Cryptonomicon

To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master calendar, motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living document. Its spreadsheets are palimpsests, linked to the company's bank accounts and financial records so that they automatically adjust whenever money flows in or out. Beryl handles that stuff. Avi handles the words--the underlying, abstract plan, and the concrete details, that inform those spreadsheets--interpreting the numbers. Avi's part of the plan mutates too, from week to week, as he gets new input from articles in the Asian Wall Street Journal,conversations with government officials in flyblown Shenzhen karaoke bars, remote-sensing data pouring in from satellites, and obscure technical journals analyzing the latest advances in optical fiber technology. Avi's brain also digests the ideas of Randy and the other members of the group and incorporates them into the plan. Every quarter, they take a snapshot of the business plan in its current state, trowel some Maybelline onto it, and ship out new copies to investors.

Plan Number Five is about to be mailed simultaneous with the company's first anniversary. An early draft had been sent to each of them a couple of weeks ago in an encrypted e-mail message, which Randy hadn't bothered to read, assuming he knew its contents. But little cues that he's picked up in the last few days tell him that he'd better find out what the damn thing actually says.

He fires up his laptop, plugs it into a telephone jack, opens up his communications software, and dials a number in California. This last turns out to be easy, because this is a modern hotel and Kinakuta has a modern phone system. If it hadn't been easy, it probably would have been impossible.

In a small, stuffy, perpetually dark, hot-plastic-scented wiring closet, in a cubicled office suite leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Incorporated, sandwiched between an escrow company and a discount travel agent in the most banal imaginable disco-era office building in Los Altos, California, a modem wakes up and spews noise down a wire. The noise eventually travels under the Pacific as a pattern of scintillations in a filament of glass so transparent that if the ocean itself were made out of the same stuff, you'd be able to see Hawaii from California. Eventually the information reaches Randy's computer, which spews noise back. The modem in Los Altos is one of half a dozen that are all connected to the back of the same computer, an entirely typical looking tower PC of a generic brand, which has been running, night and day, for about eight months now. They turned its monitor off about seven months ago because it was just wasting electricity. Then John Cantrell (who is on the board of Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Inc., and made arrangements to put it in the company's closet) borrowed the monitor because one of the coders who was working on the latest upgrade of Ordo needed a second screen. Later, Randy disconnected the keyboard and mouse because, without a monitor, only bad information could be fed into the system. Now it is just a faintly hissing off-white obelisk with no human interface other than a cyclopean green LED staring out over a dark landscape of empty pizza boxes.

But there is a thick coaxial cable connecting it to the Internet. Randy's computer talks to it for a few moments, negotiating the terms of a Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP connection, and then Randy's little laptop is part of the Internet, too; he can send data to Los Altos, and the lonely computer there, which is named Tombstone, will route it in the general direction of any of several tens of millions of other Internet machines.

Tombstone, or tombstone.epiphyte.com as it is known to the Internet, has an inglorious existence as a mail drop and a cache for files. It does nothing that a thousand online services couldn't do for them more easily and cheaply. But Avi, with his genius for imagining the most horrific conceivable worst-case scenarios, demanded that they have their own machine, and that Randy and the others go through its kernel code one line at a time to verify that there were no security holes. In every book store window in the Bay Area, piled in heaps, were thousands of copies of three different books about how a famous cracker had established total control over a couple of well-known online services. Consequently, Epiphyte Corp. could not possibly use such an online service for its secret files while with a straight face saying that it was exerting due diligence on its shareholders' behalf. Thus tombstone.epiphyte.com.

Randy logs on and checks his mail: forty-seven messages, including one that came two days ago from Avi ([email protected]) that is labeled: