Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  A tremendous racket ensues as a small power boat pops out of a little cave along the waterline of the island and heads directly towards an American landing craft. A hundred guns open fire on it simultaneously. Supersonic bits of metal crash into the water all around the little boat, ton after ton of them. Each bit makes a splash. All of the splashes combine into a jagged, volcanic eruption of white water centered on the little boat. Bobby Shaftoe puts his fingers in his ears. Two thousand pounds of high explosive packed into the little boat’s nose detonate. The shock wave flashes across the surface of the water, a powdery white ring expanding with supernatural velocity. It hits Bobby Shaftoe like a baseball to the bridge of the nose. He neglects to steer his chute for a while, and trusts the winds to carry him to the right place.

  The smoke bomb was dropped as proof of the concept that a man on a parachute might actually be able to land on the roof of this fortress. Bobby Shaftoe is, of course, the final and irrefutable test of this proposition. As he gets closer, and his head clears from the explosion, Shaftoe sees that the smoke bomb never actually reached the roof: its little chute got tangled up in the briar patch of antennas growing out of the top of the thing.

  All kinds of fucking antennas! Even during his days in Shanghai, Shaftoe had a weird feeling around antennas. Those Station Alpha pencil-necks, in their little wooden roof-shack with all the antennas sprouting from it—those were not soldiers, sailors, or Marines in the normal sense. Corregidor was covered with antennas before the Nips came and took it. And everywhere that Shaftoe went during his Detachment 2702 stint, there were antennas.

  He is going to spend the next few moments concentrating very hard on those antennas, and so he turns his head for a moment to get a bearing on the American LCM—the landing craft that the Nip suicide boat was hoping to destroy. It is exactly where it is supposed to be—halfway between the encircling force of naval ships and the sheer, forty-foot-high wall of the fortress. Even if Shaftoe didn’t already know the plan, he would, at a glance, identify this vessel as a Landing Craft, Mechanized (Mark 3), a fifty-foot-long steel shoebox designed to cough a medium-sized tank up onto a beach. It has a couple of fifty-caliber machine guns on it which are pounding away dutifully at various targets on the wall of the fortress which Shaftoe cannot see. But from his vantage point On High he can see something that the Nipponese can’t: the LCM is not carrying a tank, in the sense of a vehicle on caterpillar treads with a gun turret. It is carrying, rather, a tank in the sense of a large steel container with pipes and hoses and stuff attached to it.

  The Nips in the fortress are taking potshots at the approaching LCM, but the only target at which they have to aim is its front door, a piece of metal that can flop down to become a ramp, and which was designed, incredibly enough, on the assumption that doomed Nips would spend a lot of time trying to blow holes in it with various projectile weapons. So the defenders are not getting anywhere. Antiaircraft gunners on other ships have begun raking the walls of the fortress insanely, making it hard for the Nipponese to poke their heads and their gun barrels out. Shaftoe notes fragments of antennas skittering and bouncing across the roof of the fortress, and occasional streaks of tracers, and hopes that the men on those ships have the presence of mind to hold their fire before he lands on the fucking thing, which will be in a few seconds.

  Shaftoe realizes that his mental concept of what this mission was going to be like, as he reviewed it with the officers in the LCM, bears no relationship to the reality. This is only about the five thousandth time Shaftoe has experienced this phenomenon in the course of the Second World War; you’d think he would no longer be surprised by it. The antennas, which looked wispy and inconsequential on the reconnaissance photos, are in fact sizable engineering works. Or they were until they got de-engineered by the naval gunfire that silenced those big guns. Now they are just wreckage of a sort that is going to be peculiarly nasty to parachute down on top of. The antennas were, and the wreckage is, made of all kinds of different shit: spars of Philippine mahogany, sturdy columns of bamboo, welded steel trusses. The most common bits are the ones that catch a parachutist’s eye: long metal poky things, and miles and miles of guy wire, snarled into a briarpatch, some of it taut enough to cut a plummeting Marine’s head off and some of it all loose and tangly with sharp hovering ends.

  It dawns on Shaftoe that this pile isn’t just a gun emplacement; it’s a Nip intelligence headquarters. “Waterhouse, you fucking son of a bitch!” Shaftoe hollers. As far as he knows, Waterhouse is still in Europe. But he realizes, as he’s clapping his hands protectively over his eyes and falling into the nightmare, that Waterhouse must have something to do with this.

  Bobby Shaftoe has landed. He tries to move and the wreckage moves with him; he is one with it.

  He opens his eyes carefully. His head is wrapped up in a snarl of heavy wire—a guy wire that broke under tension and whipped around him. Peering between loops of wire, he sees three lengths of quarter-inch metal tubing projecting out of his torso. Another one has gone through his thigh, and yet another through his upper arm. He’s pretty sure he has a broken leg too.

  He lies there for a while, listening to the sound of the guns all around him.

  There is work that needs to be done. All he can think of is the boy.

  He gropes for the wire cutter with his free hand and begins to cut himself loose from the snarl.

  The jaws of the wire cutter just barely fit over the metal tubing of the antenna. He reaches behind himself, finds the places where the tubes poke into his back, and cuts them off, snip, snip, snip. He cuts the tube that has impaled his arm. He leans forward and cuts the one that goes through his leg. Then he pulls the tubes out of his flesh and drops them on the concrete, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink. Lots of blood follows.

  He doesn’t even try to walk. He just begins to drag himself across the concrete roof of the fortress. The sun has warmed the concrete and it feels good. He cannot see the LCM, but he can see the few antennas that stick out of its top, and he knows it is in position now.

  The rope should be there. Shaftoe props himself up on his elbows and looks. Sure enough, there it is, a manila rope (natch!) tied to a grapnel, one point of the grapnel lodged in a shell crater near the edge of the roof.

  He gets to it eventually, and begins to pull on the rope. He closes his eyes, but tries not to fall asleep. He keeps pulling, and eventually feels something big and thick between his hands: the hose.

  Almost finished. Lying on his back, hugging the end of the hose to his chest, he rolls his head from side to side until he can see the air vent that they picked out on the reconnaissance photos. It used to have a sheet-metal hood on the top of it, but that’s long gone now, it’s just a hole in the roof with a few jagged bits of metal at its edges. He crawls over to it and feeds in the end of the hose.

  Someone must be watching him on one of the ships, because the hose stiffens, like a serpent coming alive, and between his hands Bobby Shaftoe can feel the fuel oil streaming through it. Ten thousand gallons of the stuff. Straight down into the fortress. He can hear the Nips down there, singing hoarse songs. By now they will have figured out what is about to happen. General MacArthur is giving them exactly what they’ve been praying for.

  At this point, Bobby Shaftoe is supposed to abseil down a rope into the LCM, but he knows it isn’t going to happen. No one can reach him now, no one can help him. When the fuel oil stops streaming through the hose, he summons all the concentration he has left. Pretends, one last time, that he actually gives a damn. Jerks the safety pin from a white phosphorus grenade, lets the handle fly off and tinkle merrily across the roof. He can feel it come alive in his hand, the thrumming animal fizz of its inner fuse. He drops it into the air shaft: a circular pipe straight down, a black disk centered on a field of dingy grey, like the ashes of a Nipponese flag.

  Then, on an impulse, he dives in there after it.

  Semper Fidelis

  Dawn star flares on disk of night

 
I fall, sun rises

  METIS

  * * *

  THE APPEARANCE OF ROOT@ERUDITORUM.ORG IN the cell right next to Randy’s is like the crowning plot twist in this Punch-and-Judy show that has been performed for his benefit ever since his plane landed at NAIA. As with any puppet show, he knows that there must be a lot of people hidden just outside the range of his senses, in furious motion, trying to make it all happen. For all he knows, some significant fraction of the Philippine gross national product is being devoted to keeping up these pretenses for his benefit.

  There is a meal waiting on the floor of Randy’s cell, and a rat on top of the meal. Randy usually reacts pretty badly to the sight of rats; they rupture the containment system that his upbringing and his education built around the part of his mind where the collective-unconscious stuff dwells, and send him straight into Hieronymus Bosch territory. But in these circumstances it doesn’t bother him any more than seeing one at the zoo would. The rat has a surprisingly attractive buckskin-colored pelt and a tail about as thick as a pencil that has evidently run afoul of a farmer’s wife with a carving knife, and woggles stiffly in the air like the blunt antenna of a cellphone. Randy is hungry, but he doesn’t want to eat anything that a rat has left footprints on, so he just watches it.

  His body feels like it slept for a long time. He turns on his computer and types in a command called “date.” The nails of his left hand look funny, as if they all got bruised. Focusing on them he sees a club drawn in blue ballpoint pen ink on the nail of the index finger, a diamond on the forefinger, a heart on the ring finger, a spade on the pinky. Enoch Root told him that in Pontifex, as in bridge, each card in the deck has a numerical value: clubs 1-13, diamonds 14-26, hearts 27-39, spades 40-52. Randy drew the symbols on his nails so he wouldn’t forget.

  Anyway, “date” tells him that he apparently slept all of yesterday afternoon and evening, all night, and about half of today. So this rat is actually eating his lunch.

  Randy’s computer runs Finux, so when it boots up it gives him a black screen with big fat white letters scrolling up it one line at a time, a real circa-1975 type of user interface. Also presumably the easiest possible thing to read through Van Eck phreaking. Randy types in “startx” and the screen goes black for a moment and then turns a particular shade of indigo that Randy happens to like, and beige windows appear on it with much smaller and crisper black letters. So now he is running the X Windows System, or X as people like Randy call it, which provides all of the graphical junk that people expect in a user interface: menus, buttons, scroll bars, and so on. As with anything else under UNIX (of which Finux is a variant), there are a million options that only young, lonely, or obsessed people have the time and patience to explore. Randy has been all three at various times of his life and knows a lot about these options. For example, the background of his screen happens to be a uniform indigo at the moment, but it could be an image. Theoretically you could use a movie, so that all of your windows and menus and so on would float around on top of, say, Citizen Kane running in an endless loop. You can, in fact, take any piece of software and make it into your screen background, and it will purr along happily, doing whatever it does, and not even know that it’s being used as window-dressing. This has given Randy some ideas on how to approach the Van Eck thing.

  In its current state, this computer is just as vulnerable to Van Eck phreaking as it was before Randy started up X. Before it was white letters on a black background. Now it’s black on beige. The letters are a little smaller and they live in windows, but it makes no difference: the electronics inside his computer still have to make these transitions between zero and one, i.e. between high intensity (white or beige) and minimal (black) as they trace out these patterns of dots on the screen.

  Randy fundamentally does not know what the fuck is going on in his life right now, and probably hasn’t for a long time, even back in the days when he thought that he did know. But his working hypothesis is that the people who set this whole situation up (prime candidates: the Dentist and his cohorts in the Bolobolo syndicate) know that he has some cool information on his hard drive. How should they know this? Well, Pontifex—the Wizard—Enoch Root—whatever the fuck he’s called—when he phoned Randy on the plane, knew that Randy had Arethusa, so God knows who else might know. Someone set up the fake drug bust at NAIA so that they could nab his laptop and yank the hard drive and make a copy of its contents. Then they found out that it was all doubly encrypted. That is, the Arethusa intercepts are encrypted to begin with in a pretty good World War II cryptosystem, which anyone should be able to break nowadays, but on top of that they are furthermore encrypted in a state-of-the-art modern system that no one can break. If they know what’s good for them, they won’t even try to break it. The only way for them to get the information is to get Randy to decrypt it for them, which he can do by biometrically identifying himself to his laptop (by talking to it) or by typing in a pass-phrase that only he knows. They are hoping that Randy will decrypt the Arethusa intercept files and, like a moron, display their contents on the screen. The moment that stuff appears on the screen, the game is over. The Dentist’s (or whoever’s) surveillance guys can feed the intercepts to some kind of a cryptanalytic supercomputer that will break them open in no time.

  That doesn’t mean that Randy dare not open those files—just that he daren’t display them on the screen. This distinction is crucial. Ordo can read the encrypted files from the hard drive. It can write them into the computer’s memory. It can decrypt them, and write the results into another region of the computer’s memory, and leave that data there indefinitely, and the Van Eck phreakers will never be the wiser. But as soon as Randy tells the computer to show him that information in a window on the screen, the Arethusa intercepts will belong to the Van Eck phreakers; and whoever they are, they can probably break them faster than Randy can.

  The fun and interesting thing is that Randy doesn’t have to actually see those intercepts in order to work on them. As long as they are sitting in the computer’s memory, he can subject them to every cryptanalystic technique in the whole Cryptonomicon.

  He starts tapping out some lines in a language called Perl. Perl’s a scripting language; useful for controlling your computer’s functions and automating repetitive tasks. A UNIX machine like this one is rooted in a filesystem that contains tens of thousands of different files, mostly in straight ASCII text format. There are many different programs for opening these files, displaying them on the screen, and editing them. Randy intends to write a Perl script that will roam through the filesystem choosing files at random, opening each file in a randomly sized and located window, paging through it for a while, and then closing it again. If you run the script fast enough, the windows will pop open all over the place in a kind of rectangularized fireworks-burst that will go on forever. If this script is used as the screen background, in place of solid indigo, then this will go on underneath the one window on the screen where Randy’s actually working. The people monitoring his work will go crazy trying to track all of this. Especially if Randy writes a script that will cause the real window to change its shape and location at random every few seconds.

  It would be really stupid to open the Arethusa intercepts in a window—he’s not going to do that. But he can use this technique to conceal whatever else he’s doing in the way of decryption work. It occurs to him, however, when he gets a few lines into writing this Perl script, that if he pulls a stunt like that so early in his incarceration, the people surveilling him will know right away that he is on to them. And maybe it’s better if he lets them believe, for a while, that he suspects nothing. So he saves his Perl script and stops working on it for now. If he writes it in short bursts, opening it once or twice a day to type in a few lines and then closing it, it’s unlikely that the surveillors will be able to follow what he is up to, even if they happen to be hackers. Just to be an asshole, he modifies his X Windows options in such a way that none of the windows on the screen will have
a title bar at the top. That way the surveillance people won’t be able to tell what file he is working on at any given moment, which will make it a lot harder for them to string a long series of observations together into a coherent picture of what’s in his Perl script.

  Too, he opens up the old message from root@eruditorum.org giving the Pontifex Transform, expressed as a few lines of Perl code. The steps that looked so unwieldy when carried out by a computer seem straightforward—easy, even—now that he construes them as manipulations of a deck of cards.

  “Randy.”

  “Hmmm?” Randy looks up from the screen and is startled to find that he is in a jail in the Philippines.

  “Dinner is served.”

  It is Enoch Root, looking at him through the bars. He points at the floor of Randy’s cell where a new tray of food has just been slid in. “Actually, it was served an hour ago—you might want to have at it before the rats come.”

  “Thank you,” Randy says. Making sure all the windows on his screen have been closed, he goes over and lifts his dinner up from the spatter of old rat-turds on the floor. It is rice and lechon, a simple and traditional pork dish. Enoch Root finished eating a long time ago—he sits on his bed, next to Randy, and plays an unusual game of solitaire, pausing occasionally to mark down a letter. Randy watches the manipulation of the deck carefully, growingly certain that it is the same set of operations he was just reading about in the old e-mail message.

  “So what are you in for?” Randy asks.

  Enoch Root finishes counting through the deck, glances at a seven of spades, closes his eyes for a few moments, and marks down a W on his napkin. Then he says, “Disorderly conduct. Trespassing. Incitement to riot. I’m probably guilty of the first two.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “First tell me what you’re in for.”