Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

Later, he was to decide that Andrew’s life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety.

Hollywood was merely a specialized bank—a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium.

Waterhouse is thinking about cycles within cycles. He’s already made up his mind that human society is one of these cycles-within-cycles things1 and now he’s trying to figure out whether it is like Türing’s bicycle (works fine for a while, then suddenly the chain falls off; hence the occasional world war) or like an Enigma machine (grinds away incomprehensibly for a long time, then suddenly the wheels line up like a slot machine and everything is made plain in some sort of global epiphany or, if you prefer, apocalypse) or just like a rotary airplane engine (runs and runs and runs; nothing special happens; it just makes a lot of noise).

The Americans have invented a totally new bombing tactic in the middle of a war and implemented it flawlessly. His mind staggers like a drunk in the aisle of a careening train. They saw that they were wrong, they admitted their mistake, they came up with a new idea. The new idea was accepted and embraced all the way up the chain of command. Now they are using it to kill their enemies. No warrior with any concept of honor would have been so craven. So flexible. What a loss of face it must have been for the officers who had trained their men to bomb from high altitudes. What has become of those men? They must have all killed themselves, or perhaps been thrown into prison.

As has always been the case, and as will continue to be the case for at least another half century, batteries suck.

It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads for decoration.

THE UNITED STATES Military (Waterhouse has decided) is first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization.

This is what a boy of his age ought to be doing: working, hard and honest, at a simple job. Kissing girls. Walking into town to buy some smokes and maybe have a beer. The idea of flying around on heavily armed warplanes and using modern weapons systems to kill hundreds of foreign homicidal maniacs now strikes him as dated and inappropriate.

Any moron can learn to trudge through the basic steps. That takes all of half an hour. But when that half-hour is over, dancing instructors always expect you’ll take flight and go through one of those miraculous time-lapse transitions that happen only in Broadway musicals, and begin dancing brilliantly. Randy supposes that people who are lousy at math feel the same way: the instructor writes a few simple equations on the board, and ten minutes later he’s deriving the speed of light in a vacuum.

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.

His life, which used to be a straightforward set of basically linear equations, has become a differential equation.

The world of physical objects seemed to have been made solely for the purpose of giving the men around Grandma something to do with their hands; and not, mind you, for any practical reason, but purely so that Grandma could twiddle those men’s emotional knobs by reacting to how well or poorly they did it.

One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he’s socially inept—because everybody’s been there—but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.”

Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted.

But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances.

it is easier to introduce new complications than to resolve the old ones.