about approaching ships could be gathered.”

  Cut to a shot of a barge in a cove somewhere, feeding thick tarry cable overboard, divers at work with queues of round orange buoys. “Today, Corregidor’s geographical situation makes it an ideal place to land deep-sea fiberoptic cables. The information coming down these cables—from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Nippon, and the United States—can from there be transmitted directly into the heart of Manila. At the speed of light!”

  More 3-D graphics. This time, it’s a detailed rendering of the cityscape of Manila. Randy knows it by heart because he gathered the data for the damn thing by walking around town with his
GPS receiver. The beam of bits from Corregidor comes straight in off the bay and scores a bullseye on the rooftop antenna of a nondescript four-story office building between Fort Santiago and the Manila Cathedral. It is Epiphyte’s building, and the antenna is discreetly labeled with the name and logo of Epiphyte Corp. Other antennas then retransmit information to the PTA building and to other nearby sites: skyscrapers in Makati, government offices in Quezon City, and an Air Force base south of town.

  Hotel staff throw a carpeted gangway across the gap between seawall and boat. As Randy is walking across it, the woman extends her hand to him. He reaches out to shake it. “Randy Waterhouse,” he says.

  She grabs his hand and pulls him on board—not so much greeting him as making sure he doesn’t fall overboard. “Hi. Amy Shaftoe,” she says. “Welcome to Glory.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Glory. The name of this junk is Glory,” she says. She speaks forthrightly and with great clarity, as though communicating over a noisy two-way radio. “Actually, it’s Glory IV,” she continues. Her accent is largely Midwestern, with a trace of Southern twang, and a little bit of Filipino, too. If you saw her on the streets of some Midwestern town you might not notice the traces of Asian ancestry around her eyes. She has dark brown hair, sun-streaked, just long enough to form a secure ponytail, no longer.

  “Scuse me a sec,” she says, pokes her head into the pilot house, and speaks to the pilot in a mixture of Tagalog and English. The pilot nods, looks around, and begins to manipulate the controls. The hotel staff pull the gangway back. “Hey,” Amy says quietly, and underhands a pack of Marlboros across the gap to each one of them. They snatch them out of the air, grin, and thank her. Glory IV begins to back away from the dock.

  Amy spends the next few minutes walking around the deck, going through some kind of mental checklist. Randy counts four men in addition to Amy and the pilot—two Caucasians and two Filipinos. All of them are fiddling around with engines or diving gear in a way Randy recognizes, through many cultural and technological barriers, as debugging. Amy walks past Randy a couple of times, but avoids looking him in the eye. She’s not a shy person. Her body language is eloquent enough: “I am aware that men are in the habit of looking at whatever women happen to be nearby, in the hopes of deriving enjoyment from their physical beauty, their hair, makeup, fragrance, and clothing. I will ignore this, politely and patiently, until you get over it.” Amy is a long-limbed girl in paint-stained jeans, a sleeveless t-shirt, and high-tech sandals, and she lopes easily around the boat. Finally she approaches him, meeting his eyes for just a second and then glancing away as if bored.

  “Thanks for giving me the ride,” Randy says.

  “It’s nothing,” she says.

  “I feel embarrassed that I didn’t tip the guys at the dock. Can I reimburse you?”

  “You can reimburse me with information,” she says without hesitation. Amy reaches up with one hand to rub the back of her neck. Her elbow pokes up in the air. He notices about a month’s growth of hair in her armpit, then glimpses the corner of a tattoo poking out from under her shirt. “You’re in the information business, right?” She watches his face, hoping that he’ll take the cue and laugh, or at least grin. But he’s too preoccupied to catch it. She glances away, now with a knowing, sardonic look on her face—you don’t understand me, Randy, which is absolutely typical, and I’m fine with that. She reminds Randy of level-headed blue-collar lesbians he has known, drywall-hanging urban dykes with cats and cross-country ski racks.

  She takes him into an air-conditioned cabin with a lot of windows and a coffee maker. It has fake wood-veneer paneling like a suburban basement, and framed exhibits on the walls—official documents like licenses and registrations, and enlarged black-and-white photographs of people and boats. It smells like coffee, soap, and oil. There is a boom box held down with bungee cords, and a shoebox with a couple of dozen CDs in it, mostly albums by American woman singer-songwriters of the offbeat, misunderstood, highly intelligent but intensely emotional school, getting rich selling music to consumers who understand what it’s like not to be understood.* Amy pours two mugs of coffee and sets them down on the cabin’s bolted-down table, then fishes in the tight pockets of her jeans, pulls out a waterproof nylon wallet, extracts two business cards, and shoots them across the table, one after the other, to Randy. She seems to enjoy doing this—a small, private smile comes onto her lips and then vanishes the moment Randy sees it. The cards bear the logo of Semper Marine Services and the name America Shaftoe.

  “Your name’s America?” Randy asks.

  Amy looks out the window, bored, afraid he’s going to make a big deal out of it. “Yeah,” she says.

  “Where’d you grow up?”

  She seems to be fascinated by the view out the window: big cargo ships strewn around Manila Bay as far as the eye can see, ships hailing from Athens, Shanghai, Vladivostok, Cape Town, Monrovia. Randy infers that looking at big rusty boats is more interesting than talking to Randy.

  “So, would you mind telling me what’s going on?” she asks. She turns to face him, lifts the mug to her lips, and finally, looks him straight in the eye.

  Randy’s a little nonplussed. The question is basically impertinent coming from America Shaftoe. Her company, Semper Marine Services, is a contractor at the very lowest level of Avi’s virtual corporation—only one of a dozen boats-and-divers outfits that they could have hired—so this is a bit like being interrogated by one’s janitor or taxi driver.

  But she’s smart and unusual, and, precisely because of all her efforts not to be, she’s cute. As an interesting female, and a fellow American, she is pulling rank, demanding to be accorded a higher status. Randy tries to be careful.

  “Is there something bothering you?” he asks.

  She looks away. She’s afraid she’s given him the wrong impression. “Not in particular,” she says, “I’m just nosy. I like to hear stories. Divers always sit around and tell each other stories.”

  Randy sips his coffee. America continues, “In this business, you never know where your next job is going to come from. Some people have really weird reasons for wanting to get stuff done underwater, which I like to hear.” She concludes, “It’s fun!” which is clearly all the motivation she needs.

  Randy views all of the above as a fairly professional bullshitting job. He decides to give Amy press-release material only. “All the Filipinos are in Manila. That’s where the information needs to go. It is somewhat awkward, getting information to Manila, because it has mountains in back of it and Manila Bay in front. The bay is a nightmare place to run submarine cables—”

  She’s nodding. Of course she would know this already. Randy hits the fast-forward. “Corregidor’s a pretty good place. From Corregidor you can shoot a line-of-sight microwave transmission across the bay to downtown Manila.”

  “So you are extending the North Luzon coastal festoon from Subic Bay down to Corregidor,” she says.

  “Uh—two things about what you just said,” Randy says, and pauses for a moment to get the answer queued up in his output buffer. “One, you have to be careful about your pronouns—what do you mean when you say ‘you’? I work for Epiphyte Corporation, which is designed from the ground up to work, not on its own, but as an element in a virtual corporation, kind of like—”

  “I know what an epiphyte is,” she says. “What’s two?”

  “Okay, good,” Randy says, a little off balance. “Two is that the extension of the North Luzon Festoon is just the first of what we hope will be several linkups. We want to lay a lot of cable, eventually, into Corregidor.”

  Some kind of machinery behind Amy’s eyes begins to hum. The message is clear enough. There will be work aplenty for Semper Marine, if they handle this first job well.

  “In this case, the entity that’s doing the work is a joint venture including us, FiliTel, 24 Jam, and a big Nipponese electronics company, among others.”

  “What does 24 Jam have to do with it? They’
re convenience stores.”

  “They’re the retail outlet—the distribution system—for Epiphyte’s product.”

  “And that is?”

  “Pinoy-grams.” Randy manages to suppress the urge to tell her that the name is trademarked.

  “Pinoy-grams?”

  “Here’s how it works. You are an Overseas Contract Worker. Before you leave home for Saudi or Singapore or Seattle or wherever, you buy or rent a little gizmo from us. It’s about the size of a paperback book and encases a thimble-sized video camera, a tiny screen, and a lot of memory chips. The components come from all over the place—they are shipped to the free port at Subic and assembled in a Nipponese plant there. So they cost next to nothing. Anyway, you take this gizmo overseas with you. Whenever you feel like communicating with the folks at home, you turn it on, aim the camera at yourself, and record a little video greeting card. It all goes onto the memory chips. It’s highly compressed. Then you plug the gizmo into a phone line and let it work its magic.”

  “What’s the magic? It sends the video down the phone line?”

  “Right.”

  “Haven’t people being messing around with video phones for a long time?”

  “The difference here is our software. We don’t try to send the video in real time—that’s too expensive. We store the data at central servers, then take advantage of lulls, when traffic is low through the undersea cables, and shoot the data down those cables when time can be had cheap. Eventually the data winds up at Epiphyte’s facility in Intramuros. From there we can use wireless technology to send the data to 24 Jam stores all over Metro Manila. The store just needs a little pie-plate dish on the roof, and a decoder and a regular VCR down behind the counter. The Pinoy-gram is recorded on a regular videotape. Then, when Mom comes in to buy eggs or Dad comes in to buy cigarettes, the storekeeper says, ‘Hey, you got a Pinoy-gram today,’ and hands them the videotape. They can take it home and get the latest news from their child overseas. When they’re done, they bring the videotape back to 24 Jam for reuse.”