Authors: Neal Stephenson
Tags: #Literature, #U.S.A., #American Literature, #21st Century, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #v.5, #Amazon.com, #Retail
Cryptonomicon (53 page)
Tom’s laptop is sold as a computer, not as a radio station, and so it might seem odd that it should be radiating anything at all. It is all a byproduct of the fact that computers are binary critters, which means that all chip-to-chip, subsystem-to-subsystem communication taking place inside the machine—everything moving down those flat ribbons of wire, and the little metallic traces on the circuit boards—consists of transitions from zero to one and back again. The way that you represent bits in a computer is by switching the wire’s voltage back and forth between zero and five volts. In computer textbooks these transitions are always graphed as if they were perfect square waves, meaning that you have this perfectly flat line at V = 0, representing a binary zero, and then it makes a perfect right-angle turn and jumps vertically to V = 5 and then executes another perfect right-angle turn and remains at five volts until it’s time to go back to zero again, and so on.
This is the Platonic ideal of how computer circuitry is supposed to operate, but engineers have to build actual circuits in the grimy analog world. The hunks of metal and silicon can’t manifest the Platonic behavior shown in those textbooks. Circuits can jump between zero and five volts really, really abruptly but if you monitor them on an oscilloscope, you can see that it’s not a perfectly square wave. Instead you get something that looks like this:
The little waves are called ringing; these transitions among binary digits hit the circuitry like a clapper striking a bell. The voltage jumps, but after it jumps it oscillates back and forth around the new value for a little while. Whenever you have an oscillating voltage in a conductor like this, it means that electromagnetic waves are propagating out into space.
Consequently each wire in a running computer is like a little radio transmitter. The signals that it broadcasts are completely dependent upon the details of what’s going on inside the machine. Since there are a lot of wires in there, and the particulars of what they are doing are fairly unpredictable, it is difficult for anyone monitoring the transmissions to make head or tail of them. A great deal of what comes out of the machine is completely irrelevant from a
surveillance point of view. But there is one pattern of signals that is (1) totally predictable and (2) exactly what Pekka wants to see, and that is the stream of bytes being read from the screen buffer and sent down the wire to the screen hardware. Amid all the random noise coming from the machine, the ticks of the horizontal and vertical retrace intervals will stand out as clearly as the beating of a drum in a teeming jungle. Now that Pekka has zeroed in on that beat, he should be able to pick up the radiation emanating from the wire that connects screen buffer to video hardware, and translate it back into a sequence of ones and zeroes that can be dumped out onto their own screen. They will be able to see exactly what Tom Howard sees, through the kind of surveillance called Van Eck phreaking.
That’s what Randy knows. When it comes to the details, Cantrell and Pekka are way out of his league, so after a few minutes he feels himself losing interest. He sits down on Cantrell’s bed, which is the only place left
to
sit, and discovers a little palmtop computer on the bedside table. It is already up and running, patched into the world over a telephone wire. Randy’s heard of this product. It is supposed to be a first stab at a network computer, and so it’s running a Web browser whenever it is turned on; the Web browser
is
the interface.
“May I surf?” Randy asks, and Cantrell says, “Yes,” without even turning around. Randy visits one of the big Web-searching sites, which takes a minute because the machine has to establish a Net connection first. Then he searches for Web documents containing the terms ((Andy OR Andrew) Loeb) AND “hive mind.” As usual, the search finds tens of thousands of documents. But it’s not hard for Randy to pick out the relevant ones.
WHY
RIST 9E03
IS A MEMBER IN GOOD STANDING OF THE CALIFORNIA BAR ASSOCIATION
RIST 11A4
has experienced ambivalent feelings over the fact that
RIST 9E03
(insofar as s/he is construed, by atomized society, as an individual organism) is a lawyer. No doubt the conflicted feelings
of
RIST 11A4
are quite normal and natural. Part of
RIST 11A4
abhors lawyers, and the legal system in general, as symptoms of the end-stage terminal disease of atomized society. Another part understands that disease can improve the health of the meme pool if it slays an organism that is old and unfit for ongoing propagation of its
memotype
. Make no mistake about it: the legal system in its current form is the worst imaginable system for society to resolve its disputes. It is appallingly expensive in terms of money and in terms of the intellectual talent that goes to waste pursuing it as a career. But part of
RIST 11A4
feels that the goals of
RIST 11A4
may actually be served by turning the legal system’s most toxic features against the rotten body politic of atomized society and in so doing hasten its downfall.
Randy clicks on
RIST 9E03
and gets
RIST 9E03
is the
RIST
that
RIST 11A4
denotes by the arbitrarily chosen bit-pattern that, construed as an integer, is 9E03 (in
hexadecimal notation
). Click
here
for more about the system of bit-pattern designators used by
RIST 11A4
to replace the obsolescent nomenclature systems of “natural languages.” Click
here
if you would like the designator
RIST 9E03
to be automatically replaced by a conventional designator (name) as you browse this web site.
Click.
From now on, the expression
RIST 9E03
will be replaced by the expression
Andrew
Loeb
. Warning: we consider such nomenclature fundamentally invalid, and do not recommend its use, but have provided it as a service to first-time visitors to this Web site who are not accustomed to thinking in terms of
RISTs
.
Click.
You have clicked on
Andrew Loeb
which is a designator assigned by atomized society to the
memome
of
RIST 9E03
. . .
Click.
. . .
memome
is the set of all memes that define the physical reality of a carbon-based
RIST
. Memes can be divided into two broad categories: genetic and semantic. Genetic memes are simply genes (DNA) and are propagated through normal biological reproduction. Semantic memes are ideas (ideologies, religions, fads, etc.) and are propagated by communications.
Click.
The genetic part of the
memome
of
Andrew Loeb
shares 99% of its contents with the data set produced by the
Human Genome Project
. This should not be construed as endorsing the concept of speciation (i.e. that the continuum of carbon-based life forms can or should be arbitrarily partitioned into paradigmatic species) in general, or the theory that there is a species called “Homo sapiens” in particular.
The semantic part of the
memome
of
Andrew Loeb
is still unavoidably contaminated with many primitive viral memes, but
these are being gradually and steadily supplanted by new semantic memes generated
ab initio
by rational processes.
Click.
RIST stands for Relatively Independent Sub-Totality. It can be used to refer to any entity that, from one point of view, seems to possess a clear boundary separating it from the world (as do cells in a body) but that, in a deeper sense, is inextricably linked with a larger totality (as are cells in a body). For example, the biological entities traditionally known as “human beings” are nothing more than Relatively Independent Sub-Totalities of the social organism in which they are embedded.
A dissertation written under the name
Andrew Loeb
, who is now designated
RIST 9E03
, indicates that even in those parts of
RIST 0577
having temperate climates and abundant food and water, the life of an organism such as the type designated, in old meme-systems, as “Homo sapiens,” would have been primarily occupied with attempting to eat other RISTS. This narrow focus would inhibit the formation of advanced semantic meme systems (viz. civilization as that word is traditionally construed). RISTs of this type can only attain higher levels of functioning insofar as they are embedded in a larger society, the most logical evolutionary end-point of which is a
hive mind
.
Click.
A hive mind is a social organization of
RISTs
that are capable of processing se
mantic memes (“thinking”). These could be either carbon-based or silicon-based.
RISTs
who enter a hive mind surrender their independent identities (which are mere illusions anyway). For purposes of convenience, the constituents of the hive mind are assigned
bit-pattern designators
.
Click.
A bit-pattern designator is a random series of bits used to uniquely identify a
RIST
. For example, the organism traditionally designated as Earth (Terra, Gaia) has been assigned the designator 0577. This Web site is maintained by 11A4 which is a hive mind.
RIST 11A4
assigns bit-pattern designators with a pseudo-random number generator. This departs from the practice used by that
soi-disant
“hive mind” known to itself as the East Bay Area Hive Mind Project but designated (in the system of RIST 11A4) as RIST E772. This “hive mind” resulted from the division of “Hive Mind One” (designated in the system of RIST 11A4 as RIST 4032) into several smaller “hive minds” (the East Bay Area Hive Mind Project, the San Francisco Hive Mind, Hive Mind 1A, the Reorganized San Francisco Hive Mind, and the Universal Hive Mind) as the result of an irreconcilable contradiction between several different semantic memes that competed for mind-share. One of these semantic memes asserted that bit-pattern designators should be assigned in numerical order, so that (for example) Hive Mind One would be designated RIST 0001 and so on. Another meme asserted that numbers should
be organized in order of importance, so that (for example) the RIST conventionally known as the planet Earth would be RIST 0001. Another semantic meme agreed with this one but disagreed as to whether the counting should begin with 0000 or 0001. Within both the 0000 and 0001 camps, there was disagreement about what
RIST
should be assigned the first number: some asserted that Earth was the first and most important
RIST
, others that some larger system (the solar system, the Universe, God) was in some sense more inclusive and fundamental.
This machine has an e-mail interface. Randy uses it.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re(2) Why?
Saw the website. Am willing to stipulate that you are not RIST 9E03. Suspect that you are the Dentist, who yearns for honest exchange of views. Anonymous, digitally signed e-mail is the only safe vehicle for same.
If you want me to believe you are not the Dentist, provide plausible explanation for your question regarding why we are building the Crypt.
Yours truly,
—BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK—
(etc.)
—END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK—