Cryptonomicon (117 page)

Randy is looking at Kepler pretty carefully when he says this, and there’s no doubt that genuine astonishment is now spreading across the Dentist’s face. The Dentist only has one facial expression (already described) but it changes in intensity; it gets more so and less so depending on his emotions. The Dentist’s expression proves he had no idea, until now, that Randy’s been allowed to have a computer in his cell. In the trying-to-figure-out-what-the-fuck-is-going-on department, the computer is the single most important datum, and Kepler didn’t even know about it until just now. So to whatever extent the Dentist actually gives a shit, he has a lot of thinking to do. He excuses himself pretty soon after.

Not half an hour later, some twenty-five-year-old American guy with a ponytail shows up and has a brief audience with Randy. It turns out that he works for Chester in Seattle and has just now flown across the Pacific on Chester’s personal jet and came here straight from the airport. He is completely jazzed, totally in bat-out-of-hell mode, and cannot shut up. The sheer amazingness of his sudden flight across the ocean on a rich guy’s private jet has made a really, really deep impression on him and he obviously needs someone to share it with. He has brought a “care package” consisting of some junk food, a few trashy novels, the largest bottle of Pepto-Bismol Randy’s ever seen, a CD Walkman,
and a cubical stack of CDs. This guy can’t get over the battery thing; he was told to bring a lot of extra batteries, and so he did, and sure enough, between the luggage guys at the airport and the customs inspectors, all of the batteries disappeared en route except for one package that he’s got in the pocket of his long baggy Seattle-grunge-boy shorts. Seattle’s full of guys like this who flipped a coin when they graduated from college (heads Prague, tails Seattle) and just showed up with this expectation that because they were young and smart they’d find a job and begin making money, and then appallingly enough did exactly that. Randy can’t figure out what the world must look like to a guy like this. He has a hard time getting rid of the guy, who shares the common assumption (increasingly annoying) that just because Randy’s in jail, he doesn’t have a life, has nothing better to do than interface with visitors.

When Randy gets back to his cell, he sits crosslegged on his bed with the Walkman and begins dealing out the CDs like cards in a solitaire game. The selection is pretty reasonable: a two-disc set of the Brandenburg Concertos, a collection of Bach organ fugues (nerds have a thing about Bach), some Louis Armstrong, some Wynton Marsalis, and then various selections from Hammerdown Systems, which is a Seattle-based record label in which Chester is a major investor. It is a second-generation Seattle-scene record label; all of its artists are young people who came to Seattle after they graduated from college in search of the legendary Seattle music scene and discovered that it didn’t really exist—it was just a couple of dozen guys who sat around playing guitar in one another’s basements—and so who were basically forced to choose between going home in ignominy or fabricating the Seattle music scene of their imagination from whole cloth. This led to the establishment of any number of small clubs, and the foundation of many bands, that were not rooted in any kind of authentic reality whatsoever but merely reflected the dreams and aspiration of pan-global young adults who had all flocked to Seattle on the same chimera hunt. This second wave scene came in for a lot of abuse from those of the original two dozen people who had not yet died of drug overdose or suicide. There
was something of a backlash; and yet, about thirty-six hours after the backlash reached its maximum intensity, there was an antibacklash backlash from young immigrants who asserted their right to some kind of unique cultural identity as people who had naively come to Seattle and discovered that there was no there there and that they would have to create it themselves. Fueled by that conviction, and by their own youthful libidinous energy, and by a few cultural commentators who found this whole scenario fetchingly post-modern, they started a whole lot of second-generation bands and even a couple of record labels, of which Hammerdown Systems is the only one that didn’t either go out of business or get turned into a wholly-owned subsidiary of an L.A. or New York-based major label inside of six months.

And so Chester has decided to favor Randy with those recent Hammerdown selections of which he is most proud. Perversely, almost all of these are from bands that are not even in Seattle at all but in small, prohibitively hip college towns in North Carolina and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. But Randy does find one from an evidently Seattle-based band called Shekondar.
Evidently,
that is, because on the back of the CD is a blurry photograph of several band members drinking sixteen-ounce lattes in cups bearing the logo of a chain of coffee bars that as far as Randy knows has not yet burst free from the city limits of Seattle to crush everything in its path worldwide in the now wearisomely predictable manner of Seattle-based companies. Now, Shekondar happens to have been the name of an especially foul underworld deity who played an important role in some of the game scenarios that Randy played with Avi and Chester and the gang back in the old days. Randy opens up the case of the CD and notes immediately that the disc has the golden hue of a master, not the traditional silver of a mere copy. Randy puts that golden master into his Walkman and hits the Play button and is treated to some passable post-Cobain-mortem material, genetically engineered to have nothing in common with what is traditionally thought of as the Seattle sound and in that sense absolutely typical of Seattle du jour. He jumps
forward through a couple more tracks and then rips the earphones off his head, cursing, as the Walkman attempts to translate a stream of pure digital information, representing something other than music, into sound. This feels a bit like needles of dry ice jabbed into his eardrums.

Randy moves the golden disc to the CD-ROM drive that is built into his laptop, and checks it out. Indeed it does sport a couple of audio tracks (as he’s discovered) but almost all of the disc’s capacity is given over to computer files. There are several directories, or folders, each named after one of the documents that was in grandfather’s trunk. Within each of these directories is a long list of files named PAGE.001.jpeg, PAGE.002.jpeg, and so on. Randy starts opening them up, using the same net-browser software that he uses to read the
Cryptonomicon
, and discovers that they are all scanned image files. Evidently Chester had a bunch of minions de-staple those documents and feed them page by page through a scanner. At the same time he must have had graphic artists, presumably people he knows through Hammerdown Systems, hastily whipping up this fake Shekondar album cover. It’s even got a package insert, photographs of Shekondar in concert. What it really is is a parody of the post-Seattle Scene Seattle scene that aligns perfectly with the faulty notions of same that could be expected in the imagination of a Philippine airport customs inspector, who like everyone else is fantasizing about moving to Seattle. The lead guitarist looks kind of like Chester in a wig.

All of this sneaky stuff is probably gratuitous. It probably would have been okay for Chester to just Fedex the fucking documents straight to the jail. But Chester, sitting in his house by Lake Washington, is working on a set of assumptions about Manila just as faulty as what half of the world believes about Seattle. At least Randy gets a laugh out of it before diving into zeta functions.

A word about libido: it’s been something like three weeks for Randy now. He was just beginning to address this situation when a highly intelligent and perceptive Catholic ex-priest was suddenly introduced into the cell next to his and began sleeping six inches away from him. Since then,
masturbation per se has been pretty much out of the question. To the extent Randy believes in any god at all, he’s been praying for a nocturnal emission. His prostate gland now has the size and consistency of a croquet ball. He feels it all the time, and has begun to think of it as his Hunk of Burning Love. Randy had a spot of prostate trouble once when he was chronically drinking too much coffee, and it made everything between his nipples and his knees hurt. The urologist explained that Little Man ‘tate is neurologically wired into just about every other part of your body, and he didn’t have to exert any rhetorical skill, or marshall any detailed arguments, in order to make Randy believe that. Randy has believed, ever since, that the ability of men to become moronically obsessed with copulation is in some way a reflection of this wiring diagram; when you are ready to give the external world the benefit of your genetic material, i.e. when the ‘tate is fully loaded, even your pinkies and eyelids know about it.

And so it might be expected that Randy would be thinking all the time about America Shaftoe, his sexual target of choice, who (just to make things a lot worse) has probably been spending a lot of time in wetsuits lately. And indeed that is where his thoughts were directed at the moment Enoch Root was dragged in. But since then it has become evident that he needs to exercise some kind of iron mental discipline here and not think about Amy at all. Whilst juggling all of those chainsaws and puppies, he is also walking a sort of intellectual tightrope, with decryption of the Arethusa intercepts at the end of that tightrope, and as long as he keeps his eyes fixed on that goal and just keeps putting one foot in front of the other, he’ll get there. Amy-in-a-wetsuit is down below somewhere, no doubt trying to be emotionally supportive, but if he even glances in her direction he’s a goner.

What he’s reading here is a set of academic papers, dating to the 1930s and early forties, that have been heavily marked up by his grandfather, who went through them none-too-subtly gleaning anything that could be useful on the cryptographic front. That it’s none too subtle is a good thing for Randy, whose grasp of pure number theory is just
barely adequate here. Chester’s minions had to scan not only the fronts of these pages but the backs too, which were originally blank but on which Grandpa wrote many notes. For example there is a paper written by Alan Turing in 1937 in which Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has found some kind of error, or at least, something that Turing didn’t go into in sufficient detail, forcing him to cover several pages with annotations. Randy’s blood absolutely runs cold at the very idea that he is being so presumptuous as to participate in such a colloquy. When he realizes just how deep over his head he is intellectually, he turns off his computer and goes to bed and sleeps the bootless sleep of the depressed for ten hours. Eventually he convinces himself that most of the junk in these papers probably has no direct relevance to Arethusa and that he just needs to calm down and filter the material carefully.

Two weeks pass. His prayers vis-à-vis the Hunk of Burning Love are answered, giving him at least a couple of days of relief during which he can admit the concept of Amy Shaftoe into his awareness, but only in a really austere and passionless way. Attorney Alejandro shows up occasionally to tell Randy that things are not going very well. Surprising obstacles have arisen. All of the people he was planning to bribe have been preemptively counter-bribed by Someone. These meetings are tedious for Randy, who thinks he has figured everything out. To begin with it’s Wing, and not the Dentist, who has caused all of this, and so Attorney Alejandro’s working on faulty assumptions.

Enoch, when he called Randy on the plane, said his old NSA buddy was working for one of the Crypt’s clients. It seems clear now that this client is Wing. Consequently Wing knows that Randy has Arethusa. Wing believes that the Arethusa intercepts contain information about the location of the Primary. He wants Randy to decrypt those messages so that he’ll know where to dig. Hence the whole setup with the laptop. All of Attorney Alejandro’s efforts to spring Randy loose will be unavailing until Wing has the information that he wants—or thinks he does. Then, all of a sudden, the ice will break, and Randy will unexpectedly be cut loose on a technicality. Randy’s so sure of this that he
finds Attorney Alejandro’s visits annoying. He would like to explain all of this so that Attorney Alejandro could knock it off with the wild goose chase, and his increasingly bleak and dull situation reports on same. But then Wing, who presumably surveils these attorney/client conferences, would know that Randy had figured out the whole game, and Randy doesn’t want Wing to know that. So he nods through these meetings with his lawyer and then, for good measure, goes back and tries to sound convincingly bewildered and depressed as he gives Enoch Root the update.

He gets to the point, conceptually, where his grandfather was when he commenced breaking the Arethusa messages. That is, he has a theory in mind now of how Arethusa worked. If he doesn’t know the exact algorithm, he knows what family of algorithms it belongs to, and that gives him a search space with many fewer dimensions than he had before. Certainly few enough for a modern computer to explore. He goes on a forty-eight-hour hacking binge. The nerve damage in his wrists has mounted to the point where he practically has sparks shooting out of his fingertips. His doctor told him never again to work on these nonergonomic keyboards. His eyes start to go out on him too, and he has to invert the screen colors and work with white letters on a black background, gradually increasing the size of the letters as he loses the ability to focus. But at last he gets something that he thinks is going to work, and he fires it up and sets it to running on the Arethusa intercepts, which live inside the computer’s memory but have never yet been displayed upon its screen. He falls asleep. When he wakes up, the computer is informing him that he’s got a probable break into one of the messages. Actually, three of them, all intercepted on 4 April 1945 and hence all encrypted using the same keystream.

Unlike human codebreakers, computers can’t read English. They can’t even recognize it. They can crank out possible decrypts of a message at tremendous speed but given two character strings like