Cryptonomicon

The Nipponese have, and have always had, a marvelous skill with graphic images--this is clear in their manga and their anime, but reaches its fullest expressive flower in safety ideograms. Licking red flames, buildings splitting and falling as the jagged earth parts beneath them, a fleeing figure silhouetted in a doorway, suspended in the stroboscopic flash of a detonation. The written materials accompanying these images are, of course, not understandable to Randy, and so there is nothing for his rational mind to work on; the terrifying ideograms blaze, fragmentary nightmare images popping up on walls, and in the drawers of his room's desk, whenever he lets his guard down for a moment. What he can read is not exactly soothing. Trying to sleep, he lies in bed, mentally checking the locations of his bedside emergency flashlight and the pair of freebie slippers (much too small) thoughtfully left there so that he can sprint out of the burning and collapsing hotel without cutting his feet to sashimi when the next magnitude 8.0 tremblor shivers the windows out of their frames. He stares up at the ceiling, which is fraught with safety equipment whose LEDs form a glowering red constellation, a crouching figure known to the ancient Greeks as Ganymede, the Anally Receptive Cup bearer, and to the Nipponese, as Hideo, the Plucky Disaster Relief Worker, bending over to probe a pile of jagged concrete slabs for anything that's squishy. All of this leaves him in a state of free-floating terror. He gets up at five in the morning, grabs two capsules of Japanese Snack from his minibar, and leaves the hotel, following one of the two emergency exit routes that he has memorized. He starts wandering, thinking it would be fun to get lost. Getting lost happens in about thirty seconds. He should have brought his GPS, and marked the latitude and longitude of the hotel.

The latitude and longitude of Golgotha are expressed, in the Arethusa intercept, in degrees, minutes, seconds, and tenths of a second of latitude and longitude. A minute is a nautical mile, a second is about a hundred feet. In the seconds figure, the Golgotha numbers have one digit after the decimal point, which implies a precision of ten feet. GPS receivers can give you that kind of precision. Randy's not so sure about the sextants that the Nipponese surveyors presumably used during the war. Before he left, he wrote the numbers down on a scrap of paper, but he rounded off the seconds part and just expressed it in the form of "XX degrees and twenty and a half minutes" implying a precision of a couple of thousand feet. Then he invented three other locations in the same general vicinity, but miles away, and put them all into a list, with the real location being number two on the list. Above it he wrote "Who owns these parcels of land?" or, in crypto-speak, WHOOW NSTHE SEPAR etc. and then spent an almost unbelievably tedious evening synchronizing the two decks of cards and encrypting the entire message with the Solitaire algorithm. He gave the ciphertext and the unused deck to Enoch Root, then swiped the plaintext through some of the leftover grease in his dinner tray and left it by the open drain. Within the hour, a rat had come around and eaten it.

He wanders all day. At first it is just bleak and depressing and he thinks he's going to give up very soon, but then he gets into the spirit of it, and learns how to eat: you approach gentlemen on streetcorners selling little fried-octopus balls and make neolithic grunting noises and proffer yen until you discover food in your hands and then you eat it.

Through some kind of nerdish homing instinct he finds Akihabara, the electronics district, and spends a while wandering through stores looking at all of the consumer electronics that will go on sale in the States a year from now. That's where he is when his GSM telephone rings.

"Hello?"

"It's me. I'm standing behind a fat yellow line."

"Which airport?"

"Narita."

"Delighted to hear it. Tell your driver to take you to the Mr. Donut in Akihabara."

Randy's there an hour later, flipping through a phone-book-sized manga epic, when Avi walks in. The unspoken Randy/Avi greeting protocol dictates that they hug each other at this point, so they do, somewhat to the astonishment of their fellow donut-eaters who usually make do with bowing. The Mr. Donut is a three-level affair jammed into a sliver of real estate with approximately the same footprint as a spiral staircase and is quite crowded with people who took compulsory English in their excellent and highly competitive schools. Besides, Randy broadcast the time and location of the meeting over a radio an hour ago. So as long as they are there, Randy and Avi talk about relatively innocuous things. Then they go out for a stroll. Avi knows his way around this neighborhood. He leads Randy through a doorway and into nerdvana.