Cryptonomicon

"The Philippines are going to be hot shit informationally speaking," Avi says. "The government has its flaws, but basically it's a democracy modeled after Western institutions. Unlike most Asians, they do ASCII. Most of them speak English. Longstanding ties to the United States. These guys are going to be big players, sooner or later, in the information economy."

Randy breaks in. "We've already established a foothold there. We know the local business environment. And we have cash flow."

Avi clicks up another map. This one's harder to make out. It looks like a relief map of a vast region of high mountains interrupted by occasional plateaus. Its appearance in the middle of this presentation without any labels or explanation from Avi makes it an implicit challenge to the mental acumen of the other people in the room. None of them is going to ask for help anytime soon. Randy watches them squint and tilt their heads from side to side. Eberhard Föhr, who is good at odd puzzles, gets it first.

"Southeast Asia with the oceans drained," he says. "That high ridge on the right is New Guinea. Those bumps are the volcanoes of Borneo."

"Pretty cool, huh?" Avi says. "It's a radar map. U.S. military satellites gathered all this data. You can get it for next to nothing."

On this map the Philippines can be understood, not as a chain of separate islands, but as the highest regions of a huge oblong plateau surrounded by deep gashes in the earth's crust. To get from Luzon up to Taiwan by going across the ocean floor you would have to plunge into a deep trench, flanked by parallel mountain ranges, and follow it northwards for about three hundred miles. But south of Luzon, in the region where Avi is proposing to lay a network of inter-island cables, it's all shallow and flat.

Avi clicks again, superimposing transparent blue over the parts that are below sea level, green on the islands. Then he zooms in on an area in the center of the map, where the Philippine plateau extends two arms southwest toward northern Borneo, embracing, and nearly enclosing, a diamond-shaped body of water, three hundred and fifty miles across. "The Sulu Sea," he announces. "No relation to the token Asian on Star Trek."

No one laughs. They are not really here to be entertained--they are concentrating on the map. All of the different archipelagos and seas are confusing, even for smart people with good spatial relations. The Philippines form the upper right boundary of the Sulu Sea, north Borneo (part of Malaysia) the lower left, the Sulu Archipelago (part of the Philippines) the lower right, and the upper left boundary is one extremely long skinny Philippine island called Palawan.

"This reminds us that national boundaries are artificial and silly," Avi says. "The Sulu Sea is a basin in the middle of a larger plateau shared by the Philippines and Borneo. So if you're wiring up the Philippines, you can just as easily wire Borneo up to that network at the same time, just by outlining the Sulu Sea with shallow, short-hop cables. Like this."

Avi clicks again and the computer draws in more colored lines.

"Avi, why are we here?" Eberhard asks.

"That is a very profound question," Avi says.

"We know the economics of these startups," Eb says. "We begin with nothing but the idea. That's what the NDA is for--to protect your idea. We work on the idea together--put our brainpower into it--and get stock in return. The result of this work is software. The software is copyrightable, trademarkable, perhaps patentable. It is intellectual property. It is worth some money. We all own it in common, through our shares. Then we sell some more shares to an investor. We use the money to hire more people and turn it into a product, to market it, and so on. That's how the system works, but I'm beginning to think you don't understand it."

"Why do you say that?"

Eb looks confused. "How can we contribute to this? How can we turn our brainpower into equity that an investor will want to own a part of?"

Everyone looks at Beryl. Beryl's nodding agreement with Eb. Tom Howard says, "Avi. Look. I can engineer big computer installations. John wrote Ordo--he knows everything about crypto. Randy does Internet, Eb does weird stuff, Beryl does money. But as far as I know, none of us knows diddly about undersea cable engineering. What good will our resumes do you when you go up in front of some venture capitalists?"

Avi's nodding. "Everything you say is true," he concedes smoothly.

"We would have to be crazy to get involved in running cables through the Philippines. That is a job for FiliTel, with whom Epiphyte(1) has been joint-venturing."

"Even if we were crazy, Beryl says, "we wouldn't have the opportunity, because no one would give us the money."