Cryptonomicon

"It's like this," Randy says, pulling the door closed but not letting it lock. "People like Avi and Beryl, who have been in business a lot, have this noticeable preference for two-person conversations--like the one you and I are having right now. Not only that, they rarely write things down."

"Explain."

"It's kind of an information theory thing. See, if worse comes to worst, and there is some kind of legal action--"

"Legal action? What are you talking about?"

Eb came from a small city near the border with Denmark. His father was a high school mathematics teacher, his mother an English teacher. His appearance would probably make him an outcast in his home town, but like many of the people who still live there, he believes that things should be done in a plain, open, and logical fashion.

"I don't mean to alarm you," Randy says, "I'm not implying that any such thing is happening, or about to. But America being the way it is right now, you'd be amazed how often business ventures lead to lawsuits. When that happens, any and all documents are disclosable. So people like Avi and Beryl never write anything down that they wouldn't want to see in open court. Furthermore, anyone can be asked, under oath, to testify about what happened. That's why two-person conversations, like this one, are best."

"One person's word against another. I understand this."

"I know you do."

"We should anyway have been discreetly told."

"The reason that Avi and Beryl didn't tell us about this until now was that they wanted to work out the problem face-to-face, in two-person conversations. In other words, they did it to protect us--not to hide anything from us. Now they are formally presenting us with the news."

Eberhard is no longer suspicious. Now he is irked, which is worse. Like a lot of techies, he can become obstreperous when he decides that others are not being logical. Randy holds up his hands, palms out, in surrender.

"I stipulate that this does not make sense," Randy says.

Eb glares into the distance, not mollified.

"Will you agree with me that the world is full of irrational people, and crazy situations?"

"Jaaaa--" Eb says guardedly.

"If you and I are going to hack and get paid for it, people have to hire us, right?"

Eb considers it carefully. "Yes."

"That means dealing with those people, at some level, unpleasant as it may be. And accepting a whole lot of other nonsense, like lawyers and PR people and marketroids. And if you or I tried to deal with them, we would go out of our minds. True?"

"Most likely, yes."

"It is good, then, that people like Avi and Beryl have come into existence, because they are our interface." An image from the Cold War comes into Randy's head. He reaches out with both hands and gropes in the air. "Like those glove boxes that they use to handle plutonium. See?"

Eberhard nods. An encouraging sign.

"But that doesn't mean that it's going to be like programming computers. They can only filter and soften the irrational nature of the world beyond, so Avi and Beryl may still do things that seem a little crazy."

Eb has been getting a more and more faraway look in his eyes. "It would be interesting to approach this as a problem in information theory," he announces. "How can data flow back and forth between nodes in an internal network"--Randy knows that by this Eb means people in a small corporation–-"but not exist to a person outside?"

"What do you mean, not exist?"

"How could a court subpoena a document if, from their reference frame, it had never existed?"

"Are you talking about encrypting it?"

Eb looks slightly pained by Randy's simple-mindedness. "We are already doing that. But someone could still prove that a document, of a certain size, had been sent out at a certain time, to a certain mailbox."

"Traffic analysis."

"Yes. But what if one jams it? Why couldn't I fill my hard drive with random bytes, so that individual files would not be discernible? Their very existence would be hidden in the noise, like a striped tiger in tall grass. And we could continually stream random noise back and forth to each other."

"That would be expensive."

Eberhard waves his hand dismissively. "Bandwidth is cheap."

"That is more an article of faith than a statement of fact," Randy says, "but it might be true in the future."

"But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now.

"Well," Randy says, "could we continue this discussion later?"

"Of course."

They go back into the room. Tom, who has spent the most time here, is saying: "The five-footers with yellowish-brown spots on an aqua background are harmless and make great pets. The six-footers with brownish-yellow spots on a turquoise background kill you with a single bite, in ten minutes, unless you commit suicide in the meantime to escape the intolerable pain."

This is all a way of letting Randy and Eb know that the others have not been discussing business while they were out of the room.