Cryptonomicon (37 page)

Randy closes that one without responding. Avi doesn’t want them talking to Secret Admirers for fear that they will later be accused of stealing someone’s ideas, so the reply to all of these e-mails is a form letter that Avi paid some intellectual property lawyer about ten thousand dollars to draft.

He reads another message simply because of the return address:

From: [email protected]

On a UNIX machine, “root” is the name of the most godlike of all users, the one who can read, erase, or edit any file, who can run any program, who can sign up new users and terminate existing ones. So receiving a message from someone who has the account name “root” is like getting a letter from someone who has the title “President” or “General” on his letterhead. Randy’s been root on a few different systems, some of which were worth tens of millions of dollars, and professional courtesy demands he at least read this message.

I read about your project.
Why are you doing it?

followed by an Ordo signature block.

One has to assume this is an attempt to launch some sort of philosophical debate. Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time. And yet the “root” address either means that this person is in charge of a large computer installation, or (much more likely) has a Finux box on his desk at home. Even a home Finux user has got to be several cuts above your average Internet-surfing dilettante.

Randy opens up a terminal window and types

whois eruditorum.org

and a second later gets back a block of text from the InterNIC:

eruditorum.org (Societas Eruditorum)

followed by a mailing address: a P.O. Box in Leipzig, Germany.

After that a few contact numbers are listed. All of them have the Seattle area code. But the three-digit exchanges, after the area code, look familiar to Randy, and he recognizes them as gateways into a forwarding service, popular among the highly mobile, that will bounce your voice mail, faxes, etc. to wherever you happen to be at the moment. Avi, for example, uses it all the time.

Scrolling down, Randy finds:

Record last updated on 18-Nov-98.
Record created on 1-Mar-90.

The “90” jumps out. That’s a prehistoric date by Internet standards. It means that Societas Eruditorum was way ahead of the game. Especially for a group based in Leipzig, which was part of East Germany until about then.

Domain servers in listed order:
NS.SF.LAUNDRY.ORG

. . . followed by the dotted quad for laundry.org, which is a packet anonymizer used by many Secret Admirers to render their communications untraceable.

It all adds up to nothing, yet Randy can’t get away with assuming that this message came from a bored sixteen-year-old. He should probably make some token response. But he’s afraid that it’ll turn out to be a come-on for some kind of business proposition: probably some mangy high-tech company that’s looking for capital.

In the latest version of the business plan, there is probably some explanation of why Epiphyte(2) is building the Crypt. Randy can simply cut and paste it into an e-mail reply to [email protected]. It’ll be something vaporous and shareholder-pleasing, and therefore kind of alienating. With any luck it will discourage this person from pestering him anymore. Randy double-clicks on Ordo’s eyeball/pyramid icon, and it opens up a little text window on the screen, where he is invited to type commands. Ordo’s also got a lovely graphical user interface, but Randy scorns it. No menus or buttons for him. He types

>decrypt epiphyteBizPlan.5.4.ordo

The computer responds

verify your identity: enter the pass phrase or “bio” to opt for biometric verification.

Before Ordo will decrypt the file, it needs to have the private key: all 4096 bits of it. The key is stored on Randy’s hard disk. But bad guys can break into hotel rooms and read the contents of hard disks, so the key itself has been encrypted. In order to decrypt it, Ordo needs the key to the key, which (in Cantrell’s one concession to user-friendliness) is a pass phrase: a string of words, easier to remember than 4096 binary digits. But it has to be a long phrase or else it’s too easy to break.

The last time Randy changed his pass phrase, he was reading another World War II memoir. He types:

>with hoarse shouts of “banzai!” the drunken Nips swarmed out of their trenches, their swords and bayonets flashing in the beams of our searchlights

and hits the “return” key. Ordo responds:

incorrect pass phrase
reenter the pass phrase or “bio” to use biometric verification.

Randy curses and tries it a few more times, with slight changes in punctuation. Nothing works.

In desperation and out of curiosity, he tries:

bio

and the software responds:

unable to locate biometric configuration file. Talk to Cantrell :-/

Which is of course not a normal part of the software. Ordo does not come with biometric verification, nor do its error messages refer to John Cantrell, or anyone else, by name. Cantrell has apparently written a plug-in module, a little add-on, and distributed it to his friends in Epiphyte(2).

“Fine,” Randy says, picks up his phone, and dials John Cantrell’s room number. This being a brand-new, modern hotel, he gets a voice mail box in which John has actually bothered to record an informative greeting.

“This is John Cantrell of Novus Ordo Seclorum and Epiphyte Corporations. For those of you who have reached me using my universal phone number and consequently have no idea where I am: I am in the Hotel Foote Mansion in the Sultanate of Kinakuta—please consult a quality atlas.
It is four o’clock in the afternoon, Thursday March twenty-first. I’m probably down in the Bomb and Grapnel.”

The Bomb and Grapnel is the pirate-themed hotel bar, which is not as cheesy as it sounds. It is decorated with (among other museum-grade memorabilia) several brass cannons that seem authentic. John Cantrell is seated at a corner table, looking as at home here as a man in a black cowboy hat possibly can. His laptop is open on the table next to a rum drink that has been served up in a soup tureen. A two-foot-long straw connects it to Cantrell’s mouth. He sucks and types. Watching incredulously is a cadre of tough-looking Chinese businessmen sitting at the bar; when they see Randy coming in, carrying his own laptop, they buzz up.
Now there’s two of them!

Cantrell looks up and grins—something he cannot do without looking fiendish. He and Randy shake hands triumphantly. Even though they’ve only been riding around on 747s, they feel like Stanley and Livingstone.

“Nice tan,” Cantrell says puckishly, all but twirling his mustache. Randy’s caught off guard, starts and stops talking twice, finally shakes his head in defeat. Both men laugh.

“I got the tan on boats,” Randy says, “not by the hotel pool. The last couple of weeks, I’ve been putting out fires all over the place.”

“Nothing that’ll impact shareholder value, I hope,” Cantrell deadpans.

Randy says, “You’re looking encouragingly pale.”

“Everything’s fine on my end,” Cantrell says. “It’s like I predicted—lots of Secret Admirers want to work on a real data haven.”

Randy orders a Guinness and says, “You also predicted that a lot of those people would turn out to be squirrelly and undisciplined.”

“Didn’t hire those,” Cantrell says. “And with Eb to handle the weird stuff, we’ve been able to roll right over the few speed bumps we’ve encountered.”

“Have you seen the Crypt?”

Cantrell raises an eyebrow and shoots him a flawless im
itation of a paranoid glance. “It’s like that NORAD command bunker in Colorado Springs,” he says.

“Yeah!” Randy laughs. “Cheyenne Mountain.”

“It’s too big,” Cantrell announces. He knows Randy is thinking the same thing.

So Randy decides to play devil’s advocate. “But the sultan does everything big. There are big paintings of him in the big airport.”

Cantrell shakes his head. “The Information Ministry is a serious project. The sultan didn’t just make it up. His technocrats conceived it.”

“I’m told Avi did a little bit of deft turkey-baster work…”

“Whatever. But the people behind it, like Mohammed Pragasu, are all Stanford B-School types. Oxford and Sorbonne graduates. It’s been engineered to the doorstops by Germans. That cave is not a monument to the sultan.”

“No, it’s not a vanity project,” Randy agrees, thinking of the chilly machine room that Tom Howard is building a thousand feet below the cloud forest.

“So there must be some
rational
explanation for how big it is.”

“Maybe it’s in the business plan?” ventures Randy.

Cantrell shrugs; he hasn’t read it either. “The last one I read cover-to-cover was Plan One. A year ago,” admits Randy.

“That was a good business plan,” Cantrell says.
^*

Randy changes the subject. “I forgot my pass phrase. Need to do that biometric thing with you.”

“It’s too noisy here,” Cantrell says, “it works by listening to your voice, doing Fourier shit, remembering a few key numbers. We’ll do it in my room later.”

Feeling some need to explain why he hasn’t been keeping up with his e-mail, Randy says, “I have been totally obsessed, interfacing with these AVCLA people in Manila.”

“Yup. How’s that going?”

“Look. My job’s pretty simple,” Randy says. “There’s that big Nipponese cable from Taiwan down to Luzon. A router at each end. Then there’s the network of short-run, interisland cables that the AVCLA people are laying in the Philippines. Each cable segment begins and ends at a router, as you know. My job is to program the routers, make sure the data will always have a clear path from Taiwan to Kinakuta.”

Cantrell glances away, worried that he’s about to get bored. Randy practically lunges across the table, because he knows it’s not boring. “John! You are a major credit card company!”

“Okay.” Cantrell meets his gaze, slightly unnerved.

“You are storing your data in the Kinakuta data haven. You need to download a terabyte of crucial data. You begin the process—your encrypted bytes are screaming up through the Philippines at a gigabyte per second, to Taiwan, from there across to the States.” Randy pauses and swigs Guinness, building the drama. “Then a ferry capsizes off Cebu.”

“So?”

“So, in the space of ten minutes, a hundred thousand Filipinos all pick up their telephones simultaneously.”

Cantrell actually whacks his forehead. “Oh, my god!”

“Now you understand! I’ve been configuring this network so that no matter what happens, the data continues to flow to that credit-card company. Maybe at a reduced speed—but it flows.”

“Well, I can see how that would keep you busy.”

“And that’s why all I’m really up to speed on is these routers. And incidentally they’re good routers, but they just don’t have enough capacity to feed a Crypt of that size, or justify it economically.”

“The gist of Avi and Beryl’s explanation,” Cantrell says, “is that Epiphyte is no longer the sole carrier into the Crypt.”

“But we’re laying the cable here from Palawan—”

“The sultan’s minions have been out drumming up business,” Cantrell says. “Avi and Beryl are being vague, but from comparing notes with Tom, and reading tea leaves,
methinks there’s one, maybe two other cables coming into Kinakuta.”

“Wow!” Randy says. It’s all he can think of. “Wow!” He drinks about half of his Guinness. “It makes sense. If they’re doing it once with us, they can do it again, with other carriers.”