Cryptonomicon

Avi is waiting for him, a tall pale figure standing at the velvet rope surrounded by hundreds of Filipinas in a state of emotional riot, brandishing gladiola spears like medieval pikemen. Avi has his hands in the pockets of his floor-skimming coat, and keeps his head turned in Randy's direction but is sort of concentrating on a point about halfway between them, frowning in an owlish way. This is the same frown that Randy's grandmother used to wear when she was teasing apart a tangle of string from her junk drawer. Avi adopts it when he is doing basically the same thing to some new complex of information. He must have read Randy's e-mail message about the gold. It occurs to Randy that he missed a great opportunity for a practical joke: he could have loaded up his bag with a couple of lead bricks and then handed it to Avi and completely blown his mind. Too late. Avi rotates around his vertical axis as Randy comes abreast of him and then breaks into a stride that matches Randy's pace. There is some unarticulated protocol that dictates when Randy and Avi will shake hands, when they will hug, and when they will just act like they've only been separated for a few minutes. A recent exchange of e-mail seems to constitute a virtual reunion that obviates any hand-shaking or hugging. "You were right about the cheesy dialog," is the first thing Avi says. "You're spending too much time with Shaftoe, seeing things his way. This was not an attempt to send you a message, at least not in the way Shaftoe means."

"What's your interpretation, then?"

"How would you go about establishing a new currency?" Avi asks.

Randy frequently overhears snatches of business-related conversation from people he passes in airports, and it's always about how did the big presentation go, or who's on the short list to replace the departing CFO, or something. He prides himself on what he believes to be the much higher plane, or at least the much more bizarre subject matter, of his interchanges with Avi. They are walking together around the slow arc of SFO's inner ring. A whiff of soy sauce and ginger drifts out of a restaurant and fogs Randy's mind, making him unsure, for a moment, which hemisphere he's in.

"Uh, it's not something I have given much thought to," he says. "Is that what we are about now? Are we going to establish a new currency?"

"Well obviously someoneneeds to establish one that doesn't suck," Avi says.

"Is this some exercise in keeping a straight face?" Randy asks.

"Don't you ever read the newspapers?" Avi grabs Randy by the elbow and drags him over towards a newsstand. Several papers are running front-page stories about crashing Southeast Asian currencies, but this isn't all that new.

"I know currency fluctuations are important to Epiphyte," Randy says. "But my god, it's so tedious I just want to run away.

"Well, it's not tedious to her,"Avi says, yanking out three different newspapers that have all decided to run the same wire-service photograph: an adorable Thai moppet standing in a mile-long queue in front of a bank, holding up a single American dollar bill.

"I know it's a big deal for some of our customers," Randy says, "I just didn't really think of it as a business opportunity."

"No, think about it," Avi says. He counts out a few dollar bills of his own to pay for the newspapers, then swerves towards an exit. They enter a tunnel that leads to a parking garage. "The sultan feels that--"

"You've been just sort of hanging out with the sultan?"

"Mostly with Pragasu. Will you let me finish? We decided to set up the Crypt, right?"

"Right."

"What is the Crypt? Do you remember its original stated function?"

"Secure, anonymous, unregulated data storage. A data haven."

"Yeah. A bit bucket. And we envisioned many applications for this."

"Boy, did we ever," Randy says, remembering many long nights around kitchen tables and hotel rooms, writing versions of the business plan that are now as ancient and as lost as the holographs of the Four Gospels.

"One of these was electronic banking. Heck, we even predicted it might be one of the major applications. But whenever a business plan first makes contact with the actual market--the real world--suddenly all kinds of stuff becomes clear. You may have envisioned half a dozen potential markets for your product, but as soon as you open your doors, one just explodes from the pack and becomes so instantly important that good business sense dictates that you abandon the others and concentrate all your efforts."

"And that's what happened with the e-banking thing," Randy says.

"Yes. During our meetings at the Sultan's Palace," Avi says. "Before those meetings, we envisioned--well you know what we envisioned. What actually happened was that the room was packed with these guys who were exclusively interested in the e-banking thing. That was our first clue. Then, this!" He holds up his newspapers, whacks the dollar brandishing moppet with the back of his hand. "So, that's the business we're in now."