Cryptonomicon

Okinawa has just been invaded. The fighting is the worst ever. The invasion is supported by a vast fleet against which the Nipponese have launched everything they have. The Yamatocame after them, her eighteen-inch guns at the ready, carrying only enough fuel for a one-way voyage. But the cryptanalysts of the U.S. Navy intercepted and decrypted her orders and the great ship was sent to the bottom with 2,500 men. The Nipponese have launched the first of their Floating Chrysanthemum assaults against the invasion fleet: clouds of kamikaze planes, human bombs, human torpedoes, speedboats packed with explosives.

To the irritation and bafflement of the German High Command, the Nipponese government has sent a message to them, requesting that, in the event that all of Germany's European naval bases are lost, the Kriegsmarine should be given orders to continue operating with the Nipponese in the Far East. The message is encrypted in Indigo. It is duly intercepted and read by the Allies.

In the United Kingdom, Dr. Alan Mathison Turing, considering the war to be effectively finished, has long since turned his attentions away from the problem of voice encryption and into the creation of thinking machines. For about ten months--ever since the finished Colossus Mark II was delivered to Bletchley Park--he has had the opportunity to work with a truly programmable computing machine. Alan invented these machines long before one was ever built, and has never needed hands-on experience in order to think about them, but his experiences with Colossus Mark II have helped him to solidify some ideas of how the next machine ought to be designed. He thinks of it as a postwar machine, but that's only because he's in Europe and hasn't been concerned with the problem of conquering Nippon as much as Waterhouse has.

"I've been working on BURY and DISINTER," says a voice, coming out of small holes in a Bakelite headset clamped over Waterhouse's head. The voice is oddly distorted, nearly obscured by white noise and a maddening buzz.

"Please say it again?" Lawrence says, pressing the phones against his ear.

"BURY and DISINTER," says the voice. "They are, er, sets of instructions for the machine to execute, to carry out certain algorithms. They are programmes.

"Right! Sorry, I just wasn't able to hear you the first time. Yes, I've been working on them too," Waterhouse says.

"The next machine will have a memory storage system, Lawrence, in the form of sound waves traveling down a cylinder filled with mercury--we stole the idea from John Wilkins, founder of the Royal Society, who came up with it three hundred years ago, except he was going to use air instead of quicksilver. I--excuse me, Lawrence, did you say you had been working on them?"

"I did the same thing with tubes. Valves, as you would call them."

"Well that's all well and good for you Yanks," Alan says, "I suppose if you are infinitely rich you could make a BURY/DISINTER system out of steam locomotives, or something, and retain a staff of thousands to run around squirting oil on the squeaky bits."

"The mercury line is a good idea," Waterhouse admits. "Very resourceful."

"Have you actually gotten BURY and DISINTER to work with valves?"

"Yes. My DISINTER works better than our shovel expeditions," Lawrence says. "Did you ever find those silver bars you buried?"

"No," Alan says absently. "They are lost. Lost in the noise of the world."

"You know, that was a Turing test I just gave you," Lawrence says.

"Beg pardon?"

"This damned machine screws up your voice so bad I can't tell you from Winston Churchill," Lawrence says. "So the only way I can verify it's you is by getting you to say things that only Alan Turing could say."

He hears Alan's sharp, high-pitched laugh at the other end of the line. It's him all right.

"This Project X thing really is appalling," Alan says. "Delilah is infinitely superior. I wish you could see it for yourself. Or hear it."

Alan is in London, in a command bunker somewhere. Lawrence is in Manila Bay, on the Rock, the island of Corregidor. They are joined by a thread of copper that goes all the way around the world. There are many such threads traversing the floors of the world's oceans now, but only a few special ones go to rooms like this. The rooms are in Washington, London, Melbourne, and now, Corregidor.