Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

Avi’s telephone call, some eighty hours ago, arrived in the middle of a major interdisciplinary conference called “The Intermediate Phase (1939–45) of the Global Hegemony Struggle of the Twentieth Century (Common Era).” This is a bit of a mouthful and so it has been given a pithy nickname: “War as Text.” People are coming from places like Amsterdam and Milan. The conference’s organizing committee—which includes Randy’s girlfriend, Charlene, who actually gives every indication of being his ex-girlfriend now—hired an artist in San Francisco to come up with a poster. He started with a black-and-white halftone photo of a haggard World War II infantryman with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip. He worked this image over using a photocopier, blowing the halftone dots up into rough lumps, like rubber balls chewed by a dog, and wreaking any number of other distortions on it until it had an amazingly stark, striking, jagged appearance; the soldier’s pale eyes turned an eerie white. Then he added a few elements in color: red lipstick, blue eyeshadow, and a trace of a red brassiere strap peeking out from the soldier’s unbuttoned uniform shirt. The poster won some kind of an award almost the moment it came out. This led to a press release, which in turn led to the poster’s being enshrined by the news media as an Official Object of Controversy. An enterprising journalist managed to track down the soldier depicted in the original photograph—a decorated combat veteran and retired to...

... the attention of millions who never would have seen it otherwise. They also filed suit against the artist, whose net worth could be tallied up on the back of a ticket stub: he had assets of about a thousand dollars and debts (mostly student loans) amounting to sixty-five thousand.