Cryptonomicon

Even though he grew up in churches, raised by church people, Waterhouse (as must be obvious by this point) never really understood their attitudes about sex. Why did they get so hung up on that one issue, when there were others like murder, war, poverty, and pestilence?

Now, finally, he gets it: the churches are merely one branch of the ECC. And what they are doing, when they fulminate about sex, is trying to make sure that all the young people fall in line with the ECC's program.

So, what is the end result of the ECC's efforts? Waterhouse stares at the ceiling, which is starting to become fuzzily visible as the sun rises in the west, or the north, or wherever the hell it rises here in the Southern Hemisphere. He takes a quick inventory of the world and finds that basically the ECC is running the entire planet, good countries and bad countries alike. That all successful and respected men are minions of the ECC, or at least are so scared of it that they pretend to be. Non-ECC members live on the fringes of society, like prostitutes, or have been driven deep underground and must waste tremendous amounts of time and energy keeping up a false front. If you knuckle under and become a minion of the ECC, you get to have a career, a family, kids, wealth, house, pot roasts, clean laundry, and the respect of all the other ECC minions. You have to pay dues in the form of chronic nagging sexual irritation which can only be relieved by, and at the discretion and convenience of, one person, the person designated for this role by the ECC: your wife. On the other hand, if you reject the ECC and its works, you can't, by definition, have a family, and your career options are limited to pimp, gangster, and forty-year enlisted sailor.

Hell, it's not even that bad of a conspiracy. They build churches and universities, educate kids, install swingsets in parks. Sometimes they throw a war and kill ten or twenty million people, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to stuff like influenza--which the ECC campaigns against by nagging everyone to wash their hands and cover their mouths when sneezing.

The alarm clock. Rod rolls out of bed like it's a Nip air raid. Waterhouse stares at the ceiling for another few minutes, dithering. But he knows where he's going, and there's no point in wasting any more time. He's going to church, and not exactly because he has renounced Satan and all his works, but because he wants to fuck Mary. He almost can't help flinching when he says (to himself) this terrible-sounding thing. But the weird thing about church is that it provides a special context within which it is perfectly okay to want to fuck Mary. As long as he goes to church, he can want to fuck Mary as much as he wants, he can spend all of his time, in and out of church, thinking about fucking Mary. He can let her know that he wants to fuck her as long as he finds a more oblique way of phrasing it. And if he jumps through certain hoops (hoops of gold) he can even fuck Mary in actuality, and it will all be perfectly acceptable--at no time will he have to feel the slightest trace of shame or guilt.

He rolls out of bed, startling Rod, who (being some sort of jungle commando) is easily startled. "I'm going to fuck your cousin until the bed collapses into a pile of splinters," Waterhouse says.

Actually, what he says is "I'm going to church with you." But Waterhouse, the cryptologist, is engaging in a bit of secret code work here. He is using a newly invented code, which only he knows. It will be very dangerous if the code is ever broken, but this is impossible since there is only one copy, and it's in Waterhouse's head. Turing might be smart enough to break the code anyway, but he's in England, and he's on Waterhouse's side, so he'd never tell

A few minutes later, Waterhouse and cCmndhd go downstairs, headed for "church," which in Waterhouse's secret code, means "headquarters of the Mary-fucking campaign of 1944."

As they step out into the cool morning air they can hear Mrs. McTeague bustling into their bedroom to strip their beds and inspect their sheets. Waterhouse smiles, thinking that he has just gotten away with something; the damning and overwhelming evidence found on his bed linens will be neatly cancelled out by the fact that he got up early and went to church.