Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  (1) At any given moment, no fewer than three United States Marines are loitering directly in front of the door of this room, carrying pump shotguns and other weapons optimized for close-range indoor flesh-shredding.

  (2) Lots of power cables go into this room; it has its own fuse-panel, separate from the rest of the building’s electrical system.

  (3) The room emits muffled, yet deafening quasimusical noises.

  (4) The room is referred to as the Basement, even though it’s only part of the basement. When “the Basement” is written down, it is capitalized. When someone (let’s say Lieutenant Colonel Earl Comstock) is going to verbalize this, he will come to a complete stop in mid-sentence, so that all of the preceding words kind of pile into each other like cars in a colliding train. He will, in fact, bracket “the Basement” between a pair of full one-second-long caesuras. During the first of these, he will raise his eyebrows and purse his lips simultaneously, altering the entire aspect ratio of his face so that it becomes strikingly elongated in the vertical dimension, and his eyes will dart sideways in case any Nipponese spies somehow managed to escape the recent apocalypse and found a place to lurk around the fringes of his peripheral vision. Then he will say “the” and then he will say “Basement,” drawing out the s and primly articulating the t. And then will come another caesura during which he will incline his head towards the listener and fix him with a sober, appraising look, seeming to demand some kind of verbal or gestural acknowledgment from the listener that something appallingly significant has just passed between them. And then he will continue with whatever he was saying.

  Waterhouse nods to the Marines, one of whom hauls the door open for him. A really funny thing happened shortly after the Basement was established, when it was still just a bunch of wooden crates and a stack of 32-foot-long sewer pipe segments, and the electricians were still running in the power lines: Lieutenant Colonel Earl Comstock tried to enter the Basement to inspect it. But owing to a clerical error, Lieutenant Colonel Earl Comstock’s name was not on the list, and so a difference of opinion ensued that culminated with one of the Marines drawing his Colt .45 and taking the safety off and chambering a round, pressing the barrel of the weapon directly into the center of Comstock’s right thigh, and then reminiscing about some of the spectacular femur-bursting wounds he had personally witnessed on places like Tarawa and in general trying to help Comstock visualize just what his life would be like, both short- and long-term, if a large piece of lead were to pass through the middle of said major bone. To everyone’s surprise, Comstock was delighted with this encounter, almost enchanted, and hasn’t stopped talking about it since. Of course, now his name’s on the list.

  The Basement is filled with ETC card machines and with several racks of equipment devoid of corporate logos, inasmuch as they were designed and largely built by Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse in Brisbane. When all of these things are hooked together in just the right way, they constitute a Digital Computer. Like a pipe organ, a Digital Computer is not so much a machine as a meta-machine that can be made into any of a number of different machines by changing its internal configuration. At the moment, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is the only guy in the world who understands the Digital Computer well enough to actually do this, though he’s training a couple of Comstock’s ETC men to do it themselves. On the day in question, he is turning the Digital Computer into a machine for calculating the zeta function that he thinks is at the core of the cryptosystem called Azure or Pufferfish.

  The function requires a number of inputs. One of these is a date. Azure is a system for generating one-time pads that change every day, and circumstantial evidence from the room of the dead abacus slaves tells him that, at the moment of their death, they were working on the one-time pad for 6 August 1945, which is four months in the future. Waterhouse writes it down in the European style (day of the month first, then month) as 06081945, then lops off the leading zero to get 6,081,945—a pure quantity, an integer, unmarred by decimal point, rounding error, or any of the other compromises so abhorrent to number theorists. He uses this as one of the inputs to the zeta function. The zeta function requires a few other inputs too, which the person who designed this cryptosystem (presumably Rudy) was at liberty to choose. Surmising which inputs Rudy used has occupied much of Waterhouse’s thoughts in the last week. He puts in the numbers he has guessed, anyway, which is a matter of converting them to binary notation and then physically incarnating those ones and zeros on a neat row of stainless-steel toggle switches: down for zero, up for one.

  Finally he puts on his artilleryman’s ear protectors and lets the Digital Computer howl through the calculation. The room gets much hotter. A vacuum tube burns out, and then another one. Waterhouse replaces them. That’s easy because Lieutenant Colonel Comstock has made a basically infinite supply of tubes available to him—quite a remarkable feat during wartime. The filaments of all those massed tubes glow redly and shine palpable radiant heat across the room. The smell of hot oil rises from the louvers on the ETC card machines. The stack of blank cards in the input hopper shortens mysteriously as they vanish into the machine. Cards skitter into the output bin. Waterhouse pulls them out and looks at them. His heart is pounding very hard.

  It’s quiet again. The cards have numbers on them, nothing more. They just happen to be exactly the same numbers that were frozen on certain abaci down in the room of the computer slaves.

  Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has just demolished another enemy cryptosystem: Azure/Pufferfish may now be mounted like a stuffed head on the wall of the Basement. And indeed, looking at those numbers he feels the same kind of letdown that a big game hunter must feel when he’s stalked some legendary beast halfway across Africa and finally brought it down with a slug through the heart, walked up to the corpse, and discovered that after all it’s just a big, messy, pile of meat. It’s dirty and it’s got flies on it. Is that all there is to it? Why didn’t he solve this thing a long time ago? All of the old Azure/Pufferfish intercepts can be decrypted now. He’ll have to read them, and they will turn out to be the usual numb mutterings of giant bureaucracies trying to take over the world. He doesn’t, frankly, care anymore. He just wants to get the hell out of here and get married, play the organ, and program his Digital Computer, and hopefully get someone to pay him a salary to do one or the other. But Mary’s in Brisbane and the war’s not over yet—we haven’t even gotten around to invading Nippon, for crissakes, and conquering the place is going to take forever, with all those plucky Nipponese women and children drilling on soccer fields with pointed bamboo staves—and it’s probably going to be something like 1955 before he can even get discharged from the military. The war is not over yet, and as long as it goes on they will need him to stay down here in the Basement doing more of what he just did.

  Arethusa. He still hasn’t broken Arethusa. Now that’s a cryptosystem!

  He’s too tired. He can’t break Arethusa just now.

  What he really needs is someone to talk to. Not about anything in particular. Just to talk. But there’s only half a dozen people on the planet he can really talk to, and none of them is in the Philippines. Fortunately, there are long copper wires running underneath the oceans which made geographical location irrelevant, as long as you have the right clearance. Waterhouse does. He gets up and leaves the Basement and goes to have a chat with his friend Alan.

  AKIHABARA

  * * *

  AS RANDY’S PLANE BANKS INTO NARITA, A LOW stratum of cloud screens the countryside like a silk veil. It must be Nippon: the only two colors are the orange of the earth-moving equipment and the green of the earth that has not yet been moved. Other than that, everything is greyscale: grey parking lots divided into rectangles by white lines, the rectangles occupied with black, white, or grey cars, fading off into silvery fog beneath a sky the color of aviation alloy. Nippon is soothing, a good destination for a man who has just been rousted from his jail cell, hauled up before a judge, tongue-lashed, driven to the airport,
and expelled from the Philippines.

  The Nipponese look more American than Americans. Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones. The goal of all such persons seems to be to make themselves cuddly and nonthreatening. The girls in particular are unbearably precious, although perhaps Randy just thinks so because of that troublesome neurological hookup between his brain and Little Man ‘tate. The old folks, instead of looking weathered and formidable, tend to wear sneakers and baseball caps. Black leather, studs, and handcuffs-as-accessories are the marks of the powerless lower classes, the people who tend to end up in the pokey in Manila, and not of the persons who actually dominate the world and crush everything in their path.

  “The doors are about to close.” “The bus is leaving in five minutes.” Nothing happens in Nippon without a perky, breathy woman’s voice giving you a chance to brace yourself. It is safe to say that this is not true of the Philippines. Randy thinks about taking a bus into Tokyo until he comes to his senses and remembers that he’s carrying around in his head the precise coordinates of a mine that probably contains not less than a thousand tons of gold. He hails a taxi. On the way into town, he passes by a road accident: a tanker truck has crossed the white line and flipped over on the shoulder. But in Nippon, even traffic accidents have the grave precision of ancient Shinto rituals. White-gloved cops direct traffic, moon-suited rescue workers descend from spotless emergency vans. The taxi passes beneath Tokyo Bay through a tunnel that was built, three decades ago, by Goto Engineering.

  Randy ends up in a big old hotel, “old” meaning that the physical structure was constructed during the fifties, when Americans competed with Soviets to build the most brutalistic space-age buildings out of the most depressing industrial materials. And indeed one can easily imagine Ike and Mamie pulling up to the front door in a five-ton Lincoln Continental. Of course the interior has been gutted and redone more frequently than many hotels steam-clean their carpets, and so everything is perfect. Randy has a strong impulse to lie in bed like a sack of shit, but he is tired of being confined. And there are many people he could talk to on the phone, but he is supremely paranoid about telephone conversations now. Any talking that he might do would have to be censored. Talking openly and freely is a pleasure, talking carefully is work, and Randy doesn’t feel like work. He calls his parents to tell them everything’s fine, calls Chester to thank him.

  Then he takes his laptop downstairs and sits in the middle of the hotel’s lobby, which is ostentatiously vast by Tokyo standards; the value of the land beneath the lobby alone probably exceeds that of Cape Cod. No one can even get near him with a Van Eck antenna here, and even if they do there will be plenty of interference from the nearby computers of the concierge desk. He starts ordering drinks, alternating between brutally cold pale Nipponese beer and hot tea, and writes a memo explaining more or less what he has spent the last month accomplishing. He writes it very slowly because his hands are practically immobilized now by carpal tunnel syndrome, and any motion that even faintly resembles typing causes him a lot of pain. He ends up cadging a pencil from the concierge and then using its eraser to punch the keys one at a time. The memo begins with the word “carpal” which is a little code that they have developed to explain why the following text seems unnaturally terse and devoid of capital letters. He’s barely got that tapped out when he’s approached by a devastatingly cute and fluttery young thing in a kimono who tells him that there is a staff of typists on call in the Business Center to help him with this should he desire it. Randy declines as politely as he knows how, which is probably not politely enough. Kimono Girl backs away in tiny steps, bowing and uttering truncated subvocal hais. Randy goes back to work with the pencil eraser. He explains, as briefly and clearly as he can, what he’s been doing, and what he thinks is going on with General Wing and Enoch Root. He leaves the subject of what the fuck’s going on with the Dentist open for speculation.

  When he’s done, he encrypts it and then goes up to his room to e-mail it. He can’t get over the cleanliness of his lodgings. The sheets appear to have been tightened around the mattress with turnbuckles, then dipped in starch. This is the first time in over a month that he hasn’t had the warm wet reek of sewer gas climbing up his nostrils and the ammoniacal tang of evaporating urine stinging his eyes. Somewhere in Nippon, a man in a clean white coverall stands in a room with a fat hose-fed gun vomiting freshly chopped glass fibers slathered with polyester resin onto a curvaceous form; peeled off the form, the result is bathrooms like this one: a single topological surface pierced in at most two or three places by drains and nozzles. While Randy’s e-mailing his memo he lets hot water run into the largest and smoothest depression in the bathroom-surface. Then he takes off his clothes and climbs into it. He never takes baths, but between the foulness that seems infused into his flesh now, and the throbbing of his Hunk of Burning Love, there was never a better time.

  The last few days were the worst. When Randy finished his project, and displayed the bogus results on the screen, he expected that the cell door would swing open immediately. That he’d walk out onto the streets of Manila and that, just for extra bonus points, Amy might even be waiting for him. But nothing at all happened for a whole day, and then Attorney Alejandro came to tell him that a deal might be possible but that it would take some work. And then it turned out that the deal was actually a pretty bad one: Randy was not going to be exonerated as such. He was going to be deported from the country under orders not to come back. Attorney Alejandro never claimed that this was a particularly good deal, but something in his manner made it clear that there was no point griping about it; The Decision Had Been Made at levels that were not accessible.

  He could very easily take care of the Hunk of Burning Love problem now that he has privacy, but astonishes himself by electing not to. This may be perverse; he’s not sure. The last month and a half of total celibacy, relieved only by nocturnal emissions at roughly two-week intervals, has definitely got him in a mental space he has never been to before, or come near, or even heard about. When he was in jail he had to develop a fierce mental discipline in order not to be distracted by thoughts of sex. He got alarmingly good at it after a while. It’s a highly unnatural approach to the mind/body problem, pretty much the antithesis of every sixties and seventies-tinged philosophy that he ever imbibed from his Baby Boomer elders. It is the kind of thing he associates with scary hardasses: Spartans, Victorians, and mid-twentieth-century American military heroes. It has turned Randy into something of a hardass in his approach to hacking, and meanwhile, he suspects, it has got him into a much more intense and passionate head space than he’s ever known when it comes to matters of the heart. He won’t really know that until he comes face to face with Amy, which looks like it’s going to be a while, since he’s just been kicked out of the country where she lives and works. Just as an experiment, he decides he’s going to keep his hands off of himself for now. If it makes him a little tense and volatile compared to his pathologically mellow West Coast self, then so be it. One nice thing about being in Asia is that tense, volatile people blend right in. It’s not like anyone ever died from being horny.

  So he arises from the bath unsullied and wraps himself in a vestal white robe. His cell in Manila did not have a mirror. He knew he was probably losing weight, but not until he climbs out of the bath and gives himself a look in the mirror does he realize just how much. For the first time since he was an adolescent, he has a waist, which makes a white bathrobe into a quasi-practical garment.

  He’s scarcely recognizable. Before the beginning of this the Third Business Foray he kind of assumed that, going into his mid-thirties, he had figured out who he was, and that he’d keep being the way he was forever, except with a gradually decaying body and gradually increasing net worth. He didn’t imagine it was possible to change so much, and he wonders where it’s going to end. But this is nothing more than an anomalous moment of reflection. He shakes it off and
gets back to his life.

  The Nipponese have, and have always had, a marvelous skill with graphic images—this is clear in their manga and their anime, but reaches its fullest expressive flower in safety ideograms. Licking red flames, buildings splitting and falling as the jagged earth parts beneath them, a fleeing figure silhouetted in a doorway, suspended in the stroboscopic flash of a detonation. The written materials accompanying these images are, of course, not understandable to Randy, and so there is nothing for his rational mind to work on; the terrifying ideograms blaze, fragmentary nightmare images popping up on walls, and in the drawers of his room’s desk, whenever he lets his guard down for a moment. What he can read is not exactly soothing. Trying to sleep, he lies in bed, mentally checking the locations of his bedside emergency flashlight and the pair of freebie slippers (much too small) thoughtfully left there so that he can sprint out of the burning and collapsing hotel without cutting his feet to sashimi when the next magnitude 8.0 tremblor shivers the windows out of their frames. He stares up at the ceiling, which is fraught with safety equipment whose LEDs form a glowering red constellation, a crouching figure known to the ancient Greeks as Ganymede, the Anally Receptive Cupbearer, and to the Nipponese, as Hideo, the Plucky Disaster Relief Worker, bending over to probe a pile of jagged concrete slabs for anything that’s squishy. All of this leaves him in a state of free-floating terror. He gets up at five in the morning, grabs two capsules of Japanese Snack from his minibar, and leaves the hotel, following one of the two emergency exit routes that he has memorized. He starts wandering, thinking it would be fun to get lost. Getting lost happens in about thirty seconds. He should have brought his GPS, and marked the latitude and longitude of the hotel.