Cryptonomicon

He also installed Finux, a free UNIX operating system created by Finns, almost as a way of proclaiming to the rest of the world "this is how weird we are," and distributed throughout the world on the Net. Of course Finux was fantastically powerful and flexible and enabled you, among other things, to control the machine's video circuitry to the Nth degree and choose many different scanning frequencies and pixel clocks, if you were into that kind of thing. Pekka most definitely was into it, and so like a lot of Finux maniacs he set his machine up so that it could display, if he chose, a whole lot of tiny little pixels (which displayed a lot of information but was hard on the eyes) or, alternatively, fewer and larger pixels (which he tended to use after he had been hacking for twenty-four hours straight and lost ocular muscle tone), or various settings in-between. Every time he changed from one setting to another, the monitor screen would go black for a second and there would be an audible clunk from inside of it as the resonating crystals inside locked in on a different range of frequencies.

One night at three A.M., Pekka caused this to happen, and immediately after the screen went black and made that clunking noise, it exploded in his face. The front of the picture tube was made of heavy glass (it had to be, to withstand the internal vacuum) which fragmented and sped into Pekka's face, neck, and upper body. The very same phosphors that had been glowing beneath the sweeping electron beam, moments before, conveying information into Pekka's eyes, were now physically embedded in his flesh. A hunk of glass took one of his eyes and almost went through into his brain. Another one gouged out his voicebox, another zinged past the side of his head and bit a neat triangular hunk out of his left ear.

Pekka, in other words, was the first victim of the Digibomber. He almost bled to death on the spot, and his fellow Eutropians hovered around his hospital bed for a few days with tanks of Freon, ready to jump into action in case he died. But he didn't, and he got even more press because his startup company lacked health insurance. After a lot of hand-wringing in local newspapers about how this poor innocent from the land of socialized medicine had not had the presence of mind to buy health insurance, some rich high-tech guys donated money to pay his medical bills and to equip him with a computer voicebox like Stephen Hawking's.

And now here is Pekka, sitting in Cantrell's hotel room. His cello stands in the corner, dusty around the bridge from powdered rosin. He is facing a blank wall to which he has duct-taped a bunch of wires in precise loops and whorls. These lead to some home-brewed circuit boards which are in turn hooked up to his laptop.

"Hello Randy congratulations on your success," says a computer-generated voice as soon as the door is shut behind Randy and Cantrell. This is a little greeting that Pekka has obviously typed in ahead of time, anticipating his arrival. None of the foregoing seems particularly odd to Randy except for the fact that Pekka seems to think that Epiphyte has already achieved some kind of success.

"How are we doing?" Cantrell asks.

Pekka types in a response. Then he cups one hand to his mutilated ear while using his other hand to cue the voice generator: "He showers." Indeed, it's possible now to hear the pipes hissing in the wall. "His laptop radiates."

"Oh," Randy says, "Tom Howard's room is right next door?"

"Just on the other side of that wall," Cantrell says. "I specifically requested it, so that I could win this bet. See, his room is a mirror image of this one, so his computer is only a few inches away, just on the other side of this wall. Perfect conditions for Van Eck phreaking."

"Pekka, are you receiving signals from his computer right now?" Randy asks.

Pekka nods, types, and fires back, "I tune. I calibrate." The input device for his voice generator is a one-handed chord-board strapped to his thigh. He puts his right hand on it and makes flopping and groping motions. Moments later speech emerges, "I require Cantrell."

"Excuse me," Cantrell says, and goes to Pekka's side. Randy watches over their shoulders for a bit, understanding vaguely what they're doing.