Cryptonomicon

Julieta nods. So in the eyes of one Finnish girl, anyway, Shaftoe's not such a bad guy. He bends over and gives her a big succulent kiss, then straightens up, nods to the startled doctor, and walks out.

Chapter 61 COURTING

Waterhouse has been chewing his way through exotic Nip code systems at the rate of about one a week, but after he sees Mary Smith in the parlor of Mrs. McTeague's boarding house, his production rate drops to near zero. Arguably, it goes negative, for sometimes when he reads the morning newspaper, its plaintext scrambles into gibberish before his eyes, and he is unable to extract any useful information.

Despite his and Turing's disagreements about whether the human brain is a Turing machine, he has to admit that Turing wouldn't have too much trouble writing a set of instructions to simulate the brain functions of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse.

Waterhouse seeks happiness. He achieves it by breaking Nip code systems and playing the pipe organ. But since pipe organs are in short supply, his happiness level ends up being totally dependent on breaking codes.

He cannot break codes (hence, cannot be happy) unless his mind is clear. Now suppose that mental clarity is designated by C [sub m],which is normalized, or calibrated, in such a way that it is always the case that

0 <= C [sub m] < 1

where C [sub m] = 0 indicates a totally clouded mind and C [sub m] = 1 is Godlike clarity--an unattainable divine state of infinite intelligence. If the number of messages Waterhouse decrypts, in a given day, is designated by then it will be governed by C [sub m] in roughly the following way:

Clarity of mind (C [sub m]) is affected by any number of factors, but by far the most important is horniness, which might be designated by [sigma], for obvious anatomical reasons that Waterhouse finds amusing at this stage of his emotional development.

Horniness begins at zero at time t = t [sub 0] (immediately following ejaculation) and increases from there as a linear function of time:

The only way to drop it back to zero is to arrange another ejaculation. There is a critical threshold [sigma sub c] such that when [sigma] > [sigma sub c] it becomes impossible for Waterhouse to concentrate on anything, or, approximately,

which amounts to saying that the moment [sigma] rises above the threshold [sigma sub c] it becomes totally impossible for Waterhouse to break Nipponese cryptographic systems. This makes it impossible for him to achieve happiness (unless there is a pipe organ handy, which there isn't).

Typically, it takes two to three days for [sigma] to climb above [sigma sub c] after an ejaculation:

Critical, then, to the maintenance of Waterhouse's sanity is the ability to ejaculate every two to three days. As long as he can arrange this, [sigma] exhibits a classic sawtooth-wave pattern, optimally with the peaks at or near [sigma sub c] [see p. 546 top] wherein the grey zones represent periods during which he is completely useless to the war effort.

So much for the basic theory. Now, when he was at Pearl Harbor, he discovered something that, in retrospect, should have been profoundly disquieting. Namely, that ejaculations obtained in a whorehouse (i.e., provided by the ministrations of an actual human female) seemed to drop [sigma] below the level that Waterhouse could achieve through executing a Manual Override. In other words, the post-ejaculatory horniness level was not always equal to zero, as the naive theory propounded above assumes, but to some other quantity dependent upon whether the ejaculation was induced by Self or Other: [sigma] =[sigma sub self] after masturbation but [sigma]=[sigma sub other] upon leaving a whorehouse, where [sigma sub self] > [sigma sub other] an inequality to which Waterhouse's notable successes in breaking certain Nip naval codes at Station Hypo were directly attributable, in that the many convenient whorehouses nearby made it possible for him to go somewhat longer between ejaculations.

Note the twelve-day period [above], 19-30 May 1942, with only one brief interruption in productivity--during which Waterhouse (some might argue) personally won the Battle of Midway.