Cryptonomicon

Sometimes Randy walks along the top of the Spanish wall. Around Calle Victoria, where MacArthur had his headquarters before the war, it is as wide as a four-lane street. Lovers nestle in the trapezoidal gunslits and put up umbrellas for privacy. Below him, to the left, is the moat, a good city block or two in width, mostly dry. Squatters have built shacks on it. In the parts that are still submerged, they dig for mud crabs or string improvised nets among the purple and magenta lotus blossoms.

To the right is Intramuros. A few buildings poke up out of a jumbled wilderness of strewn stone. Ancient Spanish cannon are sprinkled around the place, half-buried. The rubble fields have been colonized by tropical vegetation and squatters. Their clothesline poles and television antennas are all wrapped up in jungle creepers and makeshift electrical wiring. Utility poles jut into the air at odd angles, like widowmakers in a burned forest, some of them almost completely obscured by the glass bubbles of electrical meters. Every dozen yards or so, for no discernable reason, a pile of rubble smolders.

As he goes by the cathedral, children follow him, whining and begging piteously until he puts pesos in their hands. Then they beam and sometimes give him a bright "Thank you!" in perfect American-scented shopping-mall English. The beggars in Manila never seem to take their work very seriously, for even they have been infected by the cultural fungus of irony and always seem to be fighting back a grin, as if they can't believe they're doing anything so corny.

They do not understand that he is working. That's okay.

Ideas have always come to Randy faster than he could use them. He spent the first thirty years of his life pursuing whatever idea appealed to him at the moment, discarding it when a better one came along.

Now he is working for a company again, and has some kind of responsibility to use his time productively. Good ideas come to him as fast and thick as ever, but he has to keep his eye on the ball. If the idea is not relevant to Epiphyte, he has to jot it down and forget about it for now. If it is relevant, he has to restrain his urge to dive into it and consider: has anyone else come up with this idea before him? Is it possible to just go out and buy the technology? Can he delegate the work to a contract coder in the States?

He walks slowly, partly because otherwise he will suffer heatstroke and fall dead in the gutter. Worse yet, he may fall through an open hatch into a torrent of sewage, or brush against one of the squatters's electrical wires, which dangle from overhead like patient asps. The constant dangers of sudden electrocution from above or drowning in liquid shit below keep him looking up and down as well as side-to-side. Randy has never felt more trapped between a capricious and dangerous heaven and a hellish underworld. This place is as steeped in religion as India, but all of it is Catholic.

At the northern end of Intramuros is a little business district. It is sandwiched between Manila Cathedral and Fort Santiago, which the Spaniards constructed to command the outlet of the Pasig River. You can tell it's a business district because of the phone wires. As in other Rapidly Developing Asian Economies, it is difficult to tell whether these are pirate wires, or official ones that have been incredibly badly installed. They are a case study in why incrementalism is bad. The bundles are so thick in some places that Randy probably could not wrap both arms around them. Their weight and tension have begun to pull the phone poles over, especially at curves in the roads, where the wires go round a corner and exert a net sideways force on the pole.

All of these buildings are constructed in the least expensive way conceivable: concrete poured in place in wooden forms, over grids of hand-tied rebar. They are blocky, grey, and completely indistinguishable from one another. A couple of much taller buildings, twenty or thirty stories, loom over the district from a big intersection nearby, wind and birds circulating through their broken windows. They were badly shaken up in an earthquake during the 1980s and have not been put to rights yet.