Cryptonomicon

When he gets close to the end of the pier, his eye picks out one cluster of crates that appear to be all of the same vintage insofar as their salt encrustations are of similar thickness. Down low where the rain pools, their rough-sawn wood has rotted. Up where it is roasted by the sun, it has warped and split. Somewhere these crates must have numbers stenciled onto them, but something else has caught his eye, something that stirs Comstock's heart, just as the sight of the Stars and Stripes fluttering in the morning sun might do for a beleaguered infantryman. Those crates are proudly marked with the initials of the company that Major Comstock (and most of his comrades-in-arms up in Brisbane) worked for, before they were shunted, en masse, into the Army's Signal Intelligence Service. The letters are faded and grimy, but he would recognize them anywhere in the world: they form the logo, the corporate identity, the masthead, of ETC--the Electrical Till Corporation.

Chapter 23 CRYPT

The terminal is supposed to echo the lines of a row of Malay longhouses jammed together side by side. A freshly painted jetway gropes out like a giant lamprey and slaps its neoprene lips onto the side of the plane. The elderly Nipponese tour group makes no effort to leave the plane, respectfully leaving the aisles clear for the businessmen: You go ahead, the people we're going to visit won't mind waiting.

On his march up the jetway, humidity and jet fuel condense onto Randy's skin in equal measure, and he begins to sweat. Then he's in the terminal, which notwithstanding the Malay longhouses allusion has been engineered specifically to look like any other brand-new airport terminal in the world. The air-conditioning hits like a spike through the head. He puts his bags down on the floor and stands there for a moment, collecting his wits beneath a Leroy Neiman painting the dimensions of a volleyball court, depicting the sultan in action on a polo pony. Trapped in a window seat during a short and choppy flight, he had never made it out to the lavatory, so he goes to one now and pees so hard that the urinal emits a sort of yodeling noise.

As he steps back, perfectly satisfied, he becomes conscious of a man backing away from an adjacent urinal--one of the Nipponese businessmen who just got off the plane. A couple of months ago, the presence of this man would have ruled out Randy's taking a leak at all. Today, he didn't even notice that the guy was there. As a longtime bashful kidney sufferer, Randy is delighted to have stumbled upon the magic remedy: not to convince yourself that you are a dominating Alpha Male, but rather to be too lost in your thoughts to notice other people around you. Bashful kidney is your body's way of telling you that you're thinking too hard, that you need to get off the campus and go get a fucking job.

"You were looking at the Ministry of Information site?" the businessman says. He is in a perfect charcoal-grey pinstripe suit, which he wears just as easily and comfortably as Randy does his souvenir t-shirt from the fifth Hackers Conference, surfer's jams, and Teva sandals.

"Oh!" Randy blurts, annoyed with himself. "I completely forgot to look for it." Both men laugh. The Nipponese man produces a business card with some deft sleight-of-hand. Randy has to rip open his nylon-and-velcro wallet and delve for his. They exchange cards in the traditional Asian two-handed style, which Avi has forced Randy to practice until he gets it nearly right. They bow at each other, triggering howls from the nearest couple of computerized self-flushing urinals. The bath room door swings open and an aged Nip wanders in, a precursor of the silver horde.

Nip is the word used by Sergeant Sean Daniel McGee, U.S. Army, Retired, to refer to Nipponese people in his war memoir about Kinakuta, a photocopy of which document Randy is carrying in his bag. It is a terrible racist slur. On the other hand, people call British people Brits, and Yankees Yanks, all the time. Calling a Nipponese person a Nip is just the same thing, isn't it? Or is it tantamount to calling a Chinese person a Chink? During the hundreds of hours of meetings, and megabytes of encrypted e-mail messages, that Randy, Avi, John Cantrell, Tom Howard, Eberhard Föhr, and Beryl have exchanged, getting Epiphyte(2) off the ground, each of them has occasionally, inadvertently, used the word Jap as shorthand for Japanese--in the same way as they used RAM to mean Random Access Memory. But of course Jap is a horrible racist slur too. Randy figures it all has to do with your state of mind at the time you utter the word. If you're just trying to abbreviate, it's not a slur. But if you are fomenting racist hatreds, as Sean Daniel McGee occasionally seems to be not above doing, that's different.