Cryptonomicon

He hauls two oversized laptop cases out of the tiny luggage compartment in the car's nose, walks into the house without knocking (he has not been to this particular house before, but he has been to others run along similar principles), finds Randy and Eb waiting in one of its many rooms, and hauls about fifteen thousand dollars worth of portable computer gear out of the bags. He sets them up on a table. Avi hits the start button on two laptops and, as they crawl through the boot process, plugs them into the wall so that the batteries won't drain. A power conduit, with grounded three-prong outlets spaced every eighteen inches, has been screwed down remorselessly along every inch of every wall, spanning drywall; holes in the drywall; primeval op-art contact paper; fake wood-grain paneling; faded Grateful Dead posters; and even the odd doorway.

One of the laptops is connected to a tiny portable printer, which Avi loads with a few sheets of paper. The other laptop starts up a few lines of text running across the screen, then beeps and stops. Randy ambles over and looks at it curiously. It is displaying a prompt:

FILO.

Which Randy knows is short for Finux Loader, a program that allows you to choose which operating system you want to run.

"Finux," Avi mumbles, answering Randy's unspoken question.

Randy types "Finux" and hits the return key. "How many operating systems you have on this thing?"

"Windows 95, for games and when I need to let some lamer borrow my computer temporarily," Avi says. "Windows NT for office type stuff. BeOS for hacking, and screwing around with media. Finux for industrial-strength typesetting."

"Which one do you want now?"

"BeOS. Going to display some JPEGs. I assume there's an overhead projector in this place?"

Randy looks over at Eb, the only person in the room who actually lives here. Eb seems bigger than he is, and maybe it's because of his detonating hair: two feet long, blond with a faint reddish glow, thick and wavy and tending to congeal into ropy strands. No ponytail holder can contain it, so when he bothers to tie it back, he uses a piece of string. Eb is doodling on one of those little computers that uses a stylus so that you can write on the screen. In general, hackers don't use them, but Eb (or rather, one of Eb's defunct corporations) wrote the software for this model and so he has a lot of them lying around. He seems to be absorbed in whatever he's doing, but after Randy has been looking in his direction for two seconds, he senses it, and looks up. He has pale green eyes and wears a luxuriant red beard, except when he's in one of his shaving phases, which usually coincide with serious romantic involvements. Right now his beard is about half an inch long, indicating a recent breakup, and implying a willingness to take new risks.

"Overhead projector?" Randy says.

Eb closes his eyes, which is what he does during memory access, then gets up and walks out of the room.

The tiny printer begins to eke paper. The first line of text, centered at the top of the page, is: NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT. More lines follow. Randy has seen them, or ones like them, so many times that his eyes glaze over and he turns away. The only thing that ever changes is the name of the company: in this case: EPIPHYTE(2) CORP.

"Nice goggles."

"If you think these are weird, you should see what I'm going to put on when the sun goes down," Avi says. He rummages in a bag and pulls out a contraption that looks like a pair of glasses without lenses, with a dollhouse-scale light fixture mounted above each eye. A wire runs down to a battery pack with belt loops. He slides a tiny switch on the battery pack and the lights come on: expensive-looking blue-white halogen.

Randy raises his eyebrows.

"It's all jet-lag avoidance," Avi explains. "I'm adjusted to Asian time. I'm going back there in two days. I don't want my body to get back on Left Coast time while I'm here."

"So the hat and goggles--"

"Simulate night. This thing simulates daylight. See, your body takes its cues from the light, adjusts its clock accordingly. Speaking of which, would you mind closing the blinds?"

The room has west-facing windows, affording a view down the grassy slope to Half Moon Bay. It is late afternoon and the sun is pouring through. Randy savors the view for a moment, then drops the blinds.