Cryptonomicon

The dentist is gone, the door locked, the phone unplugged. Randall Lawrence Waterhouse lies naked on the starched, turned-down sheets of his king-sized bed. His head is propped up on a pillow so that he can peer through the vee of his feet at a BBC World Service newscast on the television. A ten-dollar minibar beer is near at hand. It's six in the morning in America and so rather than a pro basketball game, he has to settle for this BBC newscast, which is strongly geared to South Asian happenings. A long and very sober story about a plague of locusts on the India/Pakistan border follows a piece on a typhoon about to nail Hong Kong. The king of Thailand is calling in some of his government's more corrupt officials to literally prostrate themselves before him. Asian news always has this edge of the fantastic to it, but it's all dead serious, no nods or winks anywhere. Now he's watching a story about a nervous system disease that people in New Guinea come down with as a consequence of eating other people's brains. Just your basic cannibal story. No wonder so many Americans come here on business and never really go home again--it's like stepping into the pages of Classics Comics.

Someone is knocking on his door. Randy gets up and puts on his plush white hotel bathrobe. He peers through the peephole, half expecting to see a pygmy standing there with a blowpipe, though he wouldn't mind a seductive Oriental courtesan. But it's just Cantrell. Randy opens the door. Cantrell is already holding up his hands, palms out, in a cheerful "shut up already" gesture. "Don't worry," Cantrell says, "I'm not here to talk about Biz."

"In that case I won't break this beer bottle over your head," Randy says. Cantrell must feel exactly the same way Randy does, which is that so much wild shit happened today that the only way to deal with it is not to talk about it at all. Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberatelyfind something else to think and talk about.

"Come to my room," Cantrell says. "Pekka is here."

"The Finn who got blown up?"

"The same."

"Why is he here?"

"Because there's no reason not to be. After he got blown up he adopted a technomadic lifestyle."

"So it's just a coincidence, or--"

"Nah," Cantrell says. "He's helping me win a bet."

"What kind of bet?"

"I was telling Tom Howard about Van Eck phreaking a few weeks ago. Tom said it sounded like bullshit. He bet me ten shares of Epiphyte stock that I couldn't make it actually work outside of a laboratory."

"Is Pekka good at that kind of thing?"

By way of saying yes, Cantrell adopts a serious look and says, "Pekka is writing a whole chapter about it for the Cryptonomicon.Pekka feels that only by mastering the technologies that might be used against us can we defend ourselves."

This sounds almost like a call to arms. Randy would have to be some kind of loser to retreat to his bed after that, so he backs into the room and steps into his trousers, which are standing there telescoped into the floor where he dropped them upon his return from the sultan's palace. The sultan's palace!The television is now broadcasting a news story about pirates plying the waters of the South China Sea, making freighter crews walk the plank. "This whole continent is like fucking Disneyland without the safety precautions," Randy observes. "Am I the only person who finds it surreal?"

Cantrell grins, but says, "If we begin talking about surreal, we'll end up talking about today."

"You got that right," Randy says. "Let's go."

***

Before Pekka became known around Silicon Valley as the Finn Who Got Blown Up, he was known as Cello Guy, because he had a nearly autistic devotion to his cello and took it with him everywhere, always trying to stuff it into overhead luggage racks. Not coincidentally, he was an analog kind of guy from way back whose specialty was radio.

When packet radio started to get big as an alternative to sending data down wires, Pekka moved to Menlo Park and joined a startup. His company bought their equipment at used-computer stores, and Pekka ended up scoring a pretty nice nineteen-inch high-res multisync monitor perfectly adequate for his adaptable twenty-four-year-old eyes. He hooked it up to a slightly used Pentium box jammed full of RAM.