Cryptonomicon

Randy's looking for a totally anonymous location where he can patch into the Internet. A hotel doesn't work because a hotel keeps good records of outgoing telephone calls. What he should really do is use this packet radio interface he has for his laptop, but even that requires a place to sit down and work undisturbed for a while. Which gets him thinking in terms of a fast food joint, not to be found in the mid-peninsular wasteland. By the time he has reached the northern skirts of the Valley--Menlo Park and Palo Alto--he has decided fuck it, he'll just go to the scene of the action. Maybe he could be of some use there. So he gets off at the El Monte exit and heads into the business district of Los Altos, a pretty typical mid-twentieth-century American downtown gradually being metabolized by franchises.

A major street intersects, at something other than a ninety-degree angle, a smaller commercial street, defining two (smaller) acute-angle lots and two (larger) obtuse-angle lots. On one side of the major street, the obtuse-angle lot is occupied by a two-storey office building, home of Ordo's offices and Tombstone. The acute-angle lot is occupied by the McDonald's. On the opposite side of the major street, the acute-angle lot is occupied by, weirdly enough, a 24 Jam, the only one Randy has ever seen in the Western Hemisphere. The obtuse-angle lot is occupied by a Park 'n' Lock, where you can park for the old-fashioned purpose of wandering around the business district from store to store.

The parking lot of the McDonald's is full, and so Randy pulls through its drive-through window, chooses n,where nis a random number between one and six, and asks for Value Meal nwith super-size fries. This having been secured, he guns the Acura directly across the big street into the Park 'n' Lock just in time to see its last available space being seized by a minivan bearing the logo of a San Jose television station. Randy is not planning to stray far from his car, so he just blocks in another car. But as he is setting the parking brake, he notices movement inside it, and with a bit of further attention realizes he is watching a man with long hair and a beard methodically ramming shells into a pump shotgun. The man catches sight of Randy in his rearview mirror and turns around with a scrupulously polite pardon-me-sir-but-you-seem-to-have-blocked-me-in look. Randy recognizes him as Mike or Mark, a graphics card hacker who farms ostriches in Gilroy (quirky hobbies being de rigueur in the high-tech world). He moves the Acura, blocking in what looks like an abandoned van from the Starsky and Hutchepoch.

Randy climbs up on the roof of his car with his laptop and his Value Meal n.Until recently he would never have sat on top of his Acura because his considerable mass would dimple the sheet metal. But after Amy rammed it with the truck, Randy became much less anal, and now sees it as a tool to be used until it is just a moraine of rusted shards. He happens to have a twelve-volt adapter for the laptop, so he runs that down into his cigarette lighter socket. Finally, he's settled, and gets a chance to take a good look around.

The parking lot of Novus Ordo Seclorum's office building is filled with cop cars, and BMWs and Mercedes Benzes that Randy assumes belong to lawyers. Avi's Range Rover is parked jauntily on top of some landscaping, and a few TV camera crews have set up, as well. In front of the building's main entrance a lot of people are jammed into the smallest possible space screaming at each other. They are surrounded by ring after concentric ring of cops, media, and law-firm minions--collectively, what Tolkien would call Men--and a few non– or post-human creatures imbued with peculiar physiognomies and vaguely magical powers: Dwarves (steady, productive, surly) and Elves (brilliant in a more ethereal way). Randy, a Dwarf, has begun to realize that his grandfather may have been an Elf. Avi is a Man with a strong Elvish glow about him. Somewhere in the center of this whole thing, presumably, is Gollum.

There is a little window on the screen of Randy's laptop showing a cheesy 1940s-newsreel-style animation of a radio tower, with zigzaggy conceptual radio waves radiating outwards from it over the whole earth, which is shown ludicrously not to scale in this rendering--the diameter of the earth is about equal to the height of the radio tower. That these Jovian info-bolts are visible and moving is a visual cue that his radio adapter has managed to patch itself into the packet radio network. Randy opens a terminal window and types

telnet laundry.org