Cryptonomicon (74 page)
Authors: Neal Stephenson
Tags: #Literature, #U.S.A., #American Literature, #21st Century, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #v.5, #Amazon.com, #Retail
Root freezes.
“Congratulations there, Rudy!” Shaftoe says. “You surprised the padre. I didn’t think it could be done. Now would you mind telling us what the fuck you’re talking about?”
L
IKE A CLIENT OF ONE OF YOUR LESS REPUTABLE
pufferfish sushi chefs, Randy Waterhouse does not move from his assigned seat for a full ninety minutes after the jumbo leaves Ninoy Aquino International Airport. A can of beer is embedded in the core of his spiraled hand. His arm lies on the extra-wide Business Class armrest, a shank on a slab. He does not turn his head, or turret his eyeballs, even, to look out the window at northern Luzon. All that’s out there is jungle, which has two sets of connotations going for it now. One is the spooky Tarzan/Stanley & Livingstone/”The horror, the horror”/natives-are-restless/ Charlie’s out there somewhere waiting for us kind. The second is the more modern and enlightened sort of Jacques Cousteauian teeming-repository-of-brilliant-and-endangered-species, lungs-of-the-planet kind. Neither really works for Randy anymore, which is why despite the state of hibernatory torpor he shunted into the moment his ass impacted on the navy blue leather of the seat, he feels a little spike of irritation every time one of the other passengers, peering out a window, pronounces the word “jungle.” To him, it is just a shitload of trees now, trees going on for miles and miles, up the little hilly-willies and down the little hilly-willies. It is easy, now, for him to understand tropical denizens’ shockingly frank and blunt craving to drive through this sort of territory in the largest and widest available bulldozers (the only parts of his body that move during the first hour and a half of the flight are certain facial muscles which pull the corners of his mouth back into an ironic rictus when he imagines what Charlene would think of this—it is just too perfect—Randy goes off on a Business Foray and comes back identifying with people who bulldoze rainforests). Randy wants to bulldoze the jungle, all of it. Actually, thermonuclear weapons, detonated at a suitable height, would do the job faster. He needs to rationalize this
urge. He will do so, as soon as he solves the running-out-of-planetary-oxygen problem.
By the time it even occurs to him to lift the beer to his lips, the heat of his body has gone into it, and his hand has become as chilly and stiff as an uncooked rolled roast. For that matter, his whole body has adjourned into some kind of metabolic recess, and his brain is not exactly purring at high RPM’s either. He feels kind of the way he does, sometimes, the day before he comes down with a total-body cold-and-flu scenario, one of those crushing viral Tet Offensives that, every few years, swats you out of the land of the fully living for a week or two. It is as if about three-quarters of his body’s resources of nutrients and energy have been diverted to the task of manufacturing quintillions of viruses. At the currency exchange window of NAIA, Randy had stood behind a Chinese man who, just before he stepped back from the window with his money, unloaded a Sneeze of such titanic force that the rolling pressure wave turbulating outwards from his raw, flapping facial orifices caused the wall of bulletproof glass separating him from the moneychangers to flex slightly, so that the reflection of the Chinese man, Randy behind him, the lobby of NAIA, and the sunlit passenger-dropoff lane outside underwent a subtle warpage. The viruses must have roiled back from the glass, reflected like light, and enveloped Randy. So maybe Randy is the personal vector of this year’s version of the flu-named-after-some-city-in-East-Asia that annually tours the United States, just barely preceded by rush shipments of flu vaccine. Or maybe it’s Ebola.
Actually, he feels fine. Other than the fact that his mitochondria have gone on strike, or that his thyroid seems to be failing (perhaps it was secretly removed by black-market organ transplanters? He makes a mental note to check for new scars in the next mirror) he is not experiencing any viral symptoms at all.
It is some kind of post-stress thing. This is the first time he has relaxed in a couple of weeks. Not once has he sat down in a bar with a beer, or put his feet up on a desk, or just collapsed like a decaying corpse in front of the television set. Now his body is telling him it’s payback time. He
does not sleep; he does not feel drowsy at all. Actually, he’s been sleeping rather well. But his body refuses to move for an hour, and then most of another hour, and to the extent his brain is working at all it can only chase its tail.
But there is something that he could be doing. This is why laptops were invented, so that important business persons would not fritter away long flights relaxing. He can see it right there on the floor in front of him. He knows he should reach for it. But it would break the spell. He feels as if water condensed on his skin and froze into a carapace that will shatter as soon as he moves any part of his body. This is, he realizes, exactly how a laptop computer must feel when it drops into its power-saving mode.
Then a flight attendant is there holding a menu in front of his face and saying something that jolts him like a cattle prod. He nearly jumps out of his seat, spills his beer a little, gropes for the menu. Before he can drop back into his demi-coma, he continues the motion and reaches down for his laptop. The seat next to him is empty and he can put his dinner over there while he works on the computer.
People around him are watching CNN—live, from CNN Center in Atlanta—not a canned thing on tape. According to the plethora of pseudotechnical data cards jammed into the seatbacks, which Randy is the only person who ever reads, this plane has some kind of antenna that can keep a lock on a communications satellite as it flies across the Pacific. Furthermore, it’s two-way, so you can even transmit e-mail. Randy spends a while familiarizing himself with the instructions, checks the rates, as if he really gives a shit how much it costs, then jacks the thing into the anus of his laptop. He opens up the laptop and checks his e-mail. Traffic is low because everyone in Epiphyte knows he’s en route somewhere.
Nevertheless, there are three messages from Kia, Epiphyte’s only actual employee, the administrative assistant for the whole company. Kia works in a totally alienated, abstracted office in the Springboard Capital corporate incubator complex in San Mateo. It is some sort of a federal regulation that nascent high-tech companies must not hire pudgy fifty-year-old support staff, the way big established
companies do. They must hire topologically enhanced twenty-year-olds with names that sound like new models of cars. Since most hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when it comes to diversity, and it follows that all of the diversity must be concentrated in the one or two employees who are not hackers. In the part of a federal equal-opportunity form where Randy would simply check a box labeled
CAUCASIAN
, Kia would have to attach multiple sheets on which her family tree would be ramified backwards through time ten or twelve generations until reaching ancestors who could actually be pegged to one specific ethnic group without glossing anything over, and those ethnic groups would be intimidatingly hip ones—not Swedes, let’s say, but Lapps, and not Chinese but Hakka, and not Spanish but Basque. Instead of doing this, on her job app for Epiphyte she simply checked “other” and then wrote in
TRANS-ETHNIC
. In fact, Kia is trans-just about every system of human categorization, and what she isn’t trans- she is post-.
Anyway, Kia does a great job (it is part of the unspoken social contract with these people that they always do an absolutely fantastic job) and she has sent e-mail to Randy notifying him that she has recently fielded four trans-Pacific telephone calls from America Shaftoe, who wants to know Randy’s whereabouts, plans, state of mind, and purity of spirit. Kia has informed Amy that Randy’s on his way to California and has somehow insinuated, or Amy has somehow figured out, that the purpose of the visit is NOT BUSINESS. Randy senses a small pane of glass shattering over a neurological alarm button somewhere. He is in trouble. This is divine retribution for his having dared to sit still and not do anything for ninety whole minutes. He uses his word processor to whip out a note explaining to Amy that he needs to straighten out some paperwork in order to sever the last clinging tendrils of his dead, dead, dead relationship with Charlene (which was such a lousy idea to begin with that it causes him to lie awake at night questioning his own judgment and fitness to live), and that he has to be in California in order to do it. He faxes the note to Semper Marine in Manila, and also faxes it to
Glory IV
in case Amy’s out on the water.
He then does something that probably means he’s certifiably crazy. He gets up and strolls up and down the business-class aisle on pretext of using the bathroom, and checks out the people sitting nearby, paying special attention to their luggage, the stuff they’ve jammed into the overhead compartments, the bags under the seats in front of them. He is looking for anything that might contain a Van Eck phreaking type of antenna. It is a completely useless thing to do, because just about any type of luggage might contain such an antenna and he would never know it. Furthermore, any actual spy who had been planted on this plane to eavesdrop on his computer would not be sitting there holding up a big antenna and peering at an oscilloscope. But performing the check (like checking the rates for live data transmissions to the satellite) is sort of an empty ritual that makes him feel vaguely responsible and arguably non-stupid.
Returning to his seat, he fires up OrdoEmacs, which is a marvelously paranoid piece of software invented by John Cantrell. Emacs in its normal form is the hacker’s word processor, a text editor that offers little in the way of fancy formatting capabilities but does the basic job of editing plain text very well. Your normally cryptographically paranoid hacker would create files using Emacs and then encrypt them with Ordo later. But if you forget to encrypt them, or if your laptop gets stolen before you get a chance to, or your plane crashes and you die but your laptop is sieved out of the muck by baffled-but-dogged crash investigators and falls into the hands of federal authorities, your files can be read. For that matter it is possible even to find ghostly traces of old bits on a hard drive’s sectors even after the file has been overwritten with new data.
OrdoEmacs, on the other hand, works exactly like regular Emacs, except that it encrypts everything before writing it out to disk. At no time is plaintext ever laid down on a disk by OrdoEmacs—the only place it exists in its plain, readable form is in the pixels on the screen, and in the volatile RAM of the computer, whence it vanishes the moment power is shut down. Not only that, but it’s coupled to a screensaver that uses the little built-in CCD camera in the
laptop to check to see if you are actually there. It can’t recognize your face, but it can tell whether or not a vaguely human-shaped form is sitting in front of it, and if that vaguely human-shaped form goes away, even for a fraction of a second, it will drop into a screen-saver that will blank the display and freeze the machine until such time as you type in a password, or biometrically verify your identity through voice recognition.
Randy opens up a document template that Epiphyte uses for internal memoranda and begins to lay out certain facts that will be fresh, and no doubt stimulating, to Avi, Beryl, John, Tom, and Eb.
MY TRIP TO THE JUNGLE
or
THE DRUMS OF THE HUKS
or
GET A LOAD OF THIS
or
HE SQUEEZED MY TESTICLES
or
THE WEIRD TURN PRO
a tale of adventure and discovery in the majestic rainforest of northern Luzon
by
Randall Lawrence Waterhouse
As I stepped on this unknown middle-aged Filipina’s feet during an ill-advised ballroom dancing foray, she leaned close to me and uttered some latitude and longitude figures with a conspicuously large number of significant digits of precision, implying a maximum positional error on the order of the size of a dinner plate. Gosh, was I ever curious! Subject provided these numbers as part of a conversational gambit/thought experiment concerning the inherent value (as in monetary) of information, a subject (coincidentally?) of interest to us, the
Management Team of Epiphyte(2) Corp. Examination of high-res maps of Luzon indicated that the lat. and long. in question were in a hilly (let’s just go ahead and call it mountainous) region some 250 km north of Manila. For those of you not familiar with WW2 history, this area was within the final perimeter controlled by General Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya and conqueror of Singapore, at the end of that war, when Gen. MacArthur had driven him and his approx. 10
5
troops out of the populated lowlands. And no, this is not just a fundamentally irrelevant historical note, as we shall see.
Relayed said data to one Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe (refer to my exceptionally colorful and readable status reports on cable survey for more anecdotal material concerning same) who asserted “someone is trying to send you a message” (note: all cheesy dialog hereinafter is DMS’s) and offered his assistance with a vigor bordering on scary aggressiveness. DMS is energetic and enterprising to a degree that from time to time leaves certain persons (e.g. those burdened with a petty fear of death or torture) uneasy (see my prior speculation as to possibility DMS may have been born with a redundant Y chromosome). Primary role of Yours Truly became as follows: source of repetitious and evidently irritating counsels of caution, restraint, other virtues given a low priority by DMS, who cites his longevity (which unavoidably exceeds that of Yours Truly as he was born before me), network of close personal relationships (murky, globe-spanning, reputedly puissant), financial prosperity (commodities,
e.g. precious metals, distributed among many locations DMS declines to reveal) and (as trump card) the corporeal perfection of his girlfriend (she must carry an umbrella while out of doors lest her face cause pilots of overflying commercial airliners to pitch forward, dumb and inert, onto their control yokes) all as proof that the ideas shared by Yours Truly vis-a-vis how to avoid death, dismemberment, etc. need not be given more than the most cursory attention. Yours Truly’s only bargaining chips were, appropriately and ironically enough, information: namely the final few digits of the lat. and long. which were withheld from DMS lest he simply go there himself and check them out (note: DMS is honest to a fault, and so the concern is not that DMS might steal or appropriate anything but that situation would get out of hand, to the extent it ever was in hand to begin with).
Plans were made for a journey (“mission” in DMS parlance) to said lat. and long. Extra batteries were purchased for the GPS receiver (see attached expense report). Drinking water, etc. laid in. A jeepney was retained. Concept of jeepney is impossible to convey fully here: a minibus, usually named after a pop star, Biblical figure, or abstract theological concept, whose engine & frame come from American, or Nipponese auto company but whose entire body, seats, upholstery, & encrustations of lurid decor are locally manufactured by high-spirited artisans. Jeepneys are normally made outside of Manila in towns or barangays (semiautonomous neighborhoods) that specialize in same; the design, materials, style, etc. of a jeepney reflect
its provenance just as good wine allegedly betrays climate, soil, etc. of its terroir. Ours was (anomalously) a perfectly monochromatic jeepney mfged. out of pure stainless steel in the stainless-steel-fabrication-specialized bgy. of San Pablo, with (unlike normal jeepneys) no colored decorations at all—everything either stainless-steel-colored or (where use was made of electric lights) pure piercing halogen-white with bluish tinge nicely complementing hue of stainless steel. Seats in back were stainless-steel benches with surprisingly ergonomic lumbar support capabilities. Name of our jeepney was THE GRACE OF GOD. Readers of this memo will be disappointed to know that Bong-Bong Gad (sic), designer/owner/driver/proprietor of the vehicle, anticipated the inevitable “there but for THE GRACE OF GOD go I” witticism by unloading same on Yours Truly while we were still shaking hands (Filipinos go in for long handshakes, and the first party to initiate termination of a handshake—usually the non-Filipino—is invariably left with a nagging feeling that he is a shithead).
Yours Truly, in discreet one-on-one mode with DMS, adverted to lack of windows in the rear (passenger) section of THE GRACE OF GOD as prima facie evidence that it lacked air-conditioning, a technology widely adopted in Philippine Islands. DMS evinced skepticism as to moral fiber of Yours Truly, commenced with a series of probing questions aimed at establishing my commitment to Mission, fiduciary resp. to Epiphyte shareholders, level of physical & mental vigor, and
overall level of “serious”-ness (being “serious” is some kind of umbrella concept strongly correlated with my fitness to live, to have the privilege of knowing DMS, and to go on dates with his daughter. This gives me an opening to mention what would normally be no one’s business but my own but which in these circumstances it is ethically mandated that I disclose, namely, that I am infatuated with daughter of DMS and that while not exactly reciprocating these feelings at full strength she finds me sufficiently non-loathsome to have dinner with me from time to time. It has only occurred to me at this very moment that my pursuit of rel’nship w/the female in question, one America (sic) by name, would in context of modern U.S. society be classified as SEXUAL HARASSMENT and that if desired culmination is achieved it might be classified as SEXUAL ABUSE or RAPE owing to “power imbalance” existing between me and her. Viz., Yours Truly is on Management Team of Corp that has retained Semper Marine for large job & provided them with majority of their revenue during last fiscal year. Anyone with thoughts of summoning federal authorities to apprehend me upon arrival at SFO & expose my misdeeds & subject me to public disgrace & compulsory consciousness-raising workshops is advised to acquaint him or herself with the Shaftoes first & to at least remain open to possibility that Dad’s martial prowess in combination with traditional feelings of psychotic protectiveness toward his female offspring, combined with Daughter’s habit of carrying large Palawan stabbing weapon known as a kris, and Daughter’s overall psychic
fierceness & physical fitness & courage exceeding that of Yours Truly, mitigate any perceived power imbalance, particularly given that most of our interactions take place in settings which lend themselves admirably to discreet homicide & corpse disposal. In other words, I make you aware of this amor stuff not as confession of personal misdeeds but to make full disclosure of situation that could influence my judgment vis-a-vis Semper Marine and conceivably negatively impact shareholder value, or, much more plausibly, that could be SEEN as doing so by minority-shareholder lawyers who infest our industry like guinea worms, and used as pretext for legal action).
Back to the question at hand, then. Yours Truly asserted calmly (feeling that vigorous assertions would be perceived by DMS as defensiveness & hence a de facto confession of lack of “serious”-ness) that (1) a couple of days’ travel in open AC-less vehicle through Philippine hinterland would be a day at the beach, a picnic, a walk in the park, & a sunday stroll all rolled into one, and (2) furthermore that even if it were the most hideous torture Yours Truly would gladly undergo it given that the stakes, for all concerned (incl. Epiphyte shareholders) were so high and generally Serious. In retrospect, (1) and (2) in close succession seem to betray some kind of hedging strategy on part of Yours Truly, however at the time DMS was mollified, formally withdrew previous accusations as to moral fiber, etc., and divulged that use of jeepney was tactical masterstroke on his (DMS’s) part in that, where we were going,
a Merc with smoked glass or fifty-thousand-dollar Land Rover, or (by extension) any vehicle with extravagances such as upholstered seats, windows with glass in them, shock absorbers dating from post-Kennedy-assassination era, etc., etc. would only draw undesired attention to Mission.
America Shaftoe remained in Manila to stay in touch with Mission via radio & (I supposed) to call in napalm strikes should we find selves embroiled. Bong-Bong Gad & his approx. 12-yr.-old son/business associate Fidel occupied front seat. DMS & Yours Truly shared rear (passenger) section with three mysterious, precisely packed G.I. green duffel bags; approx. 100 kilos of drinking water in plastic bottles; & two Asian gentlemen in their 30s or 40s who exhibited stereotypical inscrutability/impassivity/dignity, etc., etc. during the first four hours of the journey, which were spent simply trying to drive from center of Manila to northern outskirts of same. Nationality of these two was not immediately evident. Many Filipinos are, racially, almost pure Chinese even though their families have been living here for centuries. Perhaps this explained strongly Asian features of our traveling companions and (I now had to assume) business associates.
Proverbial ice was broken as one consequence of pig truck incident which occurred on four-lane highway, narrowed by construction to two, leading N from Manila. Casual obsvn. of Filipino swine suggests that their ludicrous, pink, tabloid-sized ears function as heat exchangers, as do, e.g., the tongues of dogs. They are transported in vehicles
consisting of big cage constructed on bed of a straight (as opposed to semiarticulated) truck. Construction of such vehicles appears to tax local resources to the point where they are only economical when maximum conceivable number of swine are packed into confines at all times. Heat buildup ensues. Pigs adapt by fighting their way to perimeter of cage & hanging ear/heat exchangers out over the side to flap in the wind of the truck’s motion.
The appearance of such a vehicle when approached from behind can be easily envisioned without further description. Readers who devote a few moments’ consideration to the subject of excreta need not be pounded over the head vis-a-vis what flies, sprays, drips, etc. from such vehicles either. The Pig Truck Incident was a humorous demonstration of applied hydrodynamics, though since no actual water was involved perhaps “excretodynamics” or “scatodynamics” might better fit. THE GRACE OF GOD had been following a representative Pig Truck for some miles in the hopes of passing it. The sheer quantity of excess body heat radiating from its vast phased array of flapping pink ears caused several of our drinking-water bottles to achieve full rolling boil and explode. Bong-Bong Gad maintained a respectful distance because of excreta hazards, which in no way simplified the problem of passing the truck. Tension climbed to a palpable level & Bong-Bong was subjected to steadily increasing stream of good-natured heckling and unsolicited driving advice from passenger area, esp. from DMS who viewed lingering unwelcome presence of pig truck in our planned trajectory as
personal affront & hence challenge to be overcome w/all due pluck, vigor, can-do spirit, & other qualities known to be possessed in abundance by DMS.
After some time Bong-Bong made his move, using one hand to manipulate steering wheel and other to time-share equally important responsibilities of shifting gears and depressing the horn button. As we drew alongside the Pig Truck (which was on my side of the jeepney) the Truck slalomed toward us as if perhaps swerving around some real or imagined roadside hazard. The primary horn of THE GRACE OF GOD was apparently going unheard, possibly because it was competing for audio bandwidth against large numbers of swine voicing their displeasure in same frequency range. With aplomb normally seen only among senescent English butlers, Bong-Bong reached up with his horn/gearshift hand and gripped a brilliant stainless-steel chain flailing from ceiling of cab with a stainless-steel crucifix on the end of it and jerked downwards, energizing the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary honking systems: a trio of tuba-sized stainless-steel horns mounted to the roof of THE GRACE OF GOD and collectively drawing so much power that our vehicle’s speed dropped by (I would estimate) ten km/hr as its energies were diverted into decibel production. A demi-hyperbolic swath of agricultural crops twenty miles long was flattened to the ground by the blast, and, hundreds of miles north, the Taiwanese government, its collective ears still ringing, filed a diplomatic protest with the Philippine ambassador. Dead whales and dolphins washed ashore on the beaches
of Luzon for days, and sonar operators in passing U.S. Navy submarines were sent into early retirement with blood streaming from their ears.
Terrified by this sound, all of the pigs (I would suppose) voided their bowels just as the driver of the Pig Truck swerved violently away from us. Certain first-year-physics conservation-of-momentum issues dictated that I be showered with former pig bowel contents in order to enhance shareholder value. This was evidently the funniest thing that the two Asian-looking gentlemen had ever seen, and rendered them helpless for several minutes. One of them actually retched from laughing too hard (the first time that our vehicle’s lack of windows came in handy). The other extended his hand and introduced himself as one Jean Nguyen. This is the French male name “zhohn” and not the Anglo female name “jeen.” Jean Nguyen looked at me expectantly after telling me his name, as did DMS, as if they were expecting me to get a fairly obvious joke. Perhaps preoccupied with hygienic issues, I failed to get it, and they pointed out to me that when “Jean” is pronounced like “John” and “Nguyen” is pronounced the way a lot of Americans mangle it, the name sounds arguably like “John Wayne,” which is how I was encouraged to address this Jean Nguyen from that point onwards. It seemed in retrospect that I was being given an opportunity to have a small chuckle at Jean Nguyen’s expense and thereby to even the scales, in some small but symbolically important sense, for the pig shit incident. My failure to exploit this opportunity left everyone feeling mildly uneasy and
like they still owed me one. The other gentleman was introduced as Jackie Woo. He spoke English with a vaguely East Indian crackle which led me to peg him, speculatively, as a Malay Peninsula native of Chinese descent, e.g., from Singapore or Penang.