Cryptonomicon

"I'd like you to meet my friend, Amy," Randy interrupts, even though Amy is a good distance away, and not paying attention. But Randy is afraid that Chester's about to tell him that stock in that Minneapolis company is now up to the point where its market capitalization exceeds that of General Dynamics, and that Randy should've held onto his shares. "Amy, this is my friend Chester," Randy says, leading Chester between tables. At this point some of the gamers actually do look up interestedly--not at Amy, but at Chester, who (Randy infers) has probably got some one-of-a-kind cards tucked away in that vest, like THE THERMONUCLEAR ARSENAL OF THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS or YHWH. Chester exhibits a marked improvement in social skills, shaking Amy's hand with no trace of awkwardness and dropping smoothly into a pretty decent imitation of a mature and well-rounded individual engaging in polite small talk. Before Randy knows it, Chester has invited them over to his house.

"I heard it wasn't done yet," Randy says.

"You must've seen the article in The Economist,"Chester says.

"That's right."

"If you'd seen the article in The New York Times,you'd know that the article in The Economistwas wrong. I am now living in the house."

"Well, it'd be fun to see it," Randy says.

***

"Notice how well-paved my street is?" Chester says sourly, half an hour later. Randy has parked his hammered and scraped Acura in the guest parking lot of Chester's house and Chester has parked his 1932 Dusenberg roadster in the garage, between a Lamborghini and some other vehicle that would appear to be literally an aircraft, built to hover on ducted fans.

"Uh, I can't say that I did," Randy says, trying not to gape at anything. Even the pavement under his feet is some kind of custom-made mosaic of Penrose tiles. "I sort of vaguely remember it as being broad and flat and not having any chuckholes. Well-paved, in other words."

"This," Chester says, head-faking towards his house, "was the first house to trigger the LOHO."

"LOHO?"

"The Ludicrously Oversized Home Ordinance. Some malcontents rammed it through the city council. You get these, like cardiovascular surgeons and trust-fund parasites who like to have big nice houses, but God forbid some dirty hacker should try to build a house of his own, and send a few cement trucks down their street occasionally."

"They made you repave the street?"

"They made me repave half the fucking town," Chester says. "I mean, some of the neighbors were griping that the house was an eyesore, but after we got off on the wrong foot my attitude was, to hell with 'em." Indeed, Chester's house does resemble nothing so much as a regional trucking hub with a roof made entirely of glass. He waves his arm down a patchily turfed slab of mud that slopes down into Lake Washington. "Obviously the landscaping hasn't even begun yet. So it looks like a science fair project on erosion."

"I was going to say the Battle of the Somme," Randy says.

"Not as good an analogy because there are no trenches," Chester says. He is still pointing down towards the lake. "But if you look near the waterline you can just make out some railroad ties, half-buried. That's where we laid the tracks."

"Tracks?" Amy says, the only word she's been able to get out of her mouth since Randy drove his Acura through the main gate. Randy told her, on the way over here, that if he, Randy, had a hundred thousand dollars for every order of magnitude by which Chester's net worth currently exceeds his, then he (Randy) would never have to work again. This turned out to be more clever than informative, and so Amy was not prepared for what they have found here and is still steepling her eyebrows.

"For the locomotive," Chester says. "There are no railway lines nearby, so we barged the locomotive in and then winched it up a short railway into the foyer."

Amy just scrunches up her face, silent.

"Amy hasn't seen the articles," Randy says.

"Oh! Sorry," Chester says, "I'm into obsolete technology. The house is a museum of dead tech. Stick your hand into these things."

Lined up before the front entrance are four waist-high pedestals, emblazoned with the Novus Ordo Seclorum eyeball/pyramid logo, with outlines of hands stenciled onto their lids, and knobs in the lagoons between the fingers. Randy fits his hand into place and feels the knobs slide in their grooves, reading and memorizing the geometry of his hand. "The house knows who you are now," Chester says, typing their names into a ruggedized, weatherproofed keyboard, "and I'm giving you a certain privilege constellation that I use for personal guests--now you can come in through the main gate and park your car and wander around the grounds whether or not I'm home. And you can enter the house if I'm home, but if I'm not home, it'll be locked to you. And you can wander freely in the house except for certain offices where I keep proprietary corporate documents."