Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

You—Rudy—and I are on a train, as it were, sitting in the dining car, having a nice conversation, and that train is being pulled along at a terrific clip by certain locomotives named The Bertrand Russell and Riemann and Euler and others. And our friend Lawrence is running alongside the train, trying to keep up with us—it’s not that we’re smarter than he is, necessarily, but that he’s a farmer who didn’t get a ticket. And I, Rudy, am simply reaching out through the open window here, trying to pull him onto the fucking train with us so that the three of us can have a nice little chat about mathematics without having to listen to him panting and gasping for breath the whole way.”

“Proving or disproving a formula—once you’ve encrypted the formula into numbers, that is—is just a calculation on that number. So it means that the answer to the question is, no! Some formulas cannot be proved or disproved by any mechanical process! So I guess there’s some point in being human after all!” Alan looked pleased until Lawrence said this last thing, and then his face collapsed. “Now there you go making unwarranted assumptions.”

Waterhouse spends as much time with Schoen as he is allowed to, because he’s pretty sure that whatever happened inside of Schoen’s head, between when the lists of apparently random numbers were dumped into his lap and when he finished building his machine, is an example of a noncomputable process.

Within a month of his arrival, Randy solved some trivial computer problems for one of the other grad students. A week later, the chairman of the astronomy department called him over and said, “So, you’re the UNIX guru.” At the time, Randy was still stupid enough to be flattered by this attention, when he should have recognized them as bone-chilling words.

Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war-ax for a while to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits (i.e., Charlene’s friends), had actually done a lot for Randy’s peace of mind over the years.

The pro-consensus, anti-confrontation elements then seized control of the conversation and broke it up into numerous small clusters of people all vigorously agreeing with one another.

RESPECT THE PEDESTRIAN, the signs say, but the drivers, the physical environment, local land use customs, and the very layout of the place conspire to treat the pedestrian with the contempt he so richly deserves. Randy would get more respect if he went to work on a pogo stick with a propeller beanie on his head.

Avi wastes little time in starting the videotape, which at the moment represents about seventy-five percent of Epiphyte Corp.’s assets. Avi had it produced by a hot multimedia startup in San Francisco, and the contract to produce it accounted for one hundred percent of the startup’s revenue this year. “Pies crumble when you slice them too thin,” Avi likes to say.

“My daughter asserts that you and our host might lay some more cables around here in coming years.” “In business, people rarely plan to do a thing only once,” Randy says. “It messes up the spreadsheets.”

The Bletchley girls surround him. They have celebrated the end of their shift by applying lipstick. Wartime lipstick is necessarily cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all of the good stuff was used to coat propeller shafts.

One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don’t know what the hell you are talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault.

“Well, at one time, there was a group of Muslims called the hashishin who would eat this stuff and then go out and kill people. They were so good at it, they became famous or infamous. Over time the pronunciation of the name has changed—we know them as assassins.”

Enoch Root has wedged himself into the back of the fuselage, where it gets narrow, and is perusing two books at once. It strikes Shaftoe as typical—he supposes that the books say completely different things and that the chaplain is deriving great pleasure from pitting them against each other, like those guys who have a chessboard on a turntable so that they can play against themselves.

“This probably looks weird to most of you,” Avi says. “Usually these presentations begin with a diagram of a computer network, or a flowchart or something. We don’t normally deal with maps. We’re all so used to working in a purely abstract realm that it seems almost bizarre to go out into the real world and physically do something.

In the long run, it may, or may not, be a good idea for the Sultanate of Kinakuta to have a gigantic earthquake-, volcano-, tsunami-, and thermonuclear-weapon-proof Ministry of Information with a cavernous sub-sub-basement crammed with high-powered computers and data switches. But the sultan has decided that it would be sort of cool.

He bids good-bye to the three women who work there, and once again is struck by their attentiveness, their solicitousness. Then he remembers that he is not just some interloper. He is a shareholder, and an important officer, in the corporation that employs them—he is paying them or oppressing them, take your pick.

But someone could still prove that a document, of a certain size, had been sent out at a certain time, to a certain mailbox.” “Traffic analysis.” “Yes. But what if one jams it? Why couldn’t I fill my hard drive with random bytes, so that individual files would not be discernible? Their very existence would be hidden in the noise, like a striped tiger in tall grass. And we could continually stream random noise back and forth to each other.”

“That is more an article of faith than a statement of fact,” Randy says, “but it might be true in the future.” “But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now.”

“I hate e-mail,” John says. Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. “What do you mean?” “The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don’t observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it’s really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it.” “Ah. You use digital signature algorithm.” John considers this carefully. “I do not respond to any e-mail that is not digitally signed. Digital signature algorithm refers to one technique for signing them. It is a good technique, but it could be better.”

If this were the First Business Foray, Randy would piss his pants at this point. If it were the Second, he would resign and fly back to California tomorrow. But it’s the third, and so he manages to maintain composure.

“Oh, Lawrence! I’m surprised at you! 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!”

“Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It’s leaky all the time—even if it’s not raining at the moment. But it’s only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to ‘addict,’ because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe.”

He speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he’s already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping that you’ll join in. Which no one ever does, except for Enoch Root.

(“It’s one thing to write a dissertation about mathematical techniques in cryptography,” he said, on the way up here, when someone asked him what was bothering him. “And another to gamble billions of dollars’ worth of Other People’s Money on it.”

“I heard you were in deep shit with Dönitz.” “Not as bad as I was,” Bischoff says, immediately perceiving the folksy wisdom of this American barnyard metaphor. “The depth is the same, but now I am head up instead of head down.”

“Want one?” “Sure. Thanks.” Randy pulls out a folding multipurpose tool and cuts the end from the cigar, a pretty impressive-looking Cuban number. “Why do you say it’s a good time to smoke?” “To fix it in your memory. To mark it.”

But ten seconds after the first trigger has been pulled, shit is happening all over the place, people are running around like maniacs. The battle plan that was genius a minute ago suddenly looks as sweetly naive as the inscriptions in your high school yearbook.

“I understand you are good with numbers,” the lady says. Randy is really racking his brain now. How does this woman know he’s a numbers kind of guy? “I’m good with math,” he finally says. “Isn’t that what I said?” “Nah, mathematicians stay away from actual, specific numbers as much as possible. We like to talk about numbers without actually exposing ourselves to them—that’s what computers are for.”

“Snap out of it! She doesn’t give a shit about you or me. She just wants to have all of the good parts of being a Finn without the bad parts.” “What are the bad parts?” “Having to live in Finland,” Shaftoe says. “So she has to marry someone with a good passport. Which nowadays means American or British. You might have noticed that she didn’t fuck Günter.”

But whenever a business plan first makes contact with the actual market—the real world—suddenly all kinds of stuff becomes clear. You may have envisioned half a dozen potential markets for your product, but as soon as you open your doors, one just explodes from the pack and becomes so instantly important that good business sense dictates that you abandon the others and concentrate all your efforts.”

“I was just realizing that if you have a set of cryptographic protocols suitable for issuing an electronic currency that cannot be counterfeited—which oddly enough we do—you could adapt those same protocols to card games. Because each one of these cards is like a banknote. Some more valuable than others.”

It is easy to be eyes and ears. It is harder to be fists and feet.

We know people from the NSA were there. People from Internal Revenue. Treasury people—Secret Service. Their counterparts in the other countries. And a lot of mathematicians known to have been co-opted by the government. The U.S. vice president was there. Basically we think that they are planning to form some kind of international body to clamp down on crypto and particularly on digital money.”

“And get what in return?” he asks suspiciously. “Electronic cash from the Crypt. Anonymous. Untraceable. And untaxable.” Doug’s regained his composure now, and is back to belly laughs. “What’ll that buy me? Pictures of naked girls on the World Wide Web?” “Soon enough, it’ll buy you anything that money can buy,” Tom says.

“Haven’t you guys figured out yet that banzai charges DON’T FUCKING WORK?” “All of the people who learned that were killed in banzai charges,” Goto Dengo says. As if on cue, the Nips in the left field dugout begin screaming “Banzai!” and charge, as one, out onto the field.

He didn’t even say anything like, “Wow, those suckers are really in deep.” The young brilliant oral surgeon just said, “Okay,” stood there awkwardly for a few moments, and then walked out of the room in a display of social ineptness that totally cemented Randy’s faith in him.

“Hmmm?” Randy looks up from the screen and is startled to find that he is in a jail in the Philippines.

Anyway, so now we have the Gods of Olympus as we normally think of them: Zeus, Hera, and so on. “A couple of basic observations about these: first, they all, with one exception I’ll get to soon, were produced by some kind of sexual coupling, either Titan-Titaness or God-Goddess or God-Nymph or God-Woman or basically Zeus and whom- or whatever Zeus was fucking on any particular day. Which brings me to the second basic observation, which is that the Gods of Olympus are the most squalid and dysfunctional family imaginable. And yet there is something about the motley asymmetry of this pantheon that makes it more credible.

“Now keep in mind that the typical Greek myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering around in a daze, that god’s wife or lover, in a jealous rage, turns him—the helpless, innocent victim, that is—into let’s say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the sun forever to be repeatedly disemboweled by army ants and stung by hornets or something. So if Arachne had dissed anyone else in the Pantheon, she would have been just a smoking hole in the ground before she knew what hit her.

“My son tells me that you want to dig a grave there.” “A hole,” Randy ventures, after much uncomfortableness. “Excuse me. My English is rusty,” says Goto Dengo, none too convincingly.

“Yes.” Goto Dengo nods solemnly. “It is stupid. So tell me, then: why do you want to dig up more of it?” “We’re businessmen,” Avi says. “We make money. Gold is worth money.” “Gold is the corpse of value,” says Goto Dengo.

The General didn’t care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here—” he points to his head “—in the intelligence of the people, and here—” he holds out his hands “—in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor.”

“But before this war, all of this gold was out here, in the sunlight. In the world. Yet look what happened.” Goto Dengo shudders. “Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start businesses and build buildings.”