Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  “Fine,” Randy says, picks up his phone, and dials John Cantrell’s room number. This being a brand-new, modern hotel, he gets a voice mail box in which John has actually bothered to record an informative greeting.

  “This is John Cantrell of Novus Ordo Seclorum and Epiphyte Corporations. For those of you who have reached me using my universal phone number and consequently have no idea where I am: I am in the Hotel Foote Mansion in the Sultanate of Kinakuta—please consult a quality atlas. It is four o’clock in the afternoon, Thursday March twenty-first. I’m probably down in the Bomb and Grapnel.”

  The Bomb and Grapnel is the pirate-themed hotel bar, which is not as cheesy as it sounds. It is decorated with (among other museum-grade memorabilia) several brass cannons that seem authentic. John Cantrell is seated at a corner table, looking as at home here as a man in a black cowboy hat possibly can. His laptop is open on the table next to a rum drink that has been served up in a soup tureen. A two-foot-long straw connects it to Cantrell’s mouth. He sucks and types. Watching incredulously is a cadre of tough-looking Chinese businessmen sitting at the bar; when they see Randy coming in, carrying his own laptop, they buzz up. Now there’s two of them!

  Cantrell looks up and grins—something he cannot do without looking fiendish. He and Randy shake hands triumphantly. Even though they’ve only been riding around on 747s, they feel like Stanley and Livingstone.

  “Nice tan,” Cantrell says puckishly, all but twirling his mustache. Randy’s caught off guard, starts and stops talking twice, finally shakes his head in defeat. Both men laugh.

  “I got the tan on boats,” Randy says, “not by the hotel pool. The last couple of weeks, I’ve been putting out fires all over the place.”

  “Nothing that’ll impact shareholder value, I hope,” Cantrell deadpans.

  Randy says, “You’re looking encouragingly pale.”

  “Everything’s fine on my end,” Cantrell says. “It’s like I predicted—lots of Secret Admirers want to work on a real data haven.”

  Randy orders a Guinness and says, “You also predicted that a lot of those people would turn out to be squirrelly and undisciplined.”

  “Didn’t hire those,” Cantrell says. “And with Eb to handle the weird stuff, we’ve been able to roll right over the few speed bumps we’ve encountered.”

  “Have you seen the Crypt?”

  Cantrell raises an eyebrow and shoots him a flawless imitation of a paranoid glance. “It’s like that NORAD command bunker in Colorado Springs,” he says.

  “Yeah!” Randy laughs. “Cheyenne Mountain.”

  “It’s too big,” Cantrell announces. He knows Randy is thinking the same thing.

  So Randy decides to play devil’s advocate. “But the sultan does everything big. There are big paintings of him in the big airport.”

  Cantrell shakes his head. “The Information Ministry is a serious project. The sultan didn’t just make it up. His technocrats conceived it.”

  “I’m told Avi did a little bit of deft turkey-baster work…”

  “Whatever. But the people behind it, like Mohammed Pragasu, are all Stanford B-School types. Oxford and Sorbonne graduates. It’s been engineered to the doorstops by Germans. That cave is not a monument to the sultan.”

  “No, it’s not a vanity project,” Randy agrees, thinking of the chilly machine room that Tom Howard is building a thousand feet below the cloud forest.

  “So there must be some rational explanation for how big it is.”

  “Maybe it’s in the business plan?” ventures Randy.

  Cantrell shrugs; he hasn’t read it either. “The last one I read cover-to-cover was Plan One. A year ago,” admits Randy.

  “That was a good business plan,” Cantrell says.*

  Randy changes the subject. “I forgot my pass phrase. Need to do that biometric thing with you.”

  “It’s too noisy here,” Cantrell says, “it works by listening to your voice, doing Fourier shit, remembering a few key numbers. We’ll do it in my room later.”

  Feeling some need to explain why he hasn’t been keeping up with his e-mail, Randy says, “I have been totally obsessed, interfacing with these AVCLA people in Manila.”

  “Yup. How’s that going?”

  “Look. My job’s pretty simple,” Randy says. “There’s that big Nipponese cable from Taiwan down to Luzon. A router at each end. Then there’s the network of short-run, interisland cables that the AVCLA people are laying in the Philippines. Each cable segment begins and ends at a router, as you know. My job is to program the routers, make sure the data will always have a clear path from Taiwan to Kinakuta.”

  Cantrell glances away, worried that he’s about to get bored. Randy practically lunges across the table, because he knows it’s not boring. “John! You are a major credit card company!”

  “Okay.” Cantrell meets his gaze, slightly unnerved.

  “You are storing your data in the Kinakuta data haven. You need to download a terabyte of crucial data. You begin the process—your encrypted bytes are screaming up through the Philippines at a gigabyte per second, to Taiwan, from there across to the States.” Randy pauses and swigs Guinness, building the drama. “Then a ferry capsizes off Cebu.”

  “So?”

  “So, in the space of ten minutes, a hundred thousand Filipinos all pick up their telephones simultaneously.”

  Cantrell actually whacks his forehead. “Oh, my god!”

  “Now you understand! I’ve been configuring this network so that no matter what happens, the data continues to flow to that credit-card company. Maybe at a reduced speed—but it flows.”

  “Well, I can see how that would keep you busy.”

  “And that’s why all I’m really up to speed on is these routers. And incidentally they’re good routers, but they just don’t have enough capacity to feed a Crypt of that size, or justify it economically.”

  “The gist of Avi and Beryl’s explanation,” Cantrell says, “is that Epiphyte is no longer the sole carrier into the Crypt.”

  “But we’re laying the cable here from Palawan—”

  “The sultan’s minions have been out drumming up business,” Cantrell says. “Avi and Beryl are being vague, but from comparing notes with Tom, and reading tea leaves, methinks there’s one, maybe two other cables coming into Kinakuta.”

  “Wow!” Randy says. It’s all he can think of. “Wow!” He drinks about half of his Guinness. “It makes sense. If they’re doing it once with us, they can do it again, with other carriers.”

  “They used us as leverage to bring in others,” Cantrell says.

  “Well… the question is, then, is the cable through the Philippines still needed? Or wanted?”

  “Yup,” Cantrell says.

  “It is?”

  “No. I mean, yup, that’s the question, all right.”

  Randy considers it. “Actually, this could be good news for your phase of the operation. More pipes into the Crypt means more business in the long run.”

  Cantrell raises his eyebrows, a little worried about Randy’s feelings. Randy leans back in his chair and says, “We’ve had debates before about whether it makes sense for Epiphyte to be screwing around with cables and routers in the Philippines.”

  Cantrell says, “The business plan has always maintained that it would make economic sense to be running a cable through the Philippines even if there weren’t a Crypt at the end of it.”

  “The business plan has to say the Intra-Philippines network could be spun off as an independent business, and still survive,” Randy says, “to justify our doing it.”

  Neither one of them needs to say any more. They’ve been concentrating on each other pretty intensely for a while, shutting out the rest of the bar with their postures, and now, spontaneously, both of them lean back, stretch, and begin looking around. The timing’s fortuitous, because Goto Furudenendu has just come in with a posse of what Randy guesses are civil engineers: healthy-looking, clean-cut Nipponese men in their thirties. Ra
ndy invites him over with a smile, then flags down their waiter and orders a few of those great big bottles of bitterly cold Nipponese beer.

  “This reminds me—the Secret Admirers are really on my case,” Randy says.

  Cantrell grins, showing some affection for those crazy Secret Admirers. “Smart, rabidly paranoid people are the backbone of cryptology,” he says, “but they don’t always understand business.”

  “Maybe they understand it too well,” Randy says. He is left with some residual annoyance that he came down to the Bomb and Grapnel party in order to answer the question posed by root@eruditorum.org (“Why are you doing it?”) and he still doesn’t know. As a matter of fact, he knows less now than he did before.

  Then the men from Goto join them, and it just happens that Eberhard Föhr and Tom Howard show up at just the same time. There is a combinatorial explosion of name-card exchanges and introductions. It seems like protocol demands a lot of serious social drinking—now Randy’s inadvertently challenged these guys’ politeness by ordering them beer, and they have to demonstrate that they will not be bested in any such contest. Tables get pushed together and everything gets just unbelievably jovial. Eb has to order some beer for everyone too. Pretty soon things have degenerated into karaoke. Randy gets up and sings “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo.” It’s a good choice because it’s a mellow, laid-back song that doesn’t demand lots of emoting. Or singing ability, for that matter.

  At some point Tom Howard puts his beefy arm up on the back of Cantrell’s chair, the better to shout into his ear. Their matched Eutropian bracelets, engraved with “Hello Doctor, please freeze me as follows” messages, are glittery and conspicuous, and Randy’s nervous that the Nipponese guys are going to notice this and ask questions that will be exceedingly difficult to answer. Tom is reminding Cantrell of something (for some reason they always refer to Cantrell in this way; some people are just made to be called by last names). Cantrell nods and shoots Randy a quick and somewhat furtive look. When Randy looks back at him, Cantrell glances down apologetically and takes to chivvying his beer bottle nervously between his hands. Tom just keeps looking at Randy kind of interestedly. All of this motivated glancing finally brings Randy and Tom and Cantrell together at the farthest end of the bar from the karaoke speakers.

  “So, you know Andrew Loeb,” Cantrell says. It’s clear he’s basically dismayed by this and yet sort of impressed too, as if he’d just learned that Randy had once beaten a man to death with his bare hands and then just never bothered to mention it.

  “It’s true,” Randy says. “As well as anyone can know a guy like that.”

  Cantrell is paying undue diligence to the project of picking the label off of his beer bottle and so Tom picks up the thread now. “You were in business together?”

  “Not really. Can I ask how you guys are aware of this? I mean, how do you even know that Andrew Loeb exists in the first place? Because of the Digibomber thing?”

  “Oh, no—it was after that. Andy became a figure of note in some of the circles where Tom and I both hang out,” Cantrell says.

  “The only circles I can imagine that Andy’d be a part of would be primitive survivalists, and people who believe they’ve been Satanically ritually abused.”

  Randy says this mindlessly, as if his mouth is a mechanical teletype hammering out a weather forecast. It kind of hangs there.

  “That helps fill in a few gaps,” Tom finally says.

  “What did you think when the FBI searched his cabin?” Cantrell asks, his grin returned.

  “I didn’t know what to think,” Randy says. “I remember watching the videotape on the news—the agents coming out of that shack with boxes of evidence, and thinking my name must be on papers in them. That somehow I’d get mixed up in the case as a result.”

  “Did the FBI ever contact you?” Tom asks.

  “No. I think that once they searched through all of his stuff, they figured out pretty quickly that he wasn’t the Digibomber, and crossed him off the list.”

  “Well, not long after that happened, Andy Loeb showed up on the Net,” Cantrell says.

  “I find that impossible to believe.”

  “So did we. I mean, we’d all received copies of his manifestoes—printed on this grey recycled paper that was like the sheets of fuzz that you peel off a clothes dryer’s lint trap.”

  “He used some kind of organic, water-based ink that flaked off like black dandruff,” Tom says.

  “We used to joke about having Andy-grit all over our desks,” Cantrell says. “So when this guy called Andy Loeb showed up on the Secret Admirers mailing list, and the Eutropia newsgroup, posting all of these long rants, we refused to believe it was him.”

  “We thought that someone had just written really brilliant parodies of his prose style,” Cantrell says.

  “But when they kept coming, day after day, and he started getting into these long dialogs with people, it became obvious that it really was him,” Tom grumbles.

  “How did he square that with being a Luddite?”

  Cantrell: “He said that he’d always thought of computers as a force that alienated and atomized society.”

  Tom: “But as the result of being the number one Digibomber suspect for a while, he’d been forcibly made aware of the Internet, which changed computers by connecting them.”

  “Oh, my god!” Randy says.

  “And he’d been mulling over the Internet while he was doing whatever Andrew Loeb does,” Tom continues.

  Randy: “Squatting naked in icy mountain streams strangling muskrats with his bare hands.”

  Tom: “And he’d realized computers could be a tool to unite society.”

  Randy: “And I’ll bet he was just the guy to unite it.”

  Cantrell: “Well, that’s actually not far away from what he said.”

  Randy: “So, are you about to tell me that he became a Eutropian?”

  Cantrell: “Well, no. It’s more like he discovered a schism in the Eutropian movement we didn’t know was there, and created his own splinter group.”

  Randy: “I think of the Eutropians as being totally hard-core individuals, pure libertarians.”

  “Well, yeah!” Cantrell says. “But the basic premise of Eutropianism is that technology has made us post-human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net, and headed towards omnipotence. Now, the first people to talk that way were libertarians.”

  Tom says, “But the idea has attracted all kinds of people—including Andy Loeb. He showed up one day and started yammering about hive minds.”

  “And of course he was flamed to a crisp by most of the Eutropians, because that concept was anathema to them,” Cantrell says.

  Tom: “But he kept at it, and after a while, some people started agreeing with him. Turned out there was really a pretty substantial faction within the Eutropians who didn’t especially care for libertarianism and who found the idea of a hive mind attractive.”

  “So, now Andy’s the leader of that faction?” Randy asks.

  “I would suppose so,” Cantrell says. “They split away and formed their own newsgroup. We haven’t heard much from them in the last six months or so.”

  “So how did you become aware of a connection between Andy and me?”

  “He stills pops into the Secret Admirers newsgroup from time to time,” Tom says. “And there’s been a lot of discussion there about the Crypt lately.”

  Cantrell says, “When he found out that you and Avi were involved, he posted this vast rant—twenty or thirty K of run-on sentences. Not very complimentary.”

  “Well, Jesus. What’s his beef? He won the case. Completely bankrupted me. You’d think he’d have something better to do than beat this dead horse,” Randy says, thumping himself on the chest. “Doesn’t he have a day job?”

  “He’s some kind of a lawyer now,” Cantrell says.

  “Ha! Figures.”

  “He’s been denouncing us,�
�� Tom says. “Capitalist roader. Atomizing society. Making the world safe for drug traffickers and Third-World kleptocrats.”

  “Well, at least he got something right,” Randy says. He’s delighted to have an answer, finally, to the question of why they’re building the Crypt.

  RETROGRADE MANEUVER

  * * *

  SIO IS A mud cemetery. Those who have already given their lives for the emperor compete for mire space with those who intend to. Bizarre forktailed American planes dive out of the sun every day to murder them with terrible glowing rains of cannon fire and the mind-crushing detonations of bombs, so they sleep in open-topped graves and only come out at night. But their pits are full of reeking water that churns with hostile life, and when the sun goes down, rain beats them, carrying into their bones the deadly chill of high altitudes. Every man in the 20th Division knows that he will not leave New Guinea alive, so it remains only to choose the method of death: surrender to be tortured, then massacred by the Australians? Put grenades to their heads? Remain where they are to be killed by the airplanes all day, and all night by malaria, dysentery, scrub typhus, starvation, and hypothermia? Or walk two hundred miles over mountains and flooding rivers to Madang, which is tantamount to suicide even when it is peacetime and you have food and medicine… ?

  But that is what they are ordered to do. General Adachi flies to Sio—it is the first friendly plane they have seen in weeks—and lands on the rutted septic field that they call an airstrip, and orders the evacuation. They are to move inland in four detachments. Regiment by regiment, they bury their dead, pack up what is left of their equipment, hoard what little food is left, wait for dark, and trudge towards the mountains. The later echelons can find their path by smell, following the reek of dysentery and of the corpses dropped behind the pathfinder groups like breadcrumbs.

  The top commanders stay to the end, and the radio platoon stays with them; without a powerful radio transmitter, and the cryptographic paraphernalia that goes with it, a general is not a general, a division is not a division. Finally they go off the air, and begin breaking the transmitter down into the smallest pieces they can, which unfortunately are not all that small; a divisional radio transmitter is a powerful beast, made for lighting up the ionosphere. It has an electrical generator, transformers, and other components that cannot be made light. The men of the radio platoon, who would find it difficult to move even the weight of their own skeletons over the mountains and across the surging rivers, will carry the additional burdens of engine blocks, fuel tanks, and transformers.