Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. 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.

Alan and Rudy’s relationship seemed closer, or at least more multilayered, than Alan and Lawrence’s. Lawrence concluded that Alan’s penis scheme must have finally found a taker.

“What came out of P.M., which was terrifically radical, was the ability to say that all of math, really, can be expressed as a certain ordering of symbols.”

It’ll give him something to do while

we’re fucking.

Alan Mathison Turing and Rudolf von Hacklheber were lying together like spoons on the shore, still smudged a little bit from their swim yesterday.

He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy.

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in order to show the Nips who was boss.

Japanese American war

He had abundant free time, which he spent working on a series of new theorems in the field of information theory.

there were bars and dances to go to. Waterhouse did some penis work of his own, got the clap, had it cured,* bought condoms. All of the sailors did this. They were like three-year olds who shove pencils in their ears, discover that it hurts, and stop doing it.

FILIPINOS ARE A WARM, GENTLE, CARING, GIVING people,” Avi says, “which is a good thing since so many of them carry concealed weapons.”

Randy reaches the departure gate for Manila, and pauses to admire a five-foot-wide high-definition TV set bearing the logo of a major Nipponese consumer-electronics company.

“So I just reserved you a suite at the Manila Hotel.”

“The Philippines is one of those post-Spanish countries with no clear boundaries between business and personal relationships,” Avi says. “I don’t think you can secure lodgings there without marrying into a family with a major street named after it.”

Suddenly they are banking over Manila Bay, which is marked with endless streaks of brilliant red—some kind of algal bloom.

Flute.) “Everyone in Asia is wondering when the Philippines is finally going to get its shit together,” Avi said, “it’s the question of the nineties.”

“The Filipino women are more beautiful,” Avi said quietly, “and have a ferocity that makes them more interesting, to the innately masochistic business traveler, than all those grinning Thai bimbos.”

“As long as the Philippines don’t have their shit together, there’ll be plenty of OCWs. They will want to communicate with their families—the Filipinos are incredibly family-oriented. They make Jews look like a bunch of alienated loners.”

The container port is just north of the hotel, and all night long, Rizal Boulevard, along the base of the old Spanish wall, is jammed from one end to the

The whole city is a cauldron of internal combustion. Manila seems to have more pistons and exhaust pipes than the rest of the world combined.

Many of the trucks are adorned with brilliant displays of multicolored lights—not quite as flashy as those of the few jeepneys that scurry and jostle among them.

When you get to Manila I would like you to generate a 4096-bit key pair and keep it on a floppy disk that you carry on your person at all times.

To Andrew Loeb it was an exercise in meta-historical scholarship. To Randy Waterhouse, it sounded like the beginnings of a pretty cool game. Strangle a muskrat and you get 136 Energy

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.

“The science of making secret codes is called cryptography,” Commander Schoen says, “and the science of breaking them is cryptanalysis.”

There’s some talk about an English fellow name of Wilkins, and book called Cryptonomicon that he wrote hundreds of years ago,

Waterhouse knows this because he is one of the only two persons in Pearl Harbor who has clearance to decrypt it.

Waterhouse sits down and gets to work, subtracting noise from ciphertext to produce plaintext.