Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  “Harvard Li. Didn’t you get my e-mail?”

  Harvard Li! Now Randy is starting to remember this guy. Founder of Harvard Computer Company, a medium-sized PC clone manufacturer in Taiwan.

  John grins. “I received about twenty e-mail messages from an unknown person claiming to be Harvard Li.”

  “Those were from me! I do not understand what you mean that I am an unknown person.” Harvard Li is extremely brisk, but not exactly pissed off. He is, Randy realizes, not the kind of man who has to coach himself not to be romantic before a meeting.

  “I hate e-mail,” John says.

  Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. “What do you mean?”

  “The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don’t observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it’s really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it.”

  “Ah. You use digital signature algorithm.”

  John considers this carefully. “I do not respond to any e-mail that is not digitally signed. Digital signature algorithm refers to one technique for signing them. It is a good technique, but it could be better.”

  Harvard Li begins nodding about halfway through this, acknowledging the point. “Is there a structural problem? Or are you concerned by the five-hundred-and-twelve-bit key length? Would it be acceptable with a one-thousand-twenty-four-bit key?”

  About three sentences later, the conversation between Cantrell and Li soars over the horizon of Randy’s crypto graphic knowledge, and his brain shuts down. Harvard Li is a crypto maniac! He has been studying this shit personally—not just paying minions to read the books and send him notes, but personally going over the equations, doing the math.

  Tom Howard is grinning broadly. Eberhard is looking about as amused as he ever gets, and Beryl’s biting back a grin. Randy is trying desperately to get the joke. Avi notes the confusion on Randy’s face, turns his back to the Taiwanese, and rubs his thumb and fingers together: money.

  Oh, yeah. It had to be something to do with that.

  Harvard Li cranked out a few million PC clones in the early nineties and loaded them all with Windows, Word, and Excel—but somehow forgot to write any checks to Microsoft. About a year ago, Microsoft kicked his ass in court and won a huge judgment. Harvard claimed bankruptcy: he doesn’t have a penny to his name. Microsoft has been trying to prove he still has the odd billion or two salted away.

  Harvard Li has clearly been thinking very hard about how to put money where guys like Microsoft can’t get it. There are many time-honored ways: the Swiss bank account, the false-front corporation, the big real estate project in deepest, darkest China, bars of gold in a vault somewhere. Those tricks might work with the average government, but Microsoft is ten times smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular rules. It gives Randy a little frisson just to imagine Harvard Li’s situation: being chased across the planet by Microsoft’s state-of-the-art hellhounds.

  Harvard Li needs electronic cash. Not the lame stuff that people use to buy t-shirts on the Web without giving away their credit card numbers. He needs the full-on badass kind, based on hard crypto, rooted in an offshore data haven, and he needs it bad. So nothing’s more logical than that he is sending lots of e-mail to John Cantrell.

  Tom Howard sidles up to him. “The question is, is it just Harvard Li, or does he think he’s discovered a new market?”

  “Probably both,” Randy guesses. “He probably knows a few other people who’d like to have a private bank.”

  “The missiles,” Tom says.

  “Yeah.” China’s been taking potshots at Taiwan with ballistic missiles lately, sort of like a Wild West villain shooting at the good guy’s feet to make him dance. “There have been bank runs in Taipei.”

  “In a way,” Tom says, “these guys are tons smarter than us, because they’ve never had a currency they could depend on.” He and Randy look over at John Cantrell, who has crossed his arms over his chest and is unloading a disquisition on the Euler totient function while Harvard Li nods intently and his nerd-de-camp frantically scrawls notes on a legal pad. Avi stands far to one side, staring at the Old Palace, as in his mind the ramifications of this bloom and sprawl and twine about each other like a tropical garden run riot.

  Other delegations file into the room behind the grand wazir and stake out chunks of the conference table’s coastline. The Dentist comes in with his Norns or Furies or Hygienists or whatever the hell they are. There’s a group of white guys talking in Down Underish accents. Other than that, they are all Asians. Some of them talk amongst themselves and some pull on their chins and watch the conversation between Harvard Li and John Cantrell. Randy watches them in turn: Bad Suit Asians and Good Suit Asians. The former have grizzled buzz cuts and nicotine-tanned skin and look like killers. They are wearing bad suits, not because they can’t afford good ones, but because they don’t give a shit. They are from China. The Good Suit Asians have high-maintenance haircuts, eyeglasses from Paris, clear skin, ready smiles. They are mostly from Nippon.

  “I want to exchange keys, right now, so we can e-mail,” Li says, and gestures to an aide, who scurries to the edge of the table and unfolds a laptop. “Something something Ordo,” Li says in Cantonese. The aide points and clicks.

  Cantrell is gazing at the table expressionlessly. He squats down to look under it. He strolls over and feels under the edge with his hand.

  Randy bends and looks too. It’s one of these high-tech conference tables with embedded power and communications lines, so that visitors can plug in their laptops without having to string unsightly cables around and fight over power outlets. The slab must be riddled with conduits. No visible wires connect it to the world. The connections must run down hollow legs and into a hollow floor. John grins, turns to Li, and shakes his head. “Normally I’d say fine,” he says, “but for a client with your level of security needs, this is not an acceptable place to exchange keys.”

  “I’m not planning on using the phone,” Li says, “we can exchange them on floppies.”

  John knocks on wood. “Doesn’t matter. Have one of your staff look into the subject of Van Eck phreaking. That’s with a ‘p-h,’ not an ‘f,’ ” he says to the aide who’s writing it down. Then, sensing Li’s need for an executive summary, he says, “They can read the internal state of your computer by listening to the faint radio emissions coming out of the chips.”

  “Ahhhhh,” Li says, and exchanges hugely significant looks with his technical aides, as if this explains something that has been puzzling the shit out of them.

  Someone begins hollering wildly at the far end of the room—not the end by which the guests entered, but the other one. It is a chap in a getup similar to, but not quite as ornate as, the grand wazir’s. At some point he switches to English—the same dialect of English spoken by flight attendants for foreign airlines, who have told passengers to insert the metal tongue into the buckle so many times that it rushes out in one phlegmy garble. Small Kinakutan men in good suits begin filing into the room. They take seats across the head end of the table, which is wide enough for a Last Supper tableau. In the Jesus position is a really big chair. It is the kind of thing you’d get if you went to a Finnish designer with a shaved head, rimless glasses, and twin Ph.D.s in semiotics and civil engineering, wrote him a blank check, and asked him to design a throne. Behind is a separate table for minions. All of it is backed up by tons of priceless artwork: an eroded frieze, amputated from a jungle ruin somewhere.

  All the guests gravitate instinctively towards their positions around the table, and remain standing. The grand wazir glares at each one in turn. A small man slips into the room, staring vacantly at the floor in front of him, seemingly unaware that other people are present. His hair is lacquered down to his skull, his appearance of portliness minimized by Savile Row legerdemain. He eases into the big chair, which seems like a shocki
ng violation of etiquette until Randy realizes that this is the sultan.

  Suddenly everyone is sitting down. Randy pulls his chair back and falls into it. The leathery depths swallow his ass like a catcher’s mitt accepting a baseball. He’s about to pull his laptop out of its bag, but in this setting, both the nylon bag and the plastic computer have a strip-mall tawdriness. Besides, he has to resist this sophomoric tendency to take notes all the time. Avi himself said that nothing was going to happen at this meeting; all the important stuff is going to be subtextual. Besides, there is the matter of Van Eck phreaking, which Cantrell probably mentioned just to make Harvard Li paranoid, but which has Randy a bit rattled too. He opts for a pad of graph paper—the engineer’s answer to the legal pad—and a fine-point disposable pen.

  The sultan has an Oxford English accent with traces of garlic and red pepper still wedged in its teeth. He speaks for about fifteen minutes.

  The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan’s speech. It is a marvel that can only be explained by the power of brain over body, and, in turn, by the power of cultural conditioning over the brain.

  Their host is trying to be appropriately sultanic: providing vision and direction without getting sucked down into the quicksand of management. The basic vision (or so it seems at first) is that Kinakuta has always been a crossroads, a meeting-place of cultures: the original Malays. Foote and his dynasty of White Sultans. Filipinos with their Spanish, American and Nipponese governors to the east. Muslims to the west. Anglos to the south. Numerous Southeast Asian cultures to the north. Chinese everywhere as usual. Nipponese whenever they are in one of their adventurous moods, and (for what it’s worth) the neolithic tribesmen who inhabit the interior of the island.

  Hence nothing is more natural than that the present-day Kinakutans should run big fat optical fiber cables in every direction, patch into every major national telco within reach, and become a sort of digital bazaar.

  All of the guests nod soberly at the sultan’s insight, his masterful ability to meld the ancient ways of his country with modern technology.

  But this is nothing more than a superficial analogy, the sultan confesses.

  Everyone nods somewhat more vigorously than they did before: indeed, everything that the sultan was just saying was, in fact, horseshit. Several people jot down notes, lest they lose the Sultan’s thread.

  After all, the sultan says, physical location no longer matters in a digitized, networked world. Cyberspace knows no boundaries.

  Everyone nods vigorously except for, on the one hand, John Cantrell, and, on the other, the grizzled Chinese guys.

  But hey, the sultan continues, that’s just dizzy-headed cyber-cheerleading! What bullshit! Of course locations and boundaries matter! At this point the room is plunged into dimness as the light pouring in through the window-wall is throttled by some kind of invisible mechanism built into the glass: liquid-crystal shutters or something. Screens descend from slots cunningly hidden in the room’s ceiling. This diversion saves the cervical vertebrae of many guests, who are about to whiplash themselves by nodding even more vigorously at the sultan’s latest hairpin turn. Goddamn it, does location matter in cyberspace or doesn’t it? What’s the bottom line here? This isn’t some Oxford debating society! Get to the point!

  The sultan is whipping some graphics on them: a map of the world in one of those politically correct projections that makes America and Europe look like icebound reefs in the high Arctic. A pattern of straight lines is superimposed on the map, each joining two major cities. The web of lines gets denser and denser as the sultan talks, nearly obscuring the land masses, and the oceans as well.

  This, the sultan explains, is the conventional understanding of the Internet: a decentralized web connecting each place with all the other places, with no bottlenecks or, if you will, choke-points.

  But it’s more bullshit! A new graphic comes up: same map, different pattern of lines. Now we have webs within countries, sometimes within continents. But between countries, and especially between continents, there are only a few lines. It’s not weblike at all.

  Randy looks at Cantrell, who’s nodding slyly.

  “Many Net partisans are convinced that the Net is robust because its lines of communication are spread evenly across the planet. In fact, as you can see from this graphic, nearly all intercontinental Web traffic passes through a small number of choke-points. Typically these choke-points are controlled and monitored by local governments. Clearly, then, any Internet application that wants to stand free of governmental interference is undermined, from the very beginning, by a fundamental structure problem.”

  . . . free of governmental interference. Randy can’t believe he’s hearing this. If the sultan was a scruffy hacker talking to a room full of crypto-anarchists, that’d be one thing. But the sultan is a government, for god’s sake, and the room is full of card-carrying Establishment types.

  Like those Chinese buzz-cuts! Who the hell are they? Don’t try to tell Randy those guys aren’t part of the Chinese government, in some sense.

  “Bottlenecks are only one of the structural barriers to the creation of a free, sovereign, location-independent cyberspace,” the sultan continues blithely.

  Sovereign!?

  “Another is the heterogeneous patchwork of laws, and indeed of legal systems, that address privacy, free speech, and telecoms policy.”

  Another map graphic appears. Each country is colored, shaded, and patterned according to a scheme of intimidating complexity. A half-assed stab at explaining it is made by a complex legend underneath. Instant migraine. That, of course, is the whole point.

  “The policy of any given legal system toward privacy issues is typically the result of incremental changes made over centuries by courts and legislative bodies,” the sultan says. “With all due respect, very little of it is relevant to modern privacy issues.”

  The lights come back on, sun waxes through the windows, the screens disappear silently into the ceiling, and everyone’s mildly surprised to see that the sultan is on his feet. He is approaching a large and (of course) ornate and expensive-looking Go board covered with a complex pattern of black and white stones. “Perhaps I can make an analogy to Go—though chess would work just as well. Because of our history, we Kinakutans are well-versed in both games. At the beginning of the game, the pieces are arranged in a pattern that is simple and easy to understand. But the game evolves. The players make small decisions, one turn at a time, each decision fairly simple in and of itself, and made for reasons that can be easily understood, even by a novice. But over the course of many such turns, the pattern develops such great complexity that only the finest minds—or the finest computers—can comprehend it.” The sultan is gazing down thoughtfully at the Go board as he says this. He looks up and starts making eye contact around the room. “The analogy is clear. Our policies concerning free speech, telecommun
ications, and cryptography have evolved from a series of simple, rational decisions. But they are today so complex that no one can understand them, even in one single country, to say nothing of all countries taken together.”

  The sultan pauses and walks broodingly around the Go board. The guests have mostly given up on the obsequious nodding and jotting by this point. No one is being tactical now, they are all listening with genuine interest, wondering what he’s going to say next.

  But he says nothing. Instead he lays one arm across the board and, with a sudden violent motion, sweeps all the stones aside. They rain down into the carpet, skitter across polished stone, clatter onto the tabletop.

  There is a silence of at least fifteen seconds. The sultan looks stony. Then, suddenly, he brightens up.

  “Time to start over,” he says. “A very difficult thing to do in a large country, where laws are written by legislative bodies, interpreted by judges, bound by ancient precedents. But this is the Sultanate of Kinakuta and I am the sultan and I say that the law here is to be very simple: total freedom of information. I hereby abdicate all government power over the flow of data across and within my borders. Under no circumstances will any part of this government snoop on information flows, or use its power to in any way restrict such flows. That is the new law of Kinakuta. I invite you gentlemen to make the most of it. Thank you.”

  The sultan turns and leaves the room to a dignified ovation. Those are the ground rules, boys. Now run along and play.

  Dr. Mohammed Pragasu, Kinakutan Minister of Information, now rises from his chair (which is to the right hand of the sultan’s throne, naturally) and takes the conn. His accent is almost as American as the sultan’s is British; he did his undergrad work at Berkeley and got his doctorate at Stanford. Randy knows several people who worked and studied with him during those years. According to them, Pragasu rarely showed up for work in anything other than a t-shirt and jeans, and showed just as strong an appetite for beer and sausage pizza as any non-Mohammedan. No one had a clue that he was a sultan’s second cousin, and worth a few hundred million in his own right.