Cryptonomicon

Randy is looking at Kepler pretty carefully when he says this, and there's no doubt that genuine astonishment is now spreading across the Dentist's face. The Dentist only has one facial expression (already described) but it changes in intensity; it gets more so and less so depending on his emotions. The Dentist's expression proves he had no idea, until now, that Randy's been allowed to have a computer in his cell. In the trying-to-figure-out-what-the-fuck-is-going-on department, the computer is the single most important datum, and Kepler didn't even know about it until just now. So to whatever extent the Dentist actually gives a shit, he has a lot of thinking to do. He excuses himself pretty soon after.

Not half an hour later, some twenty-five-year-old American guy with a ponytail shows up and has a brief audience with Randy. It turns out that he works for Chester in Seattle and has just now flown across the Pacific on Chester's personal jet and came here straight from the airport. He is completely jazzed, totally in bat-out-of-hell mode, and cannot shut up. The sheer amazingness of his sudden flight across the ocean on a rich guy's private jet has made a really, really deep impression on him and he obviously needs someone to share it with. He has brought a "care package" consisting of some junk food, a few trashy novels, the largest bottle of Pepto-Bismol Randy's ever seen, a CD Walkman, and a cubical stack of CDs. This guy can't get over the battery thing; he was told to bring a lot of extra batteries, and so he did, and sure enough, between the luggage guys at the airport and the customs inspectors, all of the batteries disappeared en route except for one package that he's got in the pocket of his long baggy Seattle-grunge-boy shorts. Seattle's full of guys like this who flipped a coin when they graduated from college (heads Prague, tails Seattle) and just showed up with this expectation that because they were young and smart they'd find a job and begin making money, and then appallingly enough did exactly that. Randy can't figure out what the world must look like to a guy like this. He has a hard time getting rid of the guy, who shares the common assumption (increasingly annoying) that just because Randy's in jail, he doesn't have a life, has nothing better to do than interface with visitors.

When Randy gets back to his cell, he sits crosslegged on his bed with the Walkman and begins dealing out the CDs like cards in a solitaire game. The selection is pretty reasonable: a two-disc set of the Brandenburg Concertos, a collection of Bach organ fugues (nerds have a thing about Bach), some Louis Armstrong, some Wynton Marsalis, and then various selections from Hammerdown Systems, which is a Seattle-based record label in which Chester is a major investor. It is a second-generation Seattle-scene record label; all of its artists are young people who came to Seattle after they graduated from college in search of the legendary Seattle music scene and discovered that it didn't really exist--it was just a couple of dozen guys who sat around playing guitar in one another's basements--and so who were basically forced to choose between going home in ignominy or fabricating the Seattle music scene of their imagination from whole cloth. This led to the establishment of any number of small clubs, and the foundation of many bands, that were not rooted in any kind of authentic reality whatsoever but merely reflected the dreams and aspiration of pan-global young adults who had all flocked to Seattle on the same chimera hunt. This second wave scene came in for a lot of abuse from those of the original two dozen people who had not yet died of drug overdose or suicide. There was something of a backlash; and yet, about thirty-six hours after the backlash reached its maximum intensity, there was an antibacklash backlash from young immigrants who asserted their right to some kind of unique cultural identity as people who had naively come to Seattle and discovered that there was no there there and that they would have to create it themselves. Fueled by that conviction, and by their own youthful libidinous energy, and by a few cultural commentators who found this whole scenario fetchingly post-modern, they started a whole lot of second-generation bands and even a couple of record labels, of which Hammerdown Systems is the only one that didn't either go out of business or get turned into a wholly-owned subsidiary of an L.A. or New York-based major label inside of six months.