Cryptonomicon

epiphyteBizPlan.5.4.ordo. Epiphyte Business Plan, 5th edition, 4th draft, in a file format that can only be read by [Novus] Ordo [Seclorum], which is wholly owned by the company of the same name, but whose hard parts were written, as it happens, by John Cantrell.

He tells the computer to begin downloading that file--it's going to take a while. In the meantime, he scrolls through the list of other messages, checking the names of their senders, subject headings, and sizes, trying to figure out, first of all, how many of these can simply be thrown away unread.

Two messages jump out because they are from an address that ends with aol.com, the cyberspace neighborhood of parents and children but never of students, hackers, or people who actually work in high-tech. Both of these are from Randy's lawyer, who is trying to get Randy's financial affairs disentangled from Charlene's with as little rancor as possible. Randy feels his blood pressure spiking, millions of capillaries in the brain bulging ominously. But they are very short files, and the subject headings seem innocuous, so he calms down and decides not to worry about them now.

Five messages originate from computers with extremely familiar names--systems that are part of the campus computer network he used to run. The messages come from system administrators who took over the reins when Randy left, guys who long ago asked him all the easy questions, such as What's the best place to order pizza?and Where did you hide the staples?and have now gotten to the point of e-mailing him chunks of arcane code that he wrote years ago with questions like, Was this an error, or something incredibly clever I haven't figured out yet?Randy declines to answer those messages just now.

There are about a dozen messages from friends, some of them just passing along Net humor that he's already seen a hundred times. Another dozen from other members of Epiphyte Corp., mostly concerning the details of their itineraries as they all converge on Kinakuta for tomorrow's meeting.

That leaves a dozen or so other messages which belong in a special category that did not exist until a week ago, when a new issue of TURING Magazinecame out, containing an article about the Kinakuta data haven project, and a cover photo of Randy on a boat in the Philippines. Avi had gone to some lengths to plant this article so that he would have something to wave in the faces of the other participants in tomorrow's meeting. TURINGis such a visual magazine that it cannot be viewed without the protection of welding goggles, and so they insisted on a picture. A photographer was dispatched to the Crypt, which was found visually wanting. A tizzy ensued. The photographer was diverted to Manila Bay where he captured Randy standing on a boat deck next to a big reel of orange cable, a volcano rising from the smog in the back ground. The magazine won't even be on newsstands for another month, but the article is on the Web as of a week ago, where it instantly became a subject of discussion on the Secret Admirers mailing list, which is where all of the cool guys like John Cantrell hang out to discuss the very latest hashing algorithms and pseudo-random-number generators. Because Randy happened to be in the picture, they have mistakenly fastened upon him as being more of a prime mover than he really is. This has spawned a new category of messages in Randy's mailbox: unsolicited advice and criticism from crypto freaks worldwide. At the moment there are fourteen such messages in his in-box, eight of them from a person, or persons, identifying himself, or themselves, as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

It would be tempting to ignore these, but the problem is that a solid majority of people on the Secret Admirers mailing list are about ten times as smart as Randy. You can check the list anytime you want and find a mathematics professor in Russia slugging it out with another mathematics professor in India, kilobyte for kilobyte, over some stupefyingly arcane detail in prime number theory, while an eighteen-year-old, tube-fed math prodigy in Cambridge jumps in every few days with an even more stupefying explanation of why they are both wrong.

So when people like this send him mail, Randy tries to at least skim it. He is a little leery of the ones who identify themselves as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, or with the number 56 (which is a code meaning Yamamoto). But just because they are political-verging-on-flaky doesn't mean they don't know their math.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: data haven

Do you have public key somewhere posted? I would like to exchange mail with you but I don't want Paul Comstock to read it:) My public key if you care to respond is

–-BEGIN ORDO PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-– (lines and lines of gibberish)

–-END ORDO PUBLIC KEY BLOCK--