Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  My having friends in the world of electronic intelligence-gathering is not the big coincidence you make it out to be.

  How did you come to be a founder of the Crypt?

  By being good at science and math.

  How did you come to be good at science and math?

  By standing on the shoulders of the ones who came before you.

  Who were those people?

  We used to call them natural philosophers.

  Likewise, my friends in the surveillance business owe their skills to the practical application of philosophy. They have the wit to understand this, and to give credit where credit is due.

  P.S. You forgot to use the “dwarf@siblings.net” front address. I assume this was deliberate?

  P.P.S. You say you want an example of a novel cryptosystem that I am working on. This sounds like a test. You and I both know, Randy, that the history of crypto is strewn with the wreckage of cryptosystems invented by arrogant dilettantes and soon demolished by clever codebreakers. You probably suspect that I don’t know this—that I’m just another arrogant dilettante. Quite cleverly, you ask me to stick my neck out, so that you and Cantrell and his like-minded friends can cut it off. You are testing me—trying to find my level.

  Very well. I’ll send you another message in a few days. I’d love to have the Secret Admirers take a crack at my scheme anyway.

  * * *

  In a narrow-hulled double-outrigger boat in the South China Sea, America Shaftoe stands astride a thwart, her body pointing straight up at the sun, despite the rollers, as if she is gyroscopically stabilized. She is wearing a sleeveless diving vest that reveals strong, deeply tanned shoulders, the walnut-brown skin etched with a couple of black tattoos and brilliantly jeweled with beads of water. The handle of a big knife projects from a shoulder holster. The blade is that of a regular diving knife but the handle is that of a kris, an ornate traditional weapon of Palawan. A tourist can buy a kris at the duty-free shop at NAIA, but this one appears to be less flashy but better made than the tourist-shop jobs, and worn from use. She has a gold chain around her neck with a gnarled black pearl dangling from it. She has just emerged from the water holding a tiny jeweler’s screwdriver between her teeth. Her mouth is open to breathe, displaying crooked, bright white teeth with no fillings. For this brief moment she is in her element, completely absorbed in what she is doing, totally unself-conscious. At this moment Randy thinks he understands her: why she spends most of her time living here, why she didn’t bother with going to college, why she left behind her mother’s family, who raised her, lovingly, in Chicago, to be in business with her father, the wayward veteran who walked out of the household when America was nine years old.

  Then she turns to scan the approaching launch, and sees Randy on it staring at her. She rolls her eyes, and the mask falls down over her face again. She says something to the Filipino men who are squatting in the boat around her and two of them go into action, scampering down the outrigger poles, like balance-beam artists, to stand on the outrigger pontoon. They hold their arms out as shock absorbers to ease the contact between the launch—which Doug Shaftoe has cheerfully christened Mekong Memory—and the much longer, much narrower pamboat.

  One of the other Filipinos plants his bare foot against the top of a small Honda portable generator and pulls on the ripcord, the tendons and wiry muscles popping out of his arm and back for a moment like so many ripcords themselves. The generator starts instantly, with a nearly inaudible purr. It is good stuff, part of the capital improvements that Semper Marine made as part of its contract with Epiphyte and FiliTel. Now they are using it, effectively, to defraud the Dentist.

  “She lies one hundred and fifty-four meters below that buoy,” says Doug Shaftoe, pointing to a gallon plastic milk jug bobbing on the swells. “She was lucky, in a way.”

  “Lucky?” Randy clambers off the launch and rests his weight on the outrigger, shoving it down so that the warm water comes up to his knees. Holding out his arms like a tightrope walker, he makes his way down an arm toward the canoe hull in the center.

  “Lucky for us,” Shaftoe corrects himself. “We’re on the flank of a seamount. The Palawan Trough is nearby.” He’s following Randy, but without all of the teetering and arm-waving. “If she had sunk in that, she’d have gone down so deep that she’d be hard to reach, and the pressure down there would’ve crushed her. But at two hundred meters, there wouldn’t’ve been such an implosion.” Reaching the boat’s hull, he makes dramatic crushing motions with his hands.

  “Do we care?” Randy asks. “Gold and silver don’t implode.”

  “If her hull is intact, getting the goods out is a hell of a lot easier,” says Doug Shaftoe.

  Amy has vanished beneath the pamboat’s canopy. Randy and Doug follow her into its shade, and find her sitting crosslegged on a fiberglass equipment case that is encrusted with airport baggage stickers. Her face is socketed into the top of a black rubber pyramid whose base is the screen of a ruggedized cathode-ray tube. “How’s the cable business?” she mutters. Months ago, she gave up even trying to hide her scorn for the dull work of cable-laying. Pretenses are shabby things that, like papier-mâché houses, must be energetically maintained or they will dissolve. Another case in point: some time ago, Randy gave up pretending that he was not completely fascinated with Amy Shaftoe. This is not exactly the same thing as being in love with her, but it has quite a few things in common with that. He has always had a weird, sick fascination with women who smoked and drank a lot. Amy does neither, but her complete disregard of modern skin-cancer precautions puts her in the same category: people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy.

  In any case, he has a desperate craving to know what Amy’s dream is. For a while he thought it was treasure-hunting in the South China Sea. This she definitely enjoys, but he is not sure if it gives her satisfaction entire.

  “Been adjusting the trim on those dive planes again,” she explains. “I don’t think those pushrod things were engineered very well.” She pulls her head out of the black rubber cowl and gives Randy a quick sidelong look, holding him responsible for the shortcomings of all engineers. “I hope it’ll run now without corkscrewing all over the place.”

  “Are you ready?” her father asks.

  “Whenever you are,” she answers, slamming the ball back into his court.

  Doug rises to a crouch and duck-walks out from under the low canopy. Randy follows him, wanting to see the ROV for himself.

  It rests in the water alongside the pamboat’s center hull: a stubby yellow torpedo with a glass dome for a nose, held in place by a Filipino crewman who leans over the gunwale to grip it with both hands. Pairs of stunted wings are mounted at the nose and at the tail, each wing supporting a miniature propeller mounted in a cowl. Randy is reminded of a dirigible with its outlying engine gondolas.

  Noting Randy’s interest, Doug Shaftoe squats alongside it to point out the features. “It’s neutrally buoyant, so when we have it alongside like this, we have it in this foam cradle, which we will now take off.” He begins jerking loose some quick-release bungee cords, and molded segments of foam peel away from the ROV’s hull. It drops lower in the water, nearly pulling the crewman over the side with it, and he lets go, keeping his arms extended so he can prevent it from bumping into them with each swell. “You’ll notice there’s no umbilical,” Doug says. “Normally that is mandatory for an ROV. You need the umbilical for three reasons.”

  Randy grins, because he knows that Doug Shaftoe is about to enumerate the three reasons. Randy has spent almost no time around military people, but he is finding that he gets along with them surprisingly well. His favorite thing about them is their compulsive need to educate everyone around them, all the time. Randy does not need to know anything about the ROV, but Doug Shaftoe is going to give him a short course anyway. Randy supposes that when you are in a war, practical knowledge is a good thing to spread around.

  “One,” says Dou
glas MacArthur Shaftoe, “to provide power to the ROV. But this ROV carries its own power source—an oxygen/natural gas swash-plate motor, adapted from torpedo technology, and part of our peace dividend” (that is the other thing Randy likes about military people—their mastery of deadpan humor) “that generates enough electricity to run all of the thrusters. Two, for communications and control. But this unit uses blue-green lasers to communicate with the control console which Amy is manning. Three, for emergency recovery in the event of total systems failure. But if this unit fails, it is smart enough, supposedly, to inflate a bladder and float up to the surface where it will activate a strobe light so that we can go recover it.”

  “Jeez,” Randy says, “isn’t this thing incredibly expensive?”

  “It is incredibly expensive,” Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe says, “but the guy who runs the company that makes it is an old buddy of mine—we were at the Naval Academy together—he loans it to me sometimes, when I have a pressing need.”

  “Does your friend know what the pressing need is in this case?”

  “He does not know specifically,” says Doug Shaftoe, mildly offended, “but I suppose he is not a stupid man either.”

  “Clear!” shouts Amy Shaftoe, sounding rather impatient.

  Her father takes a good look at each of the thrusters in turn. “Clear,” he responds. A moment later, something begins to thrum inside the ROV, and a stream of bubbles spurts from an orifice on its tail, and then the thrusters begin to spin around. They swivel on the ends of their stubby wings until they are facing downwards, throwing fountains into the air, and the ROV sinks rapidly. The fountains diminish and become slight upwellings in the sea. Seen through the water’s rough surface, the ROV is a yellow splatter. It shortens as the vehicle’s nose pitches down, then rapidly disappears as the thrusters drive it straight down. “Always kinda takes my breath away to see something that costs so much going off to who knows where,” Doug Shaftoe says meditatively.

  The water around the boat has begun to emit a kind of dreadful, sickly light, like radiation in a low-budget horror film. “Jeez! The laser?” Randy says.

  “Mounted to the bottom of the hull, in a little dome,” Doug says. “Punches through even turbid water with ease.”

  “What kind of bandwidth can you transmit on it?”

  “Amy is seeing decent monochrome video on her little screen right now, if that is what you mean. It is all digital. All packetized. So if some of the data doesn’t make it through, the image gets a little choppy, but we do not lose visuals altogether.”

  “Cool.”

  “Yes, it is cool,” Doug Shaftoe allows. “Let us go and watch TV.”

  They crouch beneath the canopy. Doug turns on a small Sony portable television, a ruggedized waterproof model encased in yellow plastic, and patches its input cable into a spare output jack on the back of Amy’s rig. He turns it on and they begin to see a bit of what Amy is seeing. They do not have the benefit of the dark cowl that Amy is using, and so the glare of the sun washes out everything but a straight white line emerging from the dark center of the picture and expanding towards the edge. It is moving.

  “I am following the buoy line down,” she explains. “Kind of boring.”

  Randy’s calculator watch beeps twice. He checks the time; it is three in the afternoon.

  “Randy?” Amy says, in a velvet voice.

  “Yes?”

  “Could you give me the square root of three thousand eight hundred twenty-three on that thing?”

  “Why do you want that?”

  “Just do it.”

  Randy holds his wrist up so that he can see the watch’s digital display, takes a pencil out of his pocket, and begins using its eraser to press the tiny little buttons. He hears a metallic snicking noise, but pays it no mind.

  Something cool and smooth glides along the underside of his wrist. “Hold still,” Amy says. She bites her lip and pulls. The watch falls off, and comes away in her left hand, its vinyl band neatly severed. She’s holding the kris in her right, the edge of its blade still decorated with a few of Randy’s arm hairs. “Huh. Sixty-one point eight three oh four. I would’ve guessed higher.” She tosses the watch over her shoulder and it disappears into the South China Sea. “Square roots are tricky that way.”

  “Amy, you’re losing the rope!” says her father impatiently, focused entirely on the screen of the TV.

  Amy jams the kris back into its sheath, smiles sweetly at Randy, and plugs her face back into the rig. Randy is speechless for a while.

  The question of whether or not she is a lesbian is rapidly becoming more than purely academic. He performs a quick mental review of all of the lesbians he has known. Usually they are mid-level, nine-to-five city dwellers with sensible haircuts. In other words, they are just like most of the other people Randy knows. Amy is too flagrantly exotic, too much like a horny film director’s idea of what a lesbian would be. So maybe there is some hope here.

  “If you’re gonna stare at my daughter that way,” Doug Shaftoe says, “you’d better start boning up on your ballroom dancing.”

  “Is he starin’ at me? I can never tell when I have my face stuck in this thing,” Amy says.

  “He was in love with his watch. Now he has no object for his affections,” Doug says. “So, hold on to your hats!”

  Randy can tell when someone is trying to rattle him. “What is it that offended you so much about my watch? The alarm?”

  “The whole package was pretty annoying,” Amy says, “but the alarm is what made me psychotic.”

  “You should have said something. Being a true geek, I actually know how to turn that alarm off.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t want to lose track of time.”

  “Why? Got a cake in the oven?”

  “The Dentist’s due diligence people will be all over me.”

  Doug shifts position and screws up his face curiously. “You mentioned that before. What is due diligence?”

  “It’s like this. Alfred has some money that he wants to invest.”

  “Who’s Alfred?”

  “A hypothetical person whose name begins with A.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “In the crypto world, when you are explaining a cryptographic protocol, you use hypothetical people. Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, Evan, Fred, Greg, and so on.”

  “Okay.”

  “Alfred invests his money in a company that is run by Barney. When I say ‘run by’ what I mean is that Barney has ultimate responsibility for what that company does. So, perhaps Barney is the chairman of the board of directors in this case. He’s been chosen, by Alfred, Alice, Agnes, Andrew, and the other investors, to look after the company. He and the other directors hire corporate officers—such as Chuck, who is the president. Chuck and the other officers hire Drew to run one of the company’s divisions. Drew hires Edgar, the engineer, and so on and so forth. So, in military terms, there is a whole chain of command that extends down to the guys in the trenches, like Edgar.”

  “And Barney’s the man at the top of the chain of the command,” Doug says.

  “Right. So, just like a general, he is ultimately responsible for everything that is done below him. Alfred has personally entrusted Barney with that money. Barney is legally required to exercise due diligence in seeing that the money is spent responsibly. If Barney fails to show due diligence, he is in major legal trouble.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah. That gets Barney’s attention. Alfred’s lawyers might show up at any moment and demand proof that due diligence is being exercised. Barney needs to stay on his toes, make sure that his ass is covered at all times.”

  “Barney in this case is the Dentist?”

  “Yeah. Alfred, Agnes, and the others are all of the people in his investment club—half of the orthodontists in Orange County.”

  “And you are Edgar the Engineer.”

  “No, you are Edgar the Engineer. I am a corporate officer of
Epiphyte. I am more like Chuck or Drew.”

  Amy breaks in. “But what does the Dentist have over you? You don’t work for him.”

  “I’m sorry to tell you that is no longer the case, as of yesterday.”

  This gets the Shaftoes’ attention.

  “The Dentist now owns ten percent of Epiphyte.”

  “How did that come about? Last I was informed of anything,” Doug says accusingly, “the son of a bitch was suing you.”

  “He was suing us,” Randy says, “because he wanted in. None of our stock was for sale, and we were not planning to go public anytime soon, so the only way he could get in was by essentially blackmailing us with a lawsuit.”

  “You said it was a bogus lawsuit!” Amy exclaims, the only person here who is bothering to show, or feel, any moral outrage.

  “It was. But it would have cost so much to litigate it that it would have bankrupted us. On the other hand, when we offered to sell the Dentist some stock, he dropped the suit. We got our hands on some of his money, which is always useful.”

  “But now you are beholden to his due diligence people.”

  “Yeah. They are on the cable ship even as we speak—they came out on a tender this morning.”

  “What do they think you are doing?”

  “I told them that the sidescan sonar revealed some fresh anchor scars near the cable route, which needed to be assessed.”

  “Very routine.”

  “Yeah. Due diligence people are easy to manipulate. You just have to act really diligent. They eat it up.”

  “We’re there,” Amy says, and hauls back on a joystick, twisting her body to put a little English on the maneuver.

  Doug and Randy look at the TV screen. It is completely dark. Digits along the bottom state that the pitch is five degrees and the roll is eight, which means that the ROV is nearly level. The yaw number is spinning around rapidly, meaning that the ROV is rotating around its vertical axis like a fishtailing car. “Should come into view at around fifty degrees,” Amy mutters.