Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

The millions of promises printed on those slips of bumwad will all be kept or broken in the next ten minutes; actual pieces of silver and gold will move, or they won’t. It is some kind of fiduciary Judgment Day.

After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born,

Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.

Now he had learned that a machine, simple in its design, could produce results of infinite complexity.

Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart’s content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin.

was mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols?

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.

tumescing

People speak of it as though it were a book, but it’s not. It is basically a compilation of all of the papers and notes that have drifted up in a particular corner of Commander Schoen’s office over the roughly two-year period that he’s been situated at Station Hypo, as this place is called.*

Waterhouse has made a realization about himself. He has found that he works best when he is not horny, which is to say in the day or so following ejaculation. So as a part of his duty to the United States he has begun to spend a lot of time in whorehouses. But he can’t have that much actual sex on what is still a glockenspiel player’s pay and so he limits himself to what are euphemistically called massages.

This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.

He has tasted the apple of forbidden knowledge. He is forbidden to go anywhere in the world where he might be captured by the enemy.

He knows that these demure girls, obediently shuffling reams of gibberish through their machines, shift after shift, day after day, have killed more men than Napoleon.

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.

“Smart, rabidly paranoid people are the backbone of cryptology,” he says, “but they don’t always understand business.”

“He said that he’d always thought of computers as a force that alienated and atomized society.”

“But the basic premise of Eutropianism is that technology has made us post-human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net, and headed towards omnipotence. Now, the first people to talk that way were libertarians.”

“Capitalist roader. Atomizing society. Making the world safe for drug traffickers and Third-World kleptocrats.”

He gazes up at the ceiling of the chapel through half-closed eyes and thanks God for having sent him what is obviously a German spy and an angel of mercy rolled into one adorable package.

It was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure.

“The secret convoy was just a Gedankenexperiment,” Root says.

“Avi,” says Eb solemnly, “any three points form a triangle.”

“But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now.”

Why can the human eye detect a tiny artificial form lost in nature’s torn and turbulent cosmos, a needle of data in a haystack of noise?

crystals of intention.

It is not the form but the lethal intent that demands the attention of a selfish mind.

Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto.

His feeling of disappointment that accompanies this action has nothing to do with the contents of the safe. He is disappointed because he has solved the problem, and has gone back to the baseline state of boredom and low-level irritation that always comes over him when he’s not doing something that inherently needs to be done, like picking a lock or breaking a code.

The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first. If they do contain patterns, he does not see them just now, in any rational way.

The sultan has an Oxford English accent with traces of garlic and red pepper still wedged in its teeth. He speaks for about fifteen minutes.

I must be like my father, a rational man, explaining the facts of the world to the people at home, who are crippled by superstitions.

If it will take ten years to make the machine with available technology, and only five years to make it with a new technology, and it will only take two years to invent the new technology, then you can do it in seven years by inventing the new technology first!”

If he would just work with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought.

Turing is neither a mortal nor a god. He is Antaeus. That he bridges the mathematical and physical worlds is his strength and his weakness.

No therapy will unkink the brain once it has kinked.

I prefer both of them to ‘addict,’ because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe.”

“I am afraid that all irony has become tedious and depressing to me,” Beck says, as a body breaks the surface nearby. It is Shaftoe, and he seems to be unconscious.

The virus of irony is as widespread in California as herpes, and once you’re infected with it, it lives in your brain forever.

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

War gives men good ignoring skills.

“The depth is the same, but now I am head up instead of head down.”

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.

Think what you will about religious people, they always have something to say at times like this. What would an atheist come up with?

“Why do you say it’s a good time to smoke?” “To fix it in your memory. To mark it.”

“This is one of the most important moments in your life. Nothing will ever be the same. We might get rich. We might get killed. We might just have an adventure, or learn something. But we have been changed. We are standing close to the Heraclitean fire, feeling its heat on our faces.”

The beach lures but does not pander.

The chaos of the waves, gravid with encrypted data, mocks him.

Pursuing an explanation for every strange thing you see in the Philippines is like trying to get every last bit of rainwater out of a discarded tire.

Cinderellan obloquy,

“In the old days—the early days—when no one knew what the Gestapo was, and no one was afraid of it, this four in the morning business was clever. A fine way to exploit man’s primal fear of the darkness. But now it is 1942, almost 1943, and everyone is afraid of the Gestapo. Everyone. More than they are of the dark. So, why don’t you work during the daytime? You are stuck in a rut.”