Cryptonomicon (13 page)

Waterhouse’s security clearance is upgraded about once a month, until it reaches the highest conceivable level (or so he thinks) which is Ultra/Magic. Ultra is what the Brits call the intelligence they get from having broken the German Enigma machine. Magic is what the Yanks call the intelligence they get from Indigo. In any case, Lawrence now gets to see the Ultra/Magic summaries, which are bound documents with dramatic, alternating red and black paragraphs printed on the front cover. Paragraph number three states:

NO ACTION IS TO BE TAKEN ON INFORMATION HEREIN REPORTED, REGARDLESS OF TEMPORARY ADVANTAGE, IF SUCH ACTION MIGHT HAVE THE EFFECT OF REVEALING THE EXISTENCE OF THE SOURCE TO THE ENEMY.

Seems clear enough, right? But Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is not so damn sure.

. . . IF SUCH ACTION MIGHT HAVE THE EFFECT OF REVEALING…

At about the same time, Waterhouse has made a realization about himself. He has found that he works best when he is not horny, which is to say in the day or so following ejaculation. So as a part of his duty to the United States he has begun to spend a lot of time in whorehouses. But he can’t have that much actual sex on what is still a glockenspiel player’s pay and so he limits himself to what are euphemistically called massages.

. . . ACTION… EFFECT… REVEALING…

The words stay with him like the clap. He lies on his back during these massages, arms crossed over his eyes, mumbling the words to himself. Something bothers him. He has learned that when something bothers him in this particular way it usually leads to his writing a new paper. But first he has to do a lot of hard mental pick-and-shovel work.

It all comes to him, explosively, during the Battle of Midway, while he and his comrades are spending twenty-four hours a day down among those ETC machines, decrypting Yamamoto’s messages, telling Nimitz exactly where to find the Nip fleet.

What are the chances of Nimitz finding that fleet by accident? That’s what Yamamoto must be asking himself.

It is all a question (oddly enough!) of information theory.

. . . ACTION…

What is an action? It might be anything. It might be something obvious like bombing a Nipponese military installation. Everyone would agree that this would constitute an action. But it might also be something like changing the course of an aircraft carrier by five degrees—or
not
doing so. Or having exactly the right package of forces off Midway to hammer the Nipponese invasion fleet. It could mean something much less dramatic, like canceling plans for an action. An action, in a certain sense, might even be the total absence of activity. Any of these might be rational responses, on the part of some commander, to INFORMATION HEREIN REPORTED. But any of them might be observable by the Nipponese—and hence any of them would impart information to the Nipponese. How good might those Nips be at abstracting information from a noisy channel? Do they have any Schoens?

. . . EFFECT…

So what if the Nips did observe it? What would the
effect
be exactly? And under what circumstances might the effect be REVEALING THE EXISTENCE OF THE SOURCE TO THE ENEMY?

If the action is one that could never have happened unless the Americans were breaking Indigo, then it will constitute proof, to the Nipponese, that the Americans have broken it. The existence of the source—the machine that Commander Schoen built—will be revealed.

Waterhouse trusts that no Americans will be that stupid. But what if it isn’t that clear-cut? What if the action is one that would merely be
really improbable
unless the Americans were breaking the code? What if the Americans, in the long run, are just too damn lucky?

And how closely can you play that game? A pair of loaded dice that comes up sevens every time is detected in a few throws. A pair that comes up sevens only one percent more frequently than a straight pair is harder to detect—you have to throw the dice many more times in order for your opponent to prove anything.

If the Nips keep getting ambushed—if they keep finding their own ambushes spoiled—if their merchant ships happen
to cross paths with American subs more often than pure probability would suggest—how long until they figure it out?

Waterhouse writes papers on the subject, keeps pestering people with them. Then, one day, Waterhouse receives a new set of orders.

The orders arrive encrypted into groups of five random-looking letters, printed out on the blue tissue paper that is used for top-secret cablegrams. The message has been encrypted in Washington using a one-time pad, which is a slow and awkward but, in theory, perfectly unbreakable cipher used for the most important messages. Waterhouse knows this because he is one of the only two persons in Pearl Harbor who has clearance to decrypt it. The other one is Commander Schoen, and he is under sedation today. The duty officer opens up the appropriate safe and gives him the one-time pad for the day, which is basically a piece of graph paper covered with numbers printed in groups of five. The numbers have been chosen by secretaries in a basement in Washington by shuffling cards or drawing chits out of a hat. They are pure noise. One copy of the pure noise is in Waterhouse’s hands, and the other copy is used by the person who encrypted this message in Washington.

Waterhouse sits down and gets to work, subtracting noise from ciphertext to produce plaintext.

The first thing he sees is that this message’s classification is not merely Top Secret, or even Ultra, but something entirely new: ULTRA MEGA.

The messages states that after thoroughly destroying this message, he—Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse—is to proceed to London, England, by the fastest available means. All ships, trains, and airplanes, even submarines, will be made available to him. Though a member of the U.S. Navy, he is even to be provided with an extra uniform—an Army uniform—in case it simplifies matters for him.

The one thing he must never, ever do is place himself in a situation where he could be captured by the enemy. In this sense, the war is suddenly over for Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse.

A
NETWORK OF
C
HUNNEL-SIZED AIR DUCTS AS VAST
and unfathomable as the global Internet ramifies through the thick walls and ceilings of the hotel and makes dim, attenuated noises that suggest that hidden deep within that system are jet engine proving grounds, Iron Age smithys, wretched prisoners draped with clanging chains, and writhing clumps of snakes. Randy knows that the system is not a closed loop—that it is somewhere connected to the earth’s atmosphere—because faint street smells drift in from outside. For all he knows, they may take an hour to work their way into his room. After he has been living there for a couple of weeks, the smells come to function as an olfactory alarm clock. He sleeps to the smell of diesel exhaust because the traffic conditions of Manila require that the container ships load and unload only at night. Manila sprawls along a warm and placid bay that is an infinite reservoir of mugginess, and because the atmosphere is as thick and opaque and hot as a glass of milk straight from the cow’s udder, it begins to glow when the sun rises. At this, Manila’s regiments and divisions of fighting cocks, imprisoned in makeshift hutches on every rooftop, balcony and yard, begin to crow. The people come awake and begin to burn coal. Coal smoke is the smell that wakes Randy up.

Randy Waterhouse is in merely decent physical condition. His doctor ritualistically tells him that he could lose twenty pounds, but it’s not obvious where that twenty pounds would actually come from—he has no beer gut, no flagrant love handles. The offending pounds seem to be spread evenly over his keglike torso. Or so he tells himself every morning, standing in front of the billboard-sized mirror of his suite. Randy and Charlene’s house in California contains practically no mirrors and he had lost track of what he looks like. Now he sees that he has become atavistically
hairy, and his beard glints, because it is shot through with grey hairs.

Every day, he dares himself to shave that beard off. In the tropics, you want to have as much skin as possible exposed to the air, with sweat sheeting down it.

One evening when Avi and his family had been over for dinner, Randy had said, “I’m the beard, Avi’s the suit,” as a way of explaining their business relationship, and from that point Charlene had been off and running. Charlene has recently finished a scholarly article, deconstructing beards. In particular, she was aiming at beard culture in the Northern California high-tech community—Randy’s crowd. Her paper began by demolishing, somehow, the assumption that beards were more “natural” or easier to maintain than clean-shavenness—she actually published statistics from Gillette’s research department comparing the amount of time that bearded and beardless men spent in the bathroom each day, proving that the difference was not statistically significant. Randy had any number of objections to the way in which these statistics were gathered, but Charlene was having none of it. “It is counterintuitive,” she said.

She was in a big hurry to move on to the meat of her argument. She went up to San Francisco and bought a few hundred dollars’ worth of pornography at a boîte that catered to shaving fetishists. For a couple of weeks, Randy couldn’t come home in the evening without finding Charlene sacked out in front of the TV with a bowl of popcorn and a Dictaphone, watching a video of a straight razor being drawn along wet, soapy flesh. She taped a few lengthy interviews with some actual shaving fetishists who described in great detail the feeling of nakedness and vulnerability shaving gave them, and how erotic that was, especially when freshly shaved areas were slapped or spanked. She worked up a detailed comparison of the iconography of shaving-fetishist porn and that of shaving-product commercials shown on national TV during football games, and proved that they were basically indistinguishable (you could actually buy videotapes of bootleg shaving-cream and razor ads in the same places that sold the out-and-out pornography).

She pulled down statistics on racial variation in beard
growth. American Indians didn’t grow beards, Asians hardly did, Africans were a special case because daily shaving gave them a painful skin condition. “The ability to grow heavy, full beards as a matter of choice appears to be a privilege accorded by nature solely to white males,” she wrote.

Alarm bells, red lights, and screaming klaxons went off in Randy’s mind when he happened across that phrase.

“But this assertion buys into a specious subsumption. ‘Nature’ is a socially constructed discourse, not an objective reality [many footnotes here]. That is doubly true in the case of the ‘nature’ that accords full beards to the specific minority population of northern European males.
Homo sapiens
evolved in climatic zones where facial hair was of little practical use. The development of an offshoot of the species characterized by densely bearded males is an adaptive response to cold climates. These climates did not ‘naturally’ invade the habitats of early humans—rather, the humans invaded geographical regions where such climates prevailed. This geographical transgression was strictly a sociocultural event and so all physical adaptations to it must be placed in the same category—including the development of dense facial hair.”

Charlene published the results of a survey she had organized, in which a few hundred women were asked for their opinions. Essentially all of them said that they preferred clean-shaven men to those who were either stubbly or bearded. In short order, Charlene proved that having a beard was just one element of a syndrome strongly correlated to racist and sexist attitudes, and to the pattern of emotional unavailability so often bemoaned by the female partners of white males, especially ones who were technologically oriented.

“The boundary between Self and Environment is a social con[struct]. In Western cultures this boundary is supposed to be sharp and distinct. The beard is an outward symbol of that boundary, a distancing technique. To shave off the beard (or any body hair) is to symbolically annihilate the (essentially specious) boundary separating Self from Other…”

And so on. The paper was rapturously received by the peer reviewers and immediately accepted for publication in
a major international journal. Charlene is presenting some related work at the War as Text conference: “Unshavenness as Signifier in World War II Movies.” On the strength of her beard work, three different Ivy League schools are fighting over who will get to hire her.

Randy does not want to move to the East Coast. Worse yet, he has a full beard, which makes him feel dreadfully incorrect whenever he ventures out with her. He proposed to Charlene that perhaps he should issue a press release stating that he shaves the rest of his body every day. She did not think it was very funny. He realized, when he was halfway over the Pacific Ocean, that all of her work was basically an elaborate prophecy of the doom of their relationship.

Now he is thinking of shaving his beard off. He might do his scalp and his upper body, while he’s at it.

He is in the habit of doing a lot of vigorous walking. By the standards of the body nazis who infest California and Seattle, this is only a marginal improvement over (say) sitting in front of a television chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes and eating suet from a tub. But he has stuck to his walking doggedly while his friends have taken up fitness fads and dropped them. It has become a point of pride with him, and he’s not about to stop just because he is living in Manila.

But damn, it’s hot. Hairlessness would be a good thing here.

Only two good things came out of Randy’s ill-fated First Business Foray with the food-gathering software. First, it scared him away from trying to do any kind of business, at least until he had the foggiest idea of what he was getting into. Second, he developed a lasting friendship with Avi, his old gaming buddy, now in Minneapolis, who displayed integrity and a good sense of humor.

At the suggestion of his lawyer (who by that point was one of his major creditors), Randy declared personal bankruptcy and then moved to central California with Charlene. She had gotten her Ph.D. and landed a teaching-assistant job at one of the Three Siblings. Randy enrolled at another Sibling with the aim of getting his master’s degree in as
tronomy. This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.

Within a month of his arrival, Randy solved some trivial computer problems for one of the other grad students. A week later, the chairman of the astronomy department called him over and said, “So, you’re the UNIX guru.” At the time, Randy was still stupid enough to be flattered by this attention, when he should have recognized them as bone-chilling words.

Three years later, he left the Astronomy Department without a degree, and with nothing to show for his labors except six hundred dollars in his bank account and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX. Later, he was to calculate that, at the going rates for programmers, the department had extracted about a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of work from him, in return for an outlay of less than twenty thousand. The only compensation was that his knowledge didn’t seem so useless anymore. Astronomy had become a highly networked discipline, and you could now control a telescope on another continent, or in orbit, by typing commands into your keyboard, watching the images it produced on your monitor.

Randy was now superbly knowledgeable when it came to networks. Years ago, this would have been of limited usefulness. But this was the age of networked applications, the dawn of the World Wide Web, and the timing couldn’t have been better.

In the meantime, Avi had moved to San Francisco and started a new company that was going to take role-playing games out of the nerd-ghetto and make them mainstream. Randy signed on as the head technologist. He tried to recruit Chester, but he’d already taken a job with a software company back up in Seattle. So they brought in a guy who had worked for a few video game companies, and later they brought in some other guys to do hardware and communications, and they raised enough seed money to build a playable prototype. Using that as their dog-and-pony show, they went down to Hollywood and found someone to back
them to the tune of ten million dollars. They rented out some industrial space in Gilroy, filled it full of graphics workstations, hired a lot of sharp programmers and a few artists, and went to work.

Six months later, they were frequently mentioned as among Silicon Valley’s rising stars, and Randy got a little photograph in
Time
magazine in an article about Siliwood—the growing collaboration between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. A year after that, the entire enterprise had crashed and burned.

This was an epic tale not worth telling. The conventional wisdom circa the early nineties had been that the technical wizards of Northern California would meet the creative minds of Southern California halfway and create a brilliant new collaboration. But this was rooted in a naive view of what Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank—a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium. The goal was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the talent had been paid off and sent packing.
Casablanca,
for example, was still putting asses in seats decades after Bogart had been paid off and smoked himself into an early grave.

In the view of Hollywood, the techies of Silicon Valley were just a particularly naive form of talent. So when the technology reached a certain point—the point where it could be marketed to a certain large Nipponese electronics company at a substantial profit—the backers of Avi’s company staged a lightning coup that had obviously been lovingly planned. Randy and the others were given a choice: they could leave the company now and hold on to some of their stock, which was still worth a decent amount of money. Or they could stay—in which case they would find themselves sabotaged from within by fifth columnists who had been infiltrated into key positions. At the same time they would be besieged from without by lawyers demanding their heads for the things that were suddenly going wrong.

Some of the founders stayed on as court eunuchs. Most of them left the company, and of that group, most sold their stock immediately because they could see it was going nowhere but down. The company was gutted by the transfer of its technology to Japan, and the empty husk eventually dried up and blew away.

Even today, bits and pieces of the technology keep popping up in the oddest places, such as advertisements for new video game platforms. It always gives Randy the creeps to see this. When it all started to go wrong, the Nipponese tried to hire him directly, and he actually made some money flying over there to work, for a week or a month at a time, as a consultant. But they couldn’t keep the technology running with the programmers they had, and so it hasn’t lived up to its potential.

Thus ended Randy’s Second Business Foray. He came out of it with a couple of hundred thousand dollars, most of which he plowed into the Victorian house he shares with Charlene. He hadn’t trusted himself with that much liquid cash, and locking it up in the house gave him a feeling of safety, like reaching home base in a frenzied game of full-contact tag.

He has spent the years since running the Three Siblings’ computer system. He hasn’t made much money, but he hasn’t had much stress either.

Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally.