Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

Randy used to be fascinated by software, but now he isn’t. It’s hard enough to find human beings who are interesting.

“A lot of people work hard all their lives and get nowhere,” someone said accusingly. Look out! The sniping had begun. “Well, I’m sorry I haven’t had the good grace to get nowhere,” Randy said, now feeling just a bit surly for the first time, “but I have found that if you work hard, educate yourself, and keep your wits about you, you can find your way in this society.”

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.

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.

. . . free of governmental interference. Randy can’t believe he’s hearing this. If the sultan was a scruffy hacker talking to a room full of crypto-anarchists, that’d be one thing. But the sultan is a government, for god’s sake, and the room is full of card-carrying Establishment types.

Otto’s still too flabbergasted to be outraged, but he’s sure enough gonna be outraged pretty soon. “And go where!? Have you bothered to look at a map?” “Display some fucking adaptability,” Shaftoe says. “You can figure out a way to get that tub of yours to England.”

The real reason the Constitution provides for the right to bear arms is defending oneself against oppressive governments, and when it comes to that, your handgun is close to useless. So (according to these guys) if you are going to assert your right to keep and bear arms you should do it openly, by packing something really big.

“The next machine will have a memory storage system, Lawrence, in the form of sound waves traveling down a cylinder filled with mercury—we stole the idea from John Wilkins, founder of the Royal Society, who came up with it three hundred years ago, except he was going to use air instead of quicksilver. I—excuse me, Lawrence, did you say you had been working on them?” “I did the same thing with tubes. Valves, as you would call them.”

“Would you be willing to die to prevent Wing from getting that gold?” “Probably not.” “Would you be willing to kill?” “Well,” says Randy, a bit taken aback, “I said I wouldn’t be willing to die. So—” “Don’t give me that golden rule shit,” Doug says. “If someone broke into your house in the middle of the night and threatened your family, and you had a shotgun in your hands, would you use it?”