Authors: Neal Stephenson
Tags: #Literature, #U.S.A., #American Literature, #21st Century, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #v.5, #Amazon.com, #Retail
“
Pasocon otaku?
”
“Personal computer nerds,” Avi says. “But as in so many other things, the Nipponese take it to an extreme that we barely imagine.”
The place is laid out precisely like an Asian food market: it is a maze of narrow aisles winding among tiny stalls, barely larger than phone booths, where merchants have their wares laid out for inspection. The first thing they see is a wire stall: at least a hundred reels of different types and gauges of wire in gaily hued plastic insulation. “How apropos!” Avi says, admiring the display, “we need to talk about wires.” It need not be stated that this place is a great venue for a conversation: the paths between the stalls are so narrow that they have to walk in single file. No one can follow them, or get close to them, here, without being ridiculously blatant. An array of soldering irons bristles wickedly, giving one stall the look of a martial arts store. Coffee-can-sized potentiometers are stacked in pyramids. “Tell me about wires,” Randy says.
“I don’t need to tell you how dependent we are on submarine cables,” Avi says.
“ ‘We’ meaning the Crypt, or society in general?”
“Both. Obviously the Crypt can’t even function without communications linkages to the outside world. But the Internet and everything else are just as dependent on cables.”
A
pasocon otaku
in a trench coat, holding a plastic bowl as
shopping cart, hunches over a display of gleaming copper toroidal coils that look to have been hand-polished by the owner. Finger-sized halogen spotlights mounted on an overhead rack emphasize their geometric perfection.
“So?”
“So, cables are vulnerable.”
They wander past a stall that specializes in banana plugs, with a sideline in alligator clips, arranged in colorful rosettes around disks of cardboard.
“Those cables used to be owned by PTAs. Which were basically just branches of governments. Hence they pretty much did what governments told them to. But the new cables going in today are owned and controlled by corporations beholden to no one except their investors. Puts certain governments in a position they don’t like very much.”
“Okay,” Randy says, “they used to have ultimate control over how information flowed between countries in that they ran the PTTs that ran the cables.”
“Yes.”
“Now they don’t.”
“That’s right. There’s been this big transfer of power that has taken place under their noses, without their having foreseen it.” Avi stops in front of a stall that sells LEDs in all manner of bubble-gum colors, packed into tiny boxes like ripe tropical fruits in crates, and standing up from cubes of foam like psychedelic mushrooms. He is making big transfer-of-power gestures with his hands, but to Randy’s increasingly warped mind this looks like a man moving heavy gold bars from one pile to another. Across the aisle, they are being stared at by the dead eyes of a hundred miniature video cameras. Avi continues, “And as we’ve talked about many times, there are many reasons why different governments might want to control the flow of information. China might want to institute political censorship, whereas the U.S. might want to regulate electronic cash transfers so that they can keep collecting taxes. In the old days they could ultimately do this insofar as they owned the cables.”
“But now they can’t,” Randy says.
“Now they can’t, and this change happened very fast, or
at least it looked fast to government with its retarded intellectual metabolism, and now they are way behind the curve, and scared and pissed off, and starting to lash out.”
“They are?”
“They are.”
“In what way are they lashing out?”
A toggle switch merchant snaps a rag over rows and columns of stainless steel merchandise. The tip of the rag breaks the sound barrier and generates a tiny sonic pop that blasts a dust mote from the top of a switch. Everyone is politely ignoring them. “Do you have any idea what down time on a state-of-the-art cable costs nowadays?”
“Of course I do,” Randy says. “It can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute.”
“That’s right. And it takes at least a couple of days to repair a broken cable. A couple of days. A single break in a cable can cost the companies that own it tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.”
“But that hasn’t been that much of an issue,” Randy says. “The cables are plowed in so deeply now. They’re only exposed in the deep ocean.”
“Yes—where only an entity with the naval resources of a major government could sever them.”
“Oh, shit!”
“This is the new balance of power, Randy.”
“You can’t seriously be telling me that governments are threatening to—”
“The Chinese have already done it. They cut an older cable—first-generation optical fiber—joining Korea to Nippon. The cable wasn’t that important—they only did it as a warning shot. And what’s the rule of thumb about governments cutting submarine cables?”
“That it’s like nuclear war,” Randy says. “Easy to start. Devastating in its results. So no one does it.”
“But if the Chinese have cut a cable, then other governments with a vested interest in throttling information flow can say, ‘Hey, the Chinese did it, we need to show that we can retaliate in kind.’ ”
“Is that actually happening?”
“No, no, no!” Avi says. They’ve stopped in front of the
largest display of needlenose pliers Randy has ever seen. “It’s all posturing. It’s not aimed at other governments so much as at the entrepreneurs who own and operate the new cables.”
Light dawns in Randy’s mind. “Such as the Dentist.”
“The Dentist has put more money into privately financed submarine cables than just about anyone. He has a minority stake in that cable that the Chinese cut between Korea and Nippon. So he’s trapped like a rat. He has no choice—no choice at all—other than to do as he’s told.”
“And who’s giving the orders?”
“I’m sure that the Chinese are very big in this—they don’t have any internal checks and balances in their government, so they are more prone to do something that is grossly irregular like this.”
“And they obviously have the most to lose from unfettered information flow.”
“Yeah. But I’m just cynical enough to suspect that a whole lot of other governments are right behind them.”
“If that’s true,” Randy says, “then everything is completely fucked. Sooner or later a cable-cutting war is going to break out. All the cables will get chopped through. End of story.”
“The world doesn’t work that way anymore, Randy. Governments get together and negotiate. Like they did in Brussels just after Christmas. They come up with agreements. War does not break out. Usually.”
“So—there’s an agreement in place?”
Avi shrugs. “As best as I can make out. A balance of power has been struck between the people who own navies—i.e., the people who have the ability to cut cables with impunity—and the people who own and operate cables. Each side is afraid of what the other can do to it. So they have come to a genteel understanding. The bureaucratic incarnation of it is IDTRO.”
“And the Dentist is in on it.”
“Precisely.”
“So maybe the Ordo siege really was ultimately directed by the government.”
“I very much doubt that Comstock ordered it,” Avi says. “I think it was the Dentist demonstrating his loyalty.”
“How about the Crypt? Is the sultan party to this understanding?”
Avi shrugs. “Pragasu isn’t saying much. I told him what I have just told you. I laid out my theory of what is going on. He looked tolerantly amused. He did not confirm or deny. But he did give me cause to believe that the Crypt is still going to be up and running on schedule.”
“See, I find that hard to believe,” Randy says. “It seems like the Crypt is their worst nightmare.”
“Whose worst nightmare?”
“Any government that needs to collect taxes.”
“Randy, governments will always find ways to collect taxes. If worse comes to worst, the IRS can just base everything on property taxes—you can’t hide real estate in cyberspace. But keep in mind that the U.S. government is only a part of this thing—the Chinese are very big in it, too.”
“Wing!” Randy blurts. He and Avi cringe and look around them. The
pasocon otaku
don’t care. A man selling rainbow-colored wire ribbons eyes them with polite curiosity, then looks away. They move out of the bazaar and onto the sidewalk. It has started to rain. A dozen nearly identical young women in miniskirts and high heels march in wedge formation down the center of the street sporting huge umbrellas blazoned with the face of a video game character.
“Wing’s digging for gold in Bundok,” Randy says. “He thinks he knows where Golgotha is. If he finds it, he’ll need a really special kind of bank.”
“He’s not the only guy in the world who needs a special bank,” Avi says. “Over the years, Switzerland has done a hell of a lot of business with governments, or people connected with governments. Why didn’t Hitler invade Switzerland? Because the Nazis couldn’t have done without it. So the Crypt definitely fills a niche.”
“Okay,” Randy says, “so the Crypt will be allowed to remain in existence.”
“It has to. The world needs it,” Avi says. “And we’ll need it, when we dig up Golgotha.”
Suddenly Avi’s got an impish look on his face; he looks
to have shed about ten years of age. This gets a belly-laugh out of Randy, the first time he’s really laughed in a couple of months. His mood has gone through some seismic shift all of a sudden, the whole world looks different to him. “It’s not enough to know where it is. Enoch Root says that these hoards were buried deep in mines, down in the hard rock. So we’re not going to get that gold out without launching a pretty major engineering project.”
“Why do you think I’m in Tokyo?” Avi says. “C’mon, let’s get back to the hotel.”
While Avi’s checking in, Randy collects his messages from the front desk, and finds a FedEx envelope waiting for him. If it was tampered with en route, the tamperers did a good job of covering their traces. It contains a hand-enciphered message from Enoch Root, who evidently has figured out some way to get himself sprung from the clink with his scruples intact. It is several lines of seemingly random block letters, in groups of five. Randy has been carrying around a deck of cards ever since he got sprung from jail: the prearranged key that will decipher this message. The prospect of several hours of solitaire seems a lot less inviting in Tokyo than it did in prison—and he knows it will take that long to decipher a message as long as this one. But he’s already programmed his laptop to play Solitaire according to Enoch’s rules, and he’s already punched in the key that is embodied in the deck that Enoch gave him and stored it on a floppy disk that he keeps rubber-banded to the deck in his pocket. So he and Avi go up to Avi’s room, pausing along the way to collect Randy’s laptop, and while Avi sorts through his messages, Randy types in the ciphertext and gets it deciphered. “Enoch’s message says that the land above Golgotha is owned by the Church,” Randy mutters, “but in order to reach it we have to travel across land owned by Wing, and by some Filipinos.”
Avi doesn’t appear to hear him. He’s fixated on a message slip.
“What’s up?” Randy asks.
“A little change of plans for tonight. I hope you have a really good suit with you.”
“I didn’t know we had plans for tonight.”
“We were going to meet with Goto Furundenendu,” Avi says. “I sort of figured that they were the right guys to approach about digging a big hole in the ground.”
“I’m with you,” Randy says. “What’s the change in plan?”
“The old man is coming down from his retreat in Hokkaido. He wants to buy us dinner.”
“What old man?”
“The founder of the company, Goto Furudenendu’s father,” Avi says. “Protegé of Douglas MacArthur. Multi-multi-multi-millionaire. Golf partner and confidant of prime ministers. An old guy by the name of Goto Dengo.”
I
T IS EARLY in
A
PRIL OF THE YEAR 1945.
A
MIDDLE
-aged Nipponese widow feels the earth turning over, and scurries out of her paper house, fearing a temblor. Her house is on the island of Kyushu, near the sea. She gazes out over the ocean and sees a black ship on the horizon, steaming out of a rising sun of its own making: for when its guns go off the entire vessel is shrouded in red fire for a moment. She hopes that the
Yamato,
the world’s greatest battleship, which steamed away over that horizon a few days ago, has returned victorious, and is firing its guns in celebration. But this is an American battleship and it is dropping shells into the port that the
Yamato
just left, making the earth’s bowels heave as if it were preparing to throw up.
Until this moment, the Nipponese woman has been convinced that the armed forces of her nation were crushing the Americans, the British, the Dutch, and the Chinese at every turn. This apparition must be some kind of bizarre suicide raid. But the black ship stays there all day long, heaving ton after ton of dynamite into sacred soil. No airplanes come out to bomb it, no ships to shell it, not even a submarine to torpedo it.
In a shocking display of bad form, Patton has lunged
across the Rhine ahead of schedule, to the irritation of Montgomery who has been making laborious plans and preparations to do it first.
The German submarine U-234 is in the North Atlantic, headed for the Cape of Good Hope, carrying ten containers holding twelve hundred pounds of uranium oxide. The uranium is bound for Tokyo where it will be used in some experiments, still in a preliminary phase, towards the construction of a new and extremely powerful explosive device.
General Curtis LeMay’s Air Force has spent much of the last month flying dangerously low over Nipponese cities showering them with incendiary devices. A quarter of Tokyo has been leveled; 83,000 people died there, and this does not count the similar raids on Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.
The night after the Osaka raid, some Marines raised a flag on Iwo Jima and they put a picture of it in all the papers.
Within the last few days, the Red Army, now the most terrible force on earth, has taken Vienna and the oil fields of Hungary, and the Soviets have declared that their Neutrality Pact with Nippon will be allowed to expire rather than being renewed.
Okinawa has just been invaded. The fighting is the worst ever. The invasion is supported by a vast fleet against which the Nipponese have launched everything they have. The
Yamato
came after them, her eighteen-inch guns at the ready, carrying only enough fuel for a one-way voyage. But the cryptanalysts of the U.S. Navy intercepted and decrypted her orders and the great ship was sent to the bottom with 2,500 men. The Nipponese have launched the first of their Floating Chrysanthemum assaults against the invasion fleet: clouds of kamikaze planes, human bombs, human torpedoes, speedboats packed with explosives.
To the irritation and bafflement of the German High Command, the Nipponese government has sent a message to them, requesting that, in the event that all of Germany’s European naval bases are lost, the Kriegsmarine should be given orders to continue operating with the Nipponese in the Far East. The message is encrypted in Indigo. It is duly intercepted and read by the Allies.
In the United Kingdom, Dr. Alan Mathison Turing, considering the war to be effectively finished, has long since turned his attentions away from the problem of voice encryption and into the creation of thinking machines. For about ten months—ever since the finished Colossus Mark II was delivered to Bletchley Park—he has had the opportunity to work with a truly programmable computing machine. Alan invented these machines long before one was ever built, and has never needed hands-on experience in order to think about them, but his experiences with Colossus Mark II have helped him to solidify some ideas of how the next machine ought to be designed. He thinks of it as a postwar machine, but that’s only because he’s in Europe and hasn’t been concerned with the problem of conquering Nippon as much as Waterhouse has.
“I’ve been working on
BURY
and
DISINTER
,” says a voice, coming out of small holes in a Bakelite headset clamped over Waterhouse’s head. The voice is oddly distorted, nearly obscured by white noise and a maddening buzz.
“Please say it again?” Lawrence says, pressing the phones against his ear.
“
BURY
and
DISINTER
,” says the voice. “They are, er, sets of instructions for the machine to execute, to carry out certain algorithms. They are programmes.”
“Right! Sorry, I just wasn’t able to hear you the first time. Yes, I’ve been working on them too,” Waterhouse says.
“The next machine will have a memory storage system, Lawrence, in the form of sound waves traveling down a cylinder filled with mercury—we stole the idea from John Wilkins, founder of the Royal Society, who came up with it three hundred years ago, except he was going to use air instead of quicksilver. I—excuse me, Lawrence, did you say you had been working on them?”
“I did the same thing with tubes. Valves, as you would call them.”
“Well that’s all well and good for you Yanks,” Alan says, “I suppose if you are infinitely rich you could make a
BURY/DISINTER
system out of steam locomotives, or something, and retain a staff of thousands to run around squirting oil on the squeaky bits.”
“The mercury line is a good idea,” Waterhouse admits. “Very resourceful.”
“Have you actually gotten
BURY
and
DISINTER
to work with
valves
?”
“Yes. My
DISINTER
works better than our shovel expeditions,” Lawrence says. “Did you ever find those silver bars you buried?”
“No,” Alan says absently. “They are lost. Lost in the noise of the world.”
“You know, that was a Turing test I just gave you,” Lawrence says.
“Beg pardon?”
“This damned machine screws up your voice so bad I can’t tell you from Winston Churchill,” Lawrence says. “So the only way I can verify it’s you is by getting you to say things that only Alan Turing could say.”
He hears Alan’s sharp, high-pitched laugh at the other end of the line. It’s him all right.
“This Project X thing really is appalling,” Alan says. “Delilah is infinitely superior. I wish you could see it for yourself. Or hear it.”
Alan is in London, in a command bunker somewhere. Lawrence is in Manila Bay, on the Rock, the island of Corregidor. They are joined by a thread of copper that goes all the way around the world. There are many such threads traversing the floors of the world’s oceans now, but only a few special ones go to rooms like this. The rooms are in Washington, London, Melbourne, and now, Corregidor.
Lawrence looks through a thick glass window into the engineer’s booth, where a phonograph record is playing on the world’s most precise and expensive turntable. This is, likewise, the most valuable record ever turned out: it is filled with what is intended to be perfectly random white noise. The noise is electronically combined with the sound of Lawrence’s voice before it is sent down the wire. Once it gets to London, the noise (which is being read off an identical phonograph record there) is subtracted from his voice, and the result sent into Alan Turing’s headphones. It all depends on the two phonographs being perfectly synchronized. The only way to synchronize them is to transmit that
maddening buzzing noise, a carrier wave, along with the voice signal. If all goes well, the opposite phonograph player can lock onto the buzz and spin its wax in lockstep.
The phonograph record is, in other words, a one-time pad. Somewhere in New York, in the bowels of Bell Labs, behind a locked and guarded door stenciled
PROJECT X
, technicians are turning out more of these things, the very latest chart-topping white noise. They stamp out a few copies, dispatch them by courier to the Project X sites around the globe, then destroy the originals.
They would not be having this conversation at all, except that a couple of years ago Alan went to Greenwich Village and worked at Bell Labs for a few months, while Lawrence was on Qwghlm. H.M. Government sent him there to evaluate this Project X thing and let them know whether it was truly secure. Alan decided that it was—then went back home and began working on a much better one, called Delilah.
What the hell does this have to do with dead Chinese abacus slaves? To Lawrence, staring through the window at the spinning white-noise disk, the connection could hardly be clearer. He says, “Last I spoke to you, you were working on generating random noise for Delilah.”
“Yes,” Alan says absently. That was a long time ago, and that whole project has been
BURIED
in his memory storage system; it will take him a minute or two to
DISINTER
it.
“What sorts of algorithms did you consider to create that noise?”
There is another five-second pause, then Alan launches into a disquisition about mathematical functions for generating pseudorandom number sequences. Alan had a good British boarding-school education, and his utterances tend to be well-structured, with outline form, topic sentences, the whole bit:
PSEUDO-RANDOM NUMBERS
When Alan finishes with this perfectly structured whirlwind tour of the Surprising World of Pseudo-Randomness, Lawrence says, “How about zeta functions?”
“Didn’t even consider those,” Alan says.
Lawrence’s mouth drops open. He can see his own semitransparent reflection in the window, superimposed on the spinning phonograph, and he sees that he has got a sort of mildly outraged look on his face. There must be something conspicuously nonrandom about the output of the zeta function, something so obvious to Alan that he dismissed it out of hand. But Lawrence has never seen any such thing. He knows that Alan is smarter than he is, but he’s not used to being so desperately far behind him.
“Why… why not?” he finally stammers.
“Because of Rudy!” Alan thunders. “You and I and Rudy all worked on that damn machine at Princeton! Rudy knows that you and I have the knowledge to build such a device. So it is the first thing that he would assume we would use.”
“Ah.” Lawrence sighs. “But leaving that aside, the zeta function might still be a good way of doing it.”
“It might,” Alan says guardedly, “but I have not investigated it. You’re not thinking of using it, are you?”
Lawrence tells Alan about the abaci. Even through the noise and the buzz, he can tell that Alan is thunderstruck. There is a pause while the technicians at each end flip over their phonograph records. When the connection is reestablished, Alan’s still very excited. “Let me tell you something more,” Lawrence says.
“Yes, go ahead.”
“You know that the Nipponese use a plethora of different codes, and we still have only broken some of them.”
“Yes.”
“There is an unbroken cipher system that Central Bureau calls Arethusa. It’s incredibly rare. Only thirty-some Arethusa messages have ever been intercepted.”
“Some company code?” Alan asks. This is a good guess; each major Nipponese corporation had its own code system before the war, and much effort has gone into stealing code books for, and otherwise breaking, the Mitsubishi code, to name one example.
“We can’t figure out the sources and destinations of Arethusa messages,” Lawrence continues, “because they use a unique site code system. We can only guess at their origins by using huffduff. And huffduff tells us that most of the Arethusa messages have originated from submarines. Possibly just a single submarine, plying the route between Europe and Southeast Asia. We have also seen them from Sweden, from London, Buenos Aires, and Manila.”
“Buenos Aires? Sweden?”
“Yes. And so, Alan, I took an interest in Arethusa.”
“Well, I don’t blame you!”
“The message format matches that of Azure/Pufferfish.”
“Rudy’s system?”
“Yes.”
“Nice work on that, by the way.”
“Thank you, Alan. As you must have heard by now, it is based on zeta functions. Which you did not even consider using for Delilah because you were afraid Rudy would
think of it. And this raises the question of whether Rudy intended us to break Azure/Pufferfish all along.”