Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  It is hard not to get the idea that Enoch Root and General Wing may have other reasons to be pissed off at each other.

  “Like, if I can just play Plato’s advocate here, what do you mean exactly when you talk about defending civilization?”

  “Oh, Randy, you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, but China is civilized, right? Has been for a while.”

  “Yes.”

  “So maybe you and General Wing are actually on the same team.”

  “If the Chinese are so civilized, how come they never invent anything?”

  “What—paper, gunpowder—”

  “Anything in the last millennium I mean.”

  “Beats me. What do you think, Enoch?”

  “It’s like the Germans in the Second World War.”

  “I know that all the bright lights fled Germany in the thirties—Einstein, Born—”

  “And Schrödinger, and von Neumann, and others—but do you know why they fled?”

  “Well, because they didn’t like the Nazis, of course!”

  “But do you know specifically why the Nazis didn’t like them?”

  “A lot of them were Jews…”

  “It goes deeper than mere anti-Semitism. Hilbert, Russell, Whitehead, Gödel, all of them were engaged in a monumental act of tearing mathematics down and beginning from scratch. But the Nazis believed that mathematics was a heroic science whose purpose was to reduce chaos to order—just as National Socialism was supposed to do in the political sphere.”

  “Okay,” Randy says, “but what the Nazis didn’t understand was that if you tore it down and rebuilt it, it was even more heroic than before.”

  “Indeed. It led to a renaissance,” Root says, “like in the seventeenth century, when the Puritans tore everything to rubble and then slowly built it back up from scratch. Over and over again we see the pattern of the Titanomachia repeated—the old gods are thrown down, chaos returns, but out of the chaos, the same patterns reemerge.”

  “Okay. So—again—you were talking about civilization?”

  “Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists’ uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn’t work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.”

  “Sounds teleological, Enoch. Free countries get better science, hence superior military power, hence get to defend their freedoms. You’re proclaiming a sort of Manifest Destiny here.”

  “Well, someone’s got to do it.”

  “Aren’t we beyond that sort of thing now?”

  “I know you’re just saying that to infuriate me. Sometimes, Randy, Ares gets chained up in a barrel for a few years, but he never goes away. The next time he emerges, Randy, the conflict is going to revolve around bio-, micro-, and nanotechnology. Who’s going to win?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you not just a bit unsettled by not knowing?”

  “Look, Enoch, I’m trying my best here—I really am—but I’m broke, and I’m locked up in this fucking cage, all right?”

  “Oh, stop whining.”

  “What about you? Suppose you go back to your yam farm, or whatever, and one day your shovel hits something that rings, and you suddenly dig up a few kilotons of gold? You’d invest it all in high-tech weapons?”

  Root, not surprisingly, has an answer: the gold was stolen from all of Asia by the Nipponese, who intended to use it as backing for a currency that would become the legal tender of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and that while it goes without saying that those particular Nips were among the most egregious buttheads in planetary history, some aspects of their plan weren’t such a shitty idea. That to the extent life still sucks for many Asians, things would get a lot better, for a lot of people, if the continent’s economy could get jerked into the twenty-first, or at least the twentieth, century and hopefully stay there for a while instead of collapsing whenever some dictator’s-nephew-in-charge-of-a-central-bank loses control of his sphincters and wipes out a major currency. So maybe stabilizing the currency situation would be a good thing to accomplish with a shitload of gold, and that’s the only moral thing to do with it anyway considering whom it was stolen from—you can’t just go out and spend it. Randy finds this answer appropriately sophisticated and Jesuitical and eerily in sync with what Avi has written into the latest edition of the Epiphyte(2) Business Plan.

  After a decent number of days has gone by, Enoch Root comes right back and asks Randy what he’d do with a few kilotons of gold, and Randy mentions the Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod. Turns out that Enoch Root already knows about the HEAP, has already downloaded various revisions of it over the gleaming new communications network that Randy and the Dentist strung through the islands, thinks it’s right in line with his ideas vis-à-vis Athena, Aegis, etc., but has any number of difficult questions and trenchant criticisms.

  Shortly thereafter, Avi himself comes in for a visit and says very little, but does let Randy know that, yes, General Wing is one of the Crypt’s clients. The grizzled Chinese gentlemen who sat around the table with them in Kinakuta, and whose mugs were secretly captured by the pinhole camera on Randy’s laptop, are among Wing’s chief lieutenants. Avi also lets him know that the legal pressure has eased; the Dentist has suddenly reined in Andrew Loeb and allowed any number of legal deadlines to be extended. The fact that Avi says nothing at all about the sunken submarine would seem to imply that the salvage operation is going well, or at least going.

  Randy’s still processing these pieces of news when he receives a visit from none other than the Dentist himself.

  “I assume that you think I had you framed,” says Dr. Hubert Kepler. He and Randy are alone in a room together, but Randy is conscious of many aides, bodyguards, lawyers, and Furies or Harpies or whatever just on the other side of the nearest door. The Dentist seems ever so slightly amused, but Randy gradually collects that he is actually quite serious. The Dentist’s upper lip is permanently arched, or shorter than it ought to be, or both, with the result that his glacier-white incisors are always slightly exposed, and depending on how the light is hitting his face he looks either vaguely beaverish or else as if he’s none too effectively fighting back a sneering grin. Even a gentle soul like Randy cannot gaze upon such a face without thinking how much better it would look with the application of some knuckles. From the perfection of Hubert Kepler’s dentition it is possible to infer that he had a sheltered upbringing (full-time bodyguards from the time his adult teeth erupted from the gumline) or that his choice of careers was motivated by a very personal interest in reconstructive oral surgery. “And I know that you’re probably not going to believe me. But I’m here to say that I had nothing to do with what happened at the airport.”

  The Dentist now stops and gazes at Randy for a while, by no means one of those guys who feels any need to nervously fill in gaps in conversation. And so it is during the ensuing, lengthy pause that Randy figures out that the Dentist isn’t grinning at all, that his face is simply in its state of natural repose. Randy shudders a bit just to think of what it must be like to never be able to lose this alternatively beaverish and sneering look. For your lover to gaze on you while you’re sleeping and see this. Of course, if the stories are to be believed, Victoria Vigo has her own ways of exacting retribution, and so maybe Hubert Kepler really is suffering the abuse and humiliation that his face seems to be asking for. Randy heaves a little sigh when he thinks of this, sensing some trace of cosmic symmetry revealed.

  Kepler is certainly correct in saying that Randy is not inclined to believe a single word he says. The only way for Kepler to gain any credibility is for him to show up in person at this jail and utter the words face-to-face, which given all of the other things that he
could be doing, for fun or profit or both, at this moment, gives a lot of weight to what he’s saying. It is implicit that if the Dentist wanted to lie, badly and baldly, to Randy, he could send his lawyers around to do it for him, or just send him a fucking telegram, for that matter. So either he’s telling the truth, or else he’s lying but it’s very important to him that Randy should believe in his lies. Randy cannot work out why on earth the Dentist should give a flying fuck whether Randy believes in his lies or not, which pushes him in the direction of thinking that maybe he really is telling the truth.

  “Who framed me, then?” Randy asks, kind of rhetorically. He was just in the middle of doing some pretty cool C++ coding when he got yanked out of his cell to have this surprise encounter with the Dentist, and is surprising himself with just how bored and irritated he is. He has reverted, in other words, back into a pure balls-to-the-wall nerdism rivaled only by his early game-coding days back in Seattle. The sheer depth and involution of the current nerdism binge would be hard to convey to anyone. Intellectually, he is juggling half a dozen lit torches, Ming vases, live puppies, and running chainsaws. In this frame of mind he cannot bring himself to give a shit about the fact that this incredibly powerful billionaire has gone to a lot of trouble to come and F2F with him. And so he asks the above question as nothing more than a perfunctory gesture, the subtext being I wish you’d go away but minimal standards of social decency dictate that I should say something. The Dentist, no slouch himself in the social ineptness department, comes right back as if it were an actual request for information. “I can only assume that you have somehow gotten embroiled with someone who has a lot of influence in this country. It appears that someone is trying to send you a—”

  “No! Just stop,” Randy says. “Don’t say it.” Hubert Kepler is now looking at him quizzically, so Randy continues. “The message theory doesn’t hold up.”

  Kepler looks genuinely baffled for a few moments, then actually does grin a little bit. “Well, it certainly isn’t an attempt to do away with you, because—”

  “Obviously,” Randy says.

  “Yes. Obviously.”

  There is another one of those long pauses; Kepler seems unsure of himself. Randy arches his back and stretches. “The chair in my cell is not what you call ergonomic,” he says. He holds his arms out and wiggles the fingers. “My carpals are going to start acting up again. I can tell.”

  Randy is looking at Kepler pretty carefully when he says this, and there’s no doubt that genuine astonishment is now spreading across the Dentist’s face. The Dentist only has one facial expression (already described) but it changes in intensity; it gets more so and less so depending on his emotions. The Dentist’s expression proves he had no idea, until now, that Randy’s been allowed to have a computer in his cell. In the trying-to-figure-out-what-the-fuck-is-going-on department, the computer is the single most important datum, and Kepler didn’t even know about it until just now. So to whatever extent the Dentist actually gives a shit, he has a lot of thinking to do. He excuses himself pretty soon after.

  Not half an hour later, some twenty-five-year-old American guy with a ponytail shows up and has a brief audience with Randy. It turns out that he works for Chester in Seattle and has just now flown across the Pacific on Chester’s personal jet and came here straight from the airport. He is completely jazzed, totally in bat-out-of-hell mode, and cannot shut up. The sheer amazingness of his sudden flight across the ocean on a rich guy’s private jet has made a really, really deep impression on him and he obviously needs someone to share it with. He has brought a “care package” consisting of some junk food, a few trashy novels, the largest bottle of Pepto-Bismol Randy’s ever seen, a CD Walkman, and a cubical stack of CDs. This guy can’t get over the battery thing; he was told to bring a lot of extra batteries, and so he did, and sure enough, between the luggage guys at the airport and the customs inspectors, all of the batteries disappeared en route except for one package that he’s got in the pocket of his long baggy Seattle-grunge-boy shorts. Seattle’s full of guys like this who flipped a coin when they graduated from college (heads Prague, tails Seattle) and just showed up with this expectation that because they were young and smart they’d find a job and begin making money, and then appallingly enough did exactly that. Randy can’t figure out what the world must look like to a guy like this. He has a hard time getting rid of the guy, who shares the common assumption (increasingly annoying) that just because Randy’s in jail, he doesn’t have a life, has nothing better to do than interface with visitors.

  When Randy gets back to his cell, he sits crosslegged on his bed with the Walkman and begins dealing out the CDs like cards in a solitaire game. The selection is pretty reasonable: a two-disc set of the Brandenburg Concertos, a collection of Bach organ fugues (nerds have a thing about Bach), some Louis Armstrong, some Wynton Marsalis, and then various selections from Hammerdown Systems, which is a Seattle-based record label in which Chester is a major investor. It is a second-generation Seattle-scene record label; all of its artists are young people who came to Seattle after they graduated from college in search of the legendary Seattle music scene and discovered that it didn’t really exist—it was just a couple of dozen guys who sat around playing guitar in one another’s basements—and so who were basically forced to choose between going home in ignominy or fabricating the Seattle music scene of their imagination from whole cloth. This led to the establishment of any number of small clubs, and the foundation of many bands, that were not rooted in any kind of authentic reality whatsoever but merely reflected the dreams and aspiration of pan-global young adults who had all flocked to Seattle on the same chimera hunt. This second wave scene came in for a lot of abuse from those of the original two dozen people who had not yet died of drug overdose or suicide. There was something of a backlash; and yet, about thirty-six hours after the backlash reached its maximum intensity, there was an antibacklash backlash from young immigrants who asserted their right to some kind of unique cultural identity as people who had naively come to Seattle and discovered that there was no there there and that they would have to create it themselves. Fueled by that conviction, and by their own youthful libidinous energy, and by a few cultural commentators who found this whole scenario fetchingly post-modern, they started a whole lot of second-generation bands and even a couple of record labels, of which Hammerdown Systems is the only one that didn’t either go out of business or get turned into a wholly-owned subsidiary of an L.A. or New York-based major label inside of six months.

  And so Chester has decided to favor Randy with those recent Hammerdown selections of which he is most proud. Perversely, almost all of these are from bands that are not even in Seattle at all but in small, prohibitively hip college towns in North Carolina and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. But Randy does find one from an evidently Seattle-based band called Shekondar. Evidently, that is, because on the back of the CD is a blurry photograph of several band members drinking sixteen-ounce lattes in cups bearing the logo of a chain of coffee bars that as far as Randy knows has not yet burst free from the city limits of Seattle to crush everything in its path worldwide in the now wearisomely predictable manner of Seattle-based companies. Now, Shekondar happens to have been the name of an especially foul underworld deity who played an important role in some of the game scenarios that Randy played with Avi and Chester and the gang back in the old days. Randy opens up the case of the CD and notes immediately that the disc has the golden hue of a master, not the traditional silver of a mere copy. Randy puts that golden master into his Walkman and hits the Play button and is treated to some passable post-Cobain-mortem material, genetically engineered to have nothing in common with what is traditionally thought of as the Seattle sound and in that sense absolutely typical of Seattle du jour. He jumps forward through a couple more tracks and then rips the earphones off his head, cursing, as the Walkman attempts to translate a stream of pure digital information, representing something other than music, into sound. This feels a bit like
needles of dry ice jabbed into his eardrums.

  Randy moves the golden disc to the CD-ROM drive that is built into his laptop, and checks it out. Indeed it does sport a couple of audio tracks (as he’s discovered) but almost all of the disc’s capacity is given over to computer files. There are several directories, or folders, each named after one of the documents that was in grandfather’s trunk. Within each of these directories is a long list of files named PAGE.001.jpeg, PAGE.002.jpeg, and so on. Randy starts opening them up, using the same net-browser software that he uses to read the Cryptonomicon, and discovers that they are all scanned image files. Evidently Chester had a bunch of minions de-staple those documents and feed them page by page through a scanner. At the same time he must have had graphic artists, presumably people he knows through Hammerdown Systems, hastily whipping up this fake Shekondar album cover. It’s even got a package insert, photographs of Shekondar in concert. What it really is is a parody of the post-Seattle Scene Seattle scene that aligns perfectly with the faulty notions of same that could be expected in the imagination of a Philippine airport customs inspector, who like everyone else is fantasizing about moving to Seattle. The lead guitarist looks kind of like Chester in a wig.

  All of this sneaky stuff is probably gratuitous. It probably would have been okay for Chester to just Fedex the fucking documents straight to the jail. But Chester, sitting in his house by Lake Washington, is working on a set of assumptions about Manila just as faulty as what half of the world believes about Seattle. At least Randy gets a laugh out of it before diving into zeta functions.

  A word about libido: it’s been something like three weeks for Randy now. He was just beginning to address this situation when a highly intelligent and perceptive Catholic ex-priest was suddenly introduced into the cell next to his and began sleeping six inches away from him. Since then, masturbation per se has been pretty much out of the question. To the extent Randy believes in any god at all, he’s been praying for a nocturnal emission. His prostate gland now has the size and consistency of a croquet ball. He feels it all the time, and has begun to think of it as his Hunk of Burning Love. Randy had a spot of prostate trouble once when he was chronically drinking too much coffee, and it made everything between his nipples and his knees hurt. The urologist explained that Little Man ‘tate is neurologically wired into just about every other part of your body, and he didn’t have to exert any rhetorical skill, or marshall any detailed arguments, in order to make Randy believe that. Randy has believed, ever since, that the ability of men to become moronically obsessed with copulation is in some way a reflection of this wiring diagram; when you are ready to give the external world the benefit of your genetic material, i.e. when the ‘tate is fully loaded, even your pinkies and eyelids know about it.