Cryptonomicon

He passes by a restaurant with a squat concrete blockhouse in front, its openings covered with blackened steel grates, rusty exhaust pipes sticking out the top to vent the diesel generator locked inside. NO BROWN OUT has been proudly stenciled all over it. Beyond that is a postwar office building, four stories high, with an especially thick sheaf of telephone wires running into it. The logo of a bank is bolted to the front of the building, down low. There is angle parking in front. The two spaces in front of the main entrance are blocked off with hand-painted signs: RESERVED FOR ARMORED CAR and RESERVED FOR BANK MANAGER. A couple of guards stand in front of the entrance clutching the fat wooden pistol grips of riot guns, weapons that have the hulking, cartoonish appearance of action-figure accessories. One of the guards remains behind a bulletproof podium with a sign on it: PLEASE DEPOSIT GUNS/FIREARMS TO THE GUARD.

Randy exchanges nods with the gunmen and goes into the building's lobby, which is just as hot as outside. Bypassing the bank, ignoring the unreliable elevators, he goes through a steel door that takes him into a narrow stairwell. Today, it is dark. The building's electrical system is a patchwork--several different systems coexisting in the same space, controlled by different panels, some on generators and some not. So blackouts begin and end in phases. Somewhere near the top of the stairwell, small birds chirp, competing with the sound of car alarms being set off outside.

Epiphyte Corp. rents the building's top floor, although he is the only person working there so far. He keys his way in. Thank god; the air conditioning has been working. The money they paid for their own generator was worth it. He disables the alarm systems, goes to the fridge, and gets two one-liter bottles of water. His rule of thumb, after a walk, is to drink water until he begins to urinate again. Then he can consider other activities.

He is too sweaty to sit down. He must keep moving so that the cold dry air will flow around his body. He flicks globes of sweat out of his beard and does an orbit of the floor, looking out the windows, checking out the lines of sight. He pulls a ballistic nylon traveler's wallet out of his trousers and lets it dangle from his belt loop so that the skin underneath it can breathe. It contains his passport, a virgin credit card, ten crisp new hundred dollar bills, and a floppy disk with his 4096-bit encryption key on it.

Northwards he can survey the greens and ramparts of Fort Santiago, where phalanxes of Nipponese tourists toil, recording their fun with forensic determination. Beyond that is the Pasig River, choked with floating debris. Across the river is Quiapo, a built-up area: high-rise apartment and office buildings with corporate names emblazoned on their top storeys and satellite dishes on the roofs.

Unwilling to stop moving just yet, Randy strolls clockwise around the office. Intramuros is ringed with a belt of green, its former moat. He has just walked up its western verge. The eastern one is studded with heavy neoclassical buildings housing various government ministries. The Post and Telecommunications Authority sits on the Pasig's edge, at a vertex in the river from which three closely spaced bridges radiate into Quiapo. Beyond the large new structures above the river, Quiapo and the adjoining neighborhood of San Miguel are a patchwork of giant institutions: a train station, an old prison, many universities, and Malacanang Palace, which is farther up the Pasig.

Back on this side of the river, it is Intramuros in the foreground (cathedrals and churches surrounded by dormant land), government institutions, colleges, and universities in the middle ground, and, beyond that, a seemingly infinite sprawl of low-lying, smoky city. Miles to the south is the gleaming business city of Makati, built around a square where two big roads intersect at an acute angle, echoing the intersecting runways at NAIA, a bit farther south. An emerald city of big houses perched on big lawns spreads away from Makati: it is where the ambassadors and corporate presidents live. Continuing his clockwise stroll he can follow Roxas Boulevard coming toward him up the seawall, marked by a picket line of tall palm trees. Manila Bay is jammed with heavy shipping, big cargo ships filling the water like logs in a boom. The container port is just below him to the west: a grid of warehouses on reclaimed land that is about as flat, and as natural, as a sheet of particle board.

If he looks over the cranes and containers, due west across the bay, he can barely make out the mountainous silhouette of the Bata'an Peninsula, some forty miles distant. Following its black skyline southwards--tracing the route taken by the Nipponese in '42--he can almost resolve a lump lying off its southern tip. That would be the island of Corregidor. This is the first time he's ever been able to see it; the air is unusually clear today.