Cryptonomicon

For the first hundred meters or so, the cave is just a straight passage barely wide enough to admit two Goto trucks and the pedestrian lane. Randy trails his hand along the wall. The stone is rough and dusty, not smooth like the surface of a natural cavern, and he can see fresh gouges wrought by jackhammers and drills.

He can tell by the echo that something's about to change. Steve leads him out into the cavern proper. It is, well, cavernous.Big enough for a dozen of the huge trucks to pull around in a circle to be laden with rock and muck. Randy looks up, trying to find the ceiling, but all he sees is a pattern of bluish-white high-intensity lights, like the ones in gymnasiums, perhaps ten meters above. Beyond that it's darkness and mist.

Steve goes off in search of something and leaves Randy alone for a few minutes, which is useful since it takes a long time for him to get his bearings.

Some of the cavern wall is smooth and natural; the rest of it is rough, marking the enlargements conceived by the engineers and executed by the contractor. Likewise, some of the floor is smooth, and not quite level. Some places it has been drilled and blasted to bring it down, others it has been filled in to bring it up.

This, the main chamber, looks to be about finished. The offices of the Ministry of Information will be here. There are two other, smaller chambers, deeper inside the mountain, still being enlarged. One will contain the engineering plant (power generators and so forth) and the other will be the systems unit.

A burly blond man in a white hard hat emerges from a hole in the chamber wall: Tom Howard, Epiphyte Corporation's vice president for systems technology. He takes his hard hat off and waves to Randy, then beckons him over.

The passageway that leads to the systems chamber is big enough that you could drive a delivery van down it, but it's not as straight or as level as the main entryway. It is mostly occupied by a conveyor system of terrifying power and speed, which is carrying tons of dripping grey muck out towards the main chamber to be dumped into the Goto trucks. In terms of apparent cost and sophistication, it beats the same relationship to a normal conveyor belt as an F-15 does to a Sopwith Camel. It is possible to speak but impossible to be heard when you are near it, and so Tom and Randy and the Kinakutan who calls himself Steve trudge silently down the passage for another hundred or so meters until they reach the next cavern.

This one is only large enough to contain a modest one-story house. The conveyor passes right through the middle of it and disappears down another hole; the muck is coming from deeper yet in the mountain. It's still too loud in here to talk. The floor has been leveled by pouring in concrete, and conduits rise from it every few meters with orange cables dangling from their open tops: optical fiber lines.

Tom walks towards another opening in the wall. It appears that several subsidiary caverns branch away from this one. Tom leads Randy through the opening, then turns to put a hand on his arm and steady him: they are at the top of a steep wooden staircase that has been built down a nearly vertical shaft that descends a good five meters or so.

"What you just saw is the main switch room," Tom says. "That'll be the largest router in the world when it's finished. We're using some of these other chambers to install computers and mass storage systems. The world's largest RAID, basically, buffered with a big, big RAM cache."

RAID means Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks; it is a way to store vast quantities of information cheaply and reliably, and exactly the kind of thing you would want to have in a data haven.

"So we're still cleaning out some of these other chambers," Tom continues. "We discovered something, down here, that I thought you'd find interesting." He turns around and begins to descend the staircase. "Did you know that these caves were used as an air raid shelter by the Japanese, during the war?"

Randy has been carrying the map page from his photocopied book around in his pocket. He unfolds it and holds it up near a lightbulb. Sure enough, it includes a site, up in the mountains, labeled ENTRANCE TO AIR RAID SHELTER & COMMAND POST.

"And a command post?" Randy says.

"Yeah. How'd you know that?"

"Interlibrary loan," Randy says.

"We didn't know it until we got here and found all of these old cables and electrical shit strung around the place. We had to tear it out so we could string in our own."

Randy begins to descend the steps.

"This shaft was full of rocks," Tom says, "but we could see wires going down into it, so we knew something had to be down here."

Randy looks nervously at the ceiling. "Why was it full of rocks? Was there a cave-in?"

"No," Tom says, "the Japanese soldiers did it. They threw rocks down the shaft until it was full. It took a dozen of our laborers two weeks to pull all the rocks out by hand."

"So, what did the wires lead to?"