Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  “Is Pekka good at that kind of thing?”

  By way of saying yes, Cantrell adopts a serious look and says, “Pekka is writing a whole chapter about it for the Cryptonomicon. Pekka feels that only by mastering the technologies that might be used against us can we defend ourselves.”

  This sounds almost like a call to arms. Randy would have to be some kind of loser to retreat to his bed after that, so he backs into the room and steps into his trousers, which are standing there telescoped into the floor where he dropped them upon his return from the sultan’s palace. The sultan’s palace! The television is now broadcasting a news story about pirates plying the waters of the South China Sea, making freighter crews walk the plank. “This whole continent is like fucking Disneyland without the safety precautions,” Randy observes. “Am I the only person who finds it surreal?”

  Cantrell grins, but says, “If we begin talking about surreal, we’ll end up talking about today.”

  “You got that right,” Randy says. “Let’s go.”

  Before Pekka became known around Silicon Valley as the Finn Who Got Blown Up, he was known as Cello Guy, because he had a nearly autistic devotion to his cello and took it with him everywhere, always trying to stuff it into overhead luggage racks. Not coincidentally, he was an analog kind of guy from way back whose specialty was radio.

  When packet radio started to get big as an alternative to sending data down wires, Pekka moved to Menlo Park and joined a startup. His company bought their equipment at used-computer stores, and Pekka ended up scoring a pretty nice nineteen-inch high-res multisync monitor perfectly adequate for his adaptable twenty-four-year-old eyes. He hooked it up to a slightly used Pentium box jammed full of RAM.

  He also installed Finux, a free UNIX operating system created by Finns, almost as a way of proclaiming to the rest of the world “this is how weird we are,” and distributed throughout the world on the Net. Of course Finux was fantastically powerful and flexible and enabled you, among other things, to control the machine’s video circuitry to the Nth degree and choose many different scanning frequencies and pixel clocks, if you were into that kind of thing. Pekka most definitely was into it, and so like a lot of Finux maniacs he set his machine up so that it could display, if he chose, a whole lot of tiny little pixels (which displayed a lot of information but was hard on the eyes) or, alternatively, fewer and larger pixels (which he tended to use after he had been hacking for twenty-four hours straight and lost ocular muscle tone), or various settings in-between. Every time he changed from one setting to another, the monitor screen would go black for a second and there would be an audible clunk from inside of it as the resonating crystals inside locked in on a different range of frequencies.

  One night at three A.M., Pekka caused this to happen, and immediately after the screen went black and made that clunking noise, it exploded in his face. The front of the picture tube was made of heavy glass (it had to be, to withstand the internal vacuum) which fragmented and sped into Pekka’s face, neck, and upper body. The very same phosphors that had been glowing beneath the sweeping electron beam, moments before, conveying information into Pekka’s eyes, were now physically embedded in his flesh. A hunk of glass took one of his eyes and almost went through into his brain. Another one gouged out his voicebox, another zinged past the side of his head and bit a neat triangular hunk out of his left ear.

  Pekka, in other words, was the first victim of the Digibomber. He almost bled to death on the spot, and his fellow Eutropians hovered around his hospital bed for a few days with tanks of Freon, ready to jump into action in case he died. But he didn’t, and he got even more press because his startup company lacked health insurance. After a lot of hand-wringing in local newspapers about how this poor innocent from the land of socialized medicine had not had the presence of mind to buy health insurance, some rich high-tech guys donated money to pay his medical bills and to equip him with a computer voicebox like Stephen Hawking’s.

  And now here is Pekka, sitting in Cantrell’s hotel room. His cello stands in the corner, dusty around the bridge from powdered rosin. He is facing a blank wall to which he has duct-taped a bunch of wires in precise loops and whorls. These lead to some home-brewed circuit boards which are in turn hooked up to his laptop.

  “Hello Randy congratulations on your success,” says a computer-generated voice as soon as the door is shut behind Randy and Cantrell. This is a little greeting that Pekka has obviously typed in ahead of time, anticipating his arrival. None of the foregoing seems particularly odd to Randy except for the fact that Pekka seems to think that Epiphyte has already achieved some kind of success.

  “How are we doing?” Cantrell asks.

  Pekka types in a response. Then he cups one hand to his mutilated ear while using his other hand to cue the voice generator: “He showers.” Indeed, it’s possible now to hear the pipes hissing in the wall. “His laptop radiates.”

  “Oh,” Randy says, “Tom Howard’s room is right next door?”

  “Just on the other side of that wall,” Cantrell says. “I specifically requested it, so that I could win this bet. See, his room is a mirror image of this one, so his computer is only a few inches away, just on the other side of this wall. Perfect conditions for Van Eck phreaking.”

  “Pekka, are you receiving signals from his computer right now?” Randy asks.

  Pekka nods, types, and fires back, “I tune. I calibrate.” The input device for his voice generator is a one-handed chord-board strapped to his thigh. He puts his right hand on it and makes flopping and groping motions. Moments later speech emerges, “I require Cantrell.”

  “Excuse me,” Cantrell says, and goes to Pekka’s side. Randy watches over their shoulders for a bit, understanding vaguely what they’re doing.

  If you lay a sheet of white paper on an old gravestone, and sweep the tip of a pencil across it, you get one horizontal line, dark in some places and faint in others, and not very meaningful. If you move downwards on the page by a small distance, a single pencil-line-width, and repeat, an image begins to emerge. The process of working your way down the page in a series of horizontal sweeps is what a nerd would call raster-scanning, or just rastering. With a conventional video monitor—a cathode-ray tube—the electron beam physically rasters down the glass something like sixty to eighty times a second. In the case of a laptop screen like Randy’s, there is no physical scanning; the individual pixels are turned on or off directly. But still a scanning process is taking place; what’s being scanned and made manifest on the screen is a region of the computer’s memory called the screen buffer. The contents of the screen buffer have to be slapped up onto the screen sixty to eighty times every second or else (1) the screen flickers and (2) the images move jerkily.

  The way that the computer talks to you is not by controlling the screen directly but rather by manipulating the bits contained in that buffer, secure in the knowledge that other subsystems inside the machine handle the drudge work of pipelining that information onto the actual, physical screen. Sixty to eighty times a second, the video system says shit! time to refresh the screen again, and goes to the beginning of the screen buffer—which is just a particular hunk of memory, remember—and it reads the first few bytes, which dictate what color the pixel in the upper left-hand corner of the screen is supposed to be. This information is sent on down the line to whatever is actually refreshing the screen, whether it’s a scanning electron beam or some laptop-style system for directly controlling the pixels. Then the next few bytes are read, typically for the pixel just to the right of that first one, and so on all the way to the right edge of the screen. That draws the first line of the grave-rubbing.

  Since the right edge of the screen has now been reached, there are no more pixels off in that direction. It is implicit that the next bytes read from memory will be for the leftmost pixel in the second raster-line down from the top. If this is a cathode-ray tube type of screen, we have a little timing problem here in that the electron beam is currently at the r
ight edge of the screen and now it’s being asked to draw a pixel at the left edge. It has to move back. This takes a little while—not long, but much longer than the interval of time between drawing two pixels that are cheek-by-jowl. This pause is called the horizontal retrace interval. Another one will occur at the end of every other line until the rastering has proceeded to the last pixel at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and completed a single grave-rubbing. But then it’s time to begin the process all over again, and so the electron beam (if there is one) has to jump diagonally all the way up to the upper left-hand pixel. This also takes a little while and is called the vertical retrace interval.

  These issues all stem from inherent physical limitations of sweeping electron beams through space in a cathode-ray tube, and basically disappear in the case of a laptop screen like the one Tom Howard has set up a few inches in front of Pekka, on the other side of that wall. But the video timing of a laptop screen is still patterned after that of a cathode-ray tube screen anyway. (This is simply because the old technology is universally understood by those who need to understand it, and it works well, and all kinds of electronic and software technology has been built and tested to work within that framework, and why mess with success, especially when your profit margins are so small that they can only be detected by using techniques from quantum mechanics, and any glitches vis-à-vis compatibility with old stuff will send your company straight into the toilet.)

  On Tom’s laptop, each second of time is divided into seventy-five perfectly regular slices, during which a full grave-rubbing is performed followed by a vertical retrace interval. Randy can follow Pekka and Cantrell’s conversation well enough to gather that they have already figured out, from analyzing the signals coming through the wall, that Tom Howard has his screen set up to give him 768 lines, and 1,024 pixels on each line. For every pixel, four bytes will be read from the video buffer and sent on down the line to the screen. (Tom is using the highest possible level of color definition on his screen, which means that one byte apiece is needed to represent the intensity of blue, green, and red and another is basically left over, but kept in there anyway because computers like powers of two, and computers are so ridiculously fast and powerful now that, even though all of this is happening on a timetable that would strike a human being as rather aggressive, the extra bytes just don’t make any difference.) Each byte is eight binary digits or bits and so, 1,024 times a line, 4 × 8 = 32 bits are being read from the screen buffer.

  Unbeknownst to Tom, his computer happens to be sitting right next to an antenna. The wires Pekka taped to the wall can read the electromagnetic waves that are radiating out of the computer’s circuitry at all times.

  Tom’s laptop is sold as a computer, not as a radio station, and so it might seem odd that it should be radiating anything at all. It is all a byproduct of the fact that computers are binary critters, which means that all chip-to-chip, subsystem-to-subsystem communication taking place inside the machine—everything moving down those flat ribbons of wire, and the little metallic traces on the circuit boards—consists of transitions from zero to one and back again. The way that you represent bits in a computer is by switching the wire’s voltage back and forth between zero and five volts. In computer textbooks these transitions are always graphed as if they were perfect square waves, meaning that you have this perfectly flat line at V = 0, representing a binary zero, and then it makes a perfect right-angle turn and jumps vertically to V = 5 and then executes another perfect right-angle turn and remains at five volts until it’s time to go back to zero again, and so on.

  This is the Platonic ideal of how computer circuitry is supposed to operate, but engineers have to build actual circuits in the grimy analog world. The hunks of metal and silicon can’t manifest the Platonic behavior shown in those textbooks. Circuits can jump between zero and five volts really, really abruptly but if you monitor them on an oscilloscope, you can see that it’s not a perfectly square wave. Instead you get something that looks like this:

  The little waves are called ringing; these transitions among binary digits hit the circuitry like a clapper striking a bell. The voltage jumps, but after it jumps it oscillates back and forth around the new value for a little while. Whenever you have an oscillating voltage in a conductor like this, it means that electromagnetic waves are propagating out into space.

  Consequently each wire in a running computer is like a little radio transmitter. The signals that it broadcasts are completely dependent upon the details of what’s going on inside the machine. Since there are a lot of wires in there, and the particulars of what they are doing are fairly unpredictable, it is difficult for anyone monitoring the transmissions to make head or tail of them. A great deal of what comes out of the machine is completely irrelevant from a surveillance point of view. But there is one pattern of signals that is (1) totally predictable and (2) exactly what Pekka wants to see, and that is the stream of bytes being read from the screen buffer and sent down the wire to the screen hardware. Amid all the random noise coming from the machine, the ticks of the horizontal and vertical retrace intervals will stand out as clearly as the beating of a drum in a teeming jungle. Now that Pekka has zeroed in on that beat, he should be able to pick up the radiation emanating from the wire that connects screen buffer to video hardware, and translate it back into a sequence of ones and zeroes that can be dumped out onto their own screen. They will be able to see exactly what Tom Howard sees, through the kind of surveillance called Van Eck phreaking.

  That’s what Randy knows. When it comes to the details, Cantrell and Pekka are way out of his league, so after a few minutes he feels himself losing interest. He sits down on Cantrell’s bed, which is the only place left to sit, and discovers a little palmtop computer on the bedside table. It is already up and running, patched into the world over a telephone wire. Randy’s heard of this product. It is supposed to be a first stab at a network computer, and so it’s running a Web browser whenever it is turned on; the Web browser is the interface.

  “May I surf?” Randy asks, and Cantrell says, “Yes,” without even turning around. Randy visits one of the big Web-searching sites, which takes a minute because the machine has to establish a Net connection first. Then he searches for Web documents containing the terms ((Andy OR Andrew) Loeb) AND “hive mind.” As usual, the search finds tens of thousands of documents. But it’s not hard for Randy to pick out the relevant ones.

  WHY RIST 9E03 IS A MEMBER IN GOOD STANDING OF THE CALIFORNIA BAR ASSOCIATION

  RIST 11A4 has experienced ambivalent feelings over the fact that RIST 9E03 (insofar as s/he is construed, by atomized society, as an individual organism) is a lawyer. No doubt the conflicted feelings of RIST 11A4 are quite normal and natural. Part of RIST 11A4 abhors lawyers, and the legal system in general, as symptoms of the end-stage terminal disease of atomized society. Another part understands that disease can improve the health of the meme pool if it slays an organism that is old and unfit for ongoing propagation of its memotype. Make no mistake about it: the legal system in its current form is the worst imaginable system for society to resolve its disputes. It is appallingly expensive in terms of money and in terms of the intellectual talent that goes to waste pursuing it as a career. But part of RIST 11A4 feels that the goals of RIST 11A4 may actually be served by turning the legal system’s most toxic features against the rotten body politic of atomized society and in so doing hasten its downfall.

  Randy clicks on RIST 9E03 and gets

  RIST 9E03 is the RIST that RIST 11A4 denotes by the arbitrarily chosen bit-pattern that, construed as an integer, is 9E03 (in hexadecimal notation). Click here for more about the system of bit-pattern designators used by RIST 11A4 to replace the obsolescent nomenclature systems of “natural languages.” Click here if you would like the designator RIST 9E03 to be automatically replaced by a conventional designator (name) as you browse this web site.

  Click.

  From now on, the expression RIST 9E03 will be replaced by the e
xpression Andrew Loeb. Warning: we consider such nomenclature fundamentally invalid, and do not recommend its use, but have provided it as a service to first-time visitors to this Web site who are not accustomed to thinking in terms of RISTs.

  Click.

  You have clicked on Andrew Loeb which is a designator assigned by atomized society to the memome of RIST 9E03 . . .

  Click.

  . . . memome is the set of all memes that define the physical reality of a carbon-based RIST. Memes can be divided into two broad categories: genetic and semantic. Genetic memes are simply genes (DNA) and are propagated through normal biological reproduction. Semantic memes are ideas (ideologies, religions, fads, etc.) and are propagated by communications.

  Click.

  The genetic part of the memome of Andrew Loeb shares 99% of its contents with the data set produced by the Human Genome Project. This should not be construed as endorsing the concept of speciation (i.e. that the continuum of carbon-based life forms can or should be arbitrarily partitioned into paradigmatic species) in general, or the theory that there is a species called “Homo sapiens” in particular.

  The semantic part of the memome of Andrew Loeb is still unavoidably contaminated with many primitive viral memes, but these are being gradually and steadily supplanted by new semantic memes generated ab initio by rational processes.

  Click.

  RIST stands for Relatively Independent Sub-Totality. It can be used to refer to any entity that, from one point of view, seems to possess a clear boundary separating it from the world (as do cells in a body) but that, in a deeper sense, is inextricably linked with a larger totality (as are cells in a body). For example, the biological entities traditionally known as “human beings” are nothing more than Relatively Independent Sub-Totalities of the social organism in which they are embedded.