Cryptonomicon

"Many people," Avi explains, "do not know that the word normally spelled and pronounced 'nirvana' can be more accurately transliterated 'nirdvana' or, arguably, 'nerdvana.' This is nerdvana. The nucleus around which Akihabara accreted. This is where the pasocon otakugo to get the stuff they need."

"Pasocon otaku?"

"Personal computer nerds," Avi says. "But as in so many other things, the Nipponese take it to an extreme that we barely imagine."

The place is laid out precisely like an Asian food market: it is a maze of narrow aisles winding among tiny stalls, barely larger than phone booths, where merchants have their wares laid out for inspection. The first thing they see is a wire stall: at least a hundred reels of different types and gauges of wire in gaily hued plastic insulation. "How apropos!" Avi says, admiring the display, "we need to talk about wires." It need not be stated that this place is a great venue for a conversation: the paths between the stalls are so narrow that they have to walk in single file. No one can follow them, or get close to them, here, without being ridiculously blatant. An array of soldering irons bristles wickedly, giving one stall the look of a martial arts store. Coffee-can-sized potentiometers are stacked in pyramids. "Tell me about wires," Randy says.

"I don't need to tell you how dependent we are on submarine cables," Avi says.

" 'We' meaning the Crypt, or society in general?"

"Both. Obviously the Crypt can't even function without communications linkages to the outside world. But the Internet and everything else are just as dependent on cables."

A pasocon otakuin a trench coat, holding a plastic bowl as shopping cart, hunches over a display of gleaming copper toroidal coils that look to have been hand-polished by the owner. Finger-sized halogen spotlights mounted on an overhead rack emphasize their geometric perfection.

"So?"

"So, cables are vulnerable."

They wander past a stall that specializes in banana plugs, with a sideline in alligator clips, arranged in colorful rosettes around disks of cardboard.

"Those cables used to be owned by PTAs. Which were basically just branches of governments. Hence they pretty much did what governments told them to. But the new cables going in today are owned and controlled by corporations beholden to no one except their investors. Puts certain governments in a position they don't like very much."

"Okay," Randy says, "they used to have ultimate control over how information flowed between countries in that they ran the PTTs that ran the cables."

"Yes."

"Now they don't."

"That's right. There's been this big transfer of power that has taken place under their noses, without their having foreseen it." Avi stops in front of a stall that sells LEDs in all manner of bubble-gum colors, packed into tiny boxes like ripe tropical fruits in crates, and standing up from cubes of foam like psychedelic mushrooms. He is making big transfer-of-power gestures with his hands, but to Randy's increasingly warped mind this looks like a man moving heavy gold bars from one pile to another. Across the aisle, they are being stared at by the dead eyes of a hundred miniature video cameras. Avi continues, "And as we've talked about many times, there are many reasons why different governments might want to control the flow of information. China might want to institute political censorship, whereas the U.S. might want to regulate electronic cash transfers so that they can keep collecting taxes. In the old days they could ultimately do this insofar as they owned the cables."

"But now they can't," Randy says.

"Now they can't, and this change happened very fast, or at least it looked fast to government with its retarded intellectual metabolism, and now they are way behind the curve, and scared and pissed off, and starting to lash out."

"They are?"

"They are."

"In what way are they lashing out?"

A toggle switch merchant snaps a rag over rows and columns of stainless steel merchandise. The tip of the rag breaks the sound barrier and generates a tiny sonic pop that blasts a dust mote from the top of a switch. Everyone is politely ignoring them. "Do you have any idea what down time on a state-of-the-art cable costs nowadays?"

"Of course I do," Randy says. "It can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute."

"That's right. And it takes at least a couple of days to repair a broken cable. A couple of days. A single break in a cable can cost the companies that own it tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue."

"But that hasn't been that much of an issue," Randy says. "The cables are plowed in so deeply now. They're only exposed in the deep ocean.

"Yes--where only an entity with the naval resources of a major government could sever them."

"Oh, shit!"

"This is the new balance of power, Randy."

"You can't seriously be telling me that governments are threatening to--"