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“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!”
Manila, the Pearl of the Orient,
They ascend the stairs into the antesala, which according to Glory is strictly for casual, drop-in visitors but is fancier than any room Bobby Shaftoe has ever seen.
Enter Randall Lawrence Waterhouse, in a turquoise polo shirt embroidered with the logo of one of the bankrupt high-tech companies that he and Avi have founded, and relaxed-fit blue jeans held up with suspenders, and bulky athletic shoes that once were white.
The musicians are greeted without being welcomed and saluted without being honored.
Every morning the bellhops ask him if he wants a taxi, and practically lose consciousness when he says no.
emerald green fields strewn randomly with small white capsules that he takes to be sheep. Of course, their distribution is probably not random at all—it probably reflects local variations in soil chemistry producing grass that the sheep find more or less desirable.
IT IS EARLY IN NOVEMBER OF 1942 AND A SIMPLY unbelievable amount of shit is going on, all at once, everywhere.
They embody a blunt need for space unfiltered through any aesthetic or even human considerations.
Turing figured out something entirely different, something unspeakably strange and radical.
Kinakuta City looks more modern than anything in the States.
In any case, none of the maps he has seen tallies with the reality of the modern Kinakuta City. Anything that was there during the war has been torn down and replaced with new. The river has been dredged into a new channel. An inconvenient mountain called Eliza Peak has been dynamited, and the rubble shoved into the ocean to make several new square miles of real estate, most of which has been gobbled by the new airport. The dynamitings were so loud that they prompted complaints from the governments of the Philippines and of Borneo, hundreds of miles away. They also brought down the wrath of
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That garden looked like it belonged a thousand miles farther north—in Nippon. When Randy finally realizes what it was, the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.
Their destination is not the Technology City, or any of the peculiar pointy-topped skyscrapers in the financial district. They are all going to that walled Nipponese garden, which is built on top of a mass grave containing the bodies of three and a half thousand Nipponese soldiers, who all died on August 23, 1945.
War is hell, but smoking cigarettes makes it all worthwhile.
Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn’t give a damn. Pretty soon he’ll probably start being proud of it. In the meantime, just for the sake of the common enterprise, he tries his best.
Half of the castle has, at one point or another, been burned down by a combination of Barbary corsairs, lightning bolts, Napoleon, and smoking in bed.
EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING (printed on a separate page, in red letters on a yellow background): Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms
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If it hadn’t been easy, it probably would have been impossible.
This has spawned a new category of messages in Randy’s mailbox: unsolicited advice and criticism from crypto freaks worldwide.
He divides his time between thinking about sex and thinking about mathematics.
“Oh! Let me take it!” Waterhouse blurts, and lunges forward with a jerkiness born of passion blended with hypothermia.
“It’s dreamy,” she says. Dreamily.
The Germans had observation planes all over the fucking sky. That was pretty strong circumstantial evidence that the Germans knew. And those planes were clearly visible to Shaftoe, so he could, arguably, know that they knew. But Colonel Chattan had ordered him to stay put “until positively sighted by Germans,” whatever that meant.
“Singapore, the southern tip of Taiwan, and the northernmost point of Australia form a triangle.” “Avi,” says Eb solemnly, “any three points form a triangle.”
Eberhard is no longer suspicious. Now he is irked, which is worse. Like a lot of techies, he can become obstreperous when he decides that others are not being logical.
“But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now.”
“A tape recorder doesn’t use radio,” John says. “How could we jam it?” “Van Eck phreaking,” Eb says.
The razors he finds in a rubbish bin and the carbon he steals from the closet where Ghnxh keeps the galvanick lucipher.
John knocks on wood. “Doesn’t matter. Have one of your staff look into the subject of Van Eck phreaking. That’s with a ‘p-h,’ not an ‘f,’
John runs the demo, and unlike most demos, it actually works and does not crash.
only by mastering the technologies that might be used against us can we defend ourselves.”
There is a long, frozen silence, as if Waterhouse had interrupted high tea by making farting sounds with his armpit.
“Instead of trying to educate the potential perpetrators of holocausts, we try to educate the potential victims. They will at least pay some fucking attention.”
Airplanes search not for the boat itself, which is tiny and dark, but for its wake, which is white and spreads for miles on calm water. There will be no wake behind U-691 tonight—or rather, there will be, but it will be lost in random noise of much higher amplitude.
The lieutenant steps forward and slaps him across the face. Goto Dengo feels nothing but tries to cringe anyway, so as not to humiliate the man.
Pretenses are shabby things that, like papier-mâché houses, must be energetically maintained or they will dissolve.
Randy has spent almost no time around military people, but he is finding that he gets along with them surprisingly well. His favorite thing about them is their compulsive need to educate everyone around them, all the time.
“Why do you say it’s a good time to smoke?” “To fix it in your memory. To mark it.” Doug tears his gaze from the horizon and looks at Randy searchingly, almost beseeching him to understand. “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.” He produces a flaring safety match from his cupped palms like a magician, and holds it up before Randy’s eyes, and Randy
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“Be a man,” she says. “Make me some coffee.” Shaftoe snatches the cabin’s cast-iron kettle, which could double as a ship anchor if need arose.
World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises.
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.
Certain first-year-physics conservation-of-momentum issues dictated that I be showered with former pig bowel contents in order to enhance shareholder value.
It was to send us a message. Q: What is the message? A: That money is not worth having if you can’t spend it. That certain people have a lot of money that they badly want to spend. And that if we can give them a way to spend it, through the Crypt, that these people will be very happy, and conversely that if we screw up they will be very sad, and that whether they are happy or sad they will be eager to share these emotions with us, the shareholders and management team of Epiphyte Corp.
“That leaves me,” Root says. “I’ll marry her, and she’ll have a British passport. Best in the world.” “Huh,” Shaftoe says, “how does that square with your being a celibate monk or priest or whatever the fuck you supposedly are?” Root says, “I’m supposed to be celibate—” “But you’re not,” Shaftoe reminds him. “But God’s forgiveness is infinite,” Root fires back, winning the point. “So, as I was saying, I’m supposed to be celibate—but that doesn’t mean I can’t get married. As long as I don’t consummate the marriage.
“You have encroached on the Cerberus defensive perimeter! Move back. Move back,” says the Range Rover. “An armed response team is being placed on standby.” “It is the only cryptographically sound car alarm system,” Avi says, as if that settles the matter. He digs out a keychain attached to a black polycarbonate fob with the same dimensions, and number of buttons, as a television remote control. He enters a long series of digits and cuts off the voice in the middle of proclaiming that Randy and Avi are being recorded on a digital video camera that is sensitive into the near-infrared range.
“Anomalous cases have heightened utility in that they help us delineate the boundaries of the field.”
Amy sitting in the passenger seat with her bare, tanned feet up on the dashboard, spoked with white lines from the straps of her high-tech sandals, oblivious to the danger (alluded to by Randy) of her legs being snapped by an air bag deployment.
“The certificates—the banknotes—are printed on paper. We’re going to issue electronic banknotes.” “No paper at all?” “No paper at all.” “So you can only spend it on the Net.” “Correct.” “What if you want to buy a sack of bananas?” “Find a banana merchant on the Net.” “Seems like paper money’d be just as good.” “Paper money is traceable and perishable and has other drawbacks. Electronic banknotes are fast and anonymous.”
The whole concept of matter spontaneously organizing itself into grotesquely improbable and yet indisputably self-perpetuating and fairly robust systems sort of gave Randy the willies later on, when he began to learn about physics. There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, at least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught.
