Cryptonomicon

Chapter 18 NON-DISCLOSURE

Avi shows up on time, idling his fairly good, but not disgustingly ostentatious, Nipponese sports car gingerly up the steep road, which has crazed into a loose mosaic of asphalt flagstones.

Randy watches from the second-floor deck, staring fifty feet almost straight down through the sunroof. Avi is clad in the trousers of a good tropical-weight business suit, a tailored white Sea Island cotton shirt, dark ski goggles, and a wide-brimmed canvas hat.

The house is a tall, isolated structure rising out of the middle of a California grassland that slopes up from the Pacific, a few kilometers away. Chilly air climbs up the slope, rising and falling in slow surges, like surf on a beach. When Avi gets out of his car the first thing he does is pull on his suit-jacket.

He hauls two oversized laptop cases out of the tiny luggage compartment in the car's nose, walks into the house without knocking (he has not been to this particular house before, but he has been to others run along similar principles), finds Randy and Eb waiting in one of its many rooms, and hauls about fifteen thousand dollars worth of portable computer gear out of the bags. He sets them up on a table. Avi hits the start button on two laptops and, as they crawl through the boot process, plugs them into the wall so that the batteries won't drain. A power conduit, with grounded three-prong outlets spaced every eighteen inches, has been screwed down remorselessly along every inch of every wall, spanning drywall; holes in the drywall; primeval op-art contact paper; fake wood-grain paneling; faded Grateful Dead posters; and even the odd doorway.

One of the laptops is connected to a tiny portable printer, which Avi loads with a few sheets of paper. The other laptop starts up a few lines of text running across the screen, then beeps and stops. Randy ambles over and looks at it curiously. It is displaying a prompt:

FILO.

Which Randy knows is short for Finux Loader, a program that allows you to choose which operating system you want to run.

“Finux,” Avi mumbles, answering Randy's unspoken question.

Randy types “Finux” and hits the return key. “How many operating systems you have on this thing?”

“Windows 95, for games and when I need to let some lamer borrow my computer temporarily,” Avi says. “Windows NT for office type stuff. BeOS for hacking, and screwing around with media. Finux for industrial-strength typesetting.”

“Which one do you want now?”

“BeOS. Going to display some JPEGs. I assume there's an overhead projector in this place?”

Randy looks over at Eb, the only person in the room who actually lives here. Eb seems bigger than he is, and maybe it's because of his detonating hair: two feet long, blond with a faint reddish glow, thick and wavy and tending to congeal into ropy strands. No ponytail holder can contain it, so when he bothers to tie it back, he uses a piece of string. Eb is doodling on one of those little computers that uses a stylus so that you can write on the screen. In general, hackers don't use them, but Eb (or rather, one of Eb's defunct corporations) wrote the software for this model and so he has a lot of them lying around. He seems to be absorbed in whatever he's doing, but after Randy has been looking in his direction for two seconds, he senses it, and looks up. He has pale green eyes and wears a luxuriant red beard, except when he's in one of his shaving phases, which usually coincide with serious romantic involvements. Right now his beard is about half an inch long, indicating a recent breakup, and implying a willingness to take new risks.

“Overhead projector?” Randy says.

Eb closes his eyes, which is what he does during memory access, then gets up and walks out of the room.

The tiny printer begins to eke paper. The first line of text, centered at the top of the page, is: NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT. More lines follow. Randy has seen them, or ones like them, so many times that his eyes glaze over and he turns away. The only thing that ever changes is the name of the company: in this case: EPIPHYTE(2) CORP.

“Nice goggles.”

“If you think these are weird, you should see what I'm going to put on when the sun goes down,” Avi says. He rummages in a bag and pulls out a contraption that looks like a pair of glasses without lenses, with a dollhouse-scale light fixture mounted above each eye. A wire runs down to a battery pack with belt loops. He slides a tiny switch on the battery pack and the lights come on: expensive-looking blue-white halogen.

Randy raises his eyebrows.

“It's all jet-lag avoidance,” Avi explains. “I'm adjusted to Asian time. I'm going back there in two days. I don't want my body to get back on Left Coast time while I'm here.”

“So the hat and goggles—”

“Simulate night. This thing simulates daylight. See, your body takes its cues from the light, adjusts its clock accordingly. Speaking of which, would you mind closing the blinds?”

The room has west-facing windows, affording a view down the grassy slope to Half Moon Bay. It is late afternoon and the sun is pouring through. Randy savors the view for a moment, then drops the blinds.

Eb stalks back into the room with an overhead projector dangling from one hand, looking for a moment like Beowulf brandishing a monster's severed arm. He puts it on the table and aims it at the wall. There is no need for a screen, because above the ubiquitous power strips, every wall in the house is covered with whiteboards. Many of the whiteboards are, in turn, covered with cryptical incantations, written in primary colors. Some of them are enclosed in irregular borders and labeled DO NOT ERASE! or simply DNE or NO! In front of where Eb has put the overhead projector, there is a grocery list, a half-erased fragment of a flowchart, a fax number in Russia, a couple of dotted quads—Internet addresses—and a few words in German, which were presumably written by Eb himself. Dr. Eberhard Föhr scans all of this, finds that none of it is enclosed in a DNE border, and wipes it away with an eraser.

Two more men come into the room, deeply involved in a conversation about some exasperating company in Burlingame. One of them is dark and lean and looks like a gunfighter; he even wears a black cowboy hat. The other is tubby and blond and looks like he just got out of a Rotary Club meeting. They have one detail in common: each is wearing a bright silver bracelet on his wrist.

Randy takes the NDAs out of the printers and passes them out, two copies each, each pair preprinted with a name: Randy Waterhouse, Eberhard Föhr, John Cantrell (the guy in the black cowboy hat) and Tom Howard (the fair-haired Middle American). As John and Tom reach for the pages, the silver bracelets intercept stray beams of light sneaking through the blinds. Each is printed with a red caduceus and several lines of text.

“Those look new,” Randy says. “Did they change the wording again?”

“Yeah!” John Cantrell says. “This is version 6.0—just out last week.”

Anywhere else, the bracelets would mean that John and Tom were suffering from some sort of life-threatening condition, such as an allergy to common antibiotics. A medic hauling them out of a wrecked car would see the bracelet and follow the instructions. But this is Silicon Valley and different rules apply. The bracelets say, on one side:

and on the other:

It is a recipe for freezing a dead, or nearly dead, person. People who wear this bracelet believe that, if this recipe is followed, the brain and other delicate tissues can be iced without destroying them. A few decades down the line, when nanotechnology has made it possible to be immortal, they hope to be thawed out. John Cantrell and Tom Howard believe that there is a reasonable chance that they will still be having conversations with each other a million years from now.

The room gets quiet as all of the men scan the forms, their eyes picking out certain familiar clauses. They have probably signed a hundred NDA forms between them. Around here, it is like offering someone a cup of coffee.

A woman comes into the room, burdened with tote bags, and beams an apology for being late. Beryl Hagen looks like a Norman Rockwell aunt, an apron-wearing, apple-pie-toting type. In twenty years, she's been the chief financial officer of twelve different small high-tech companies. Ten of them have gone out of business. Except in the case of the second one, this was through no fault of Beryl's. The sixth was Randy's Second Business Foray. One was absorbed by Microsoft, one became a successful, independent company in its own right. Beryl made enough money from the latter two to retire. She consults and writes while she looks for something interesting enough to draw her back into action, and her presence in this room suggests that Epiphyte(2) Corp. must not be completely bogus. Or maybe she's just being polite to Avi. Randy gives her a bearhug, lifting her off the floor, and then hands her two copies of the NDA with her name on them.

Avi has detached the screen from his big laptop and laid it flat on the surface of the overhead projector, which shines light through the liquid-crystal display and projects a color image on the whiteboard. It is a typical desktop: a couple of terminal windows and some icons. Avi goes around and picks up the signed NDAs, scans them all, hands one copy back to each person, files the rest in the outer pocket of a laptop bag. He begins to type on the laptop's keyboard, and letters spill across one of the windows. “Just so you know,” Avi mumbles, “Epiphyte Corp., which I'll call Epiphyte(1) for clarity, is a Delaware corporation, one and one half years old. The shareholders are myself, Randy, and Springboard Capital. We're in the telecoms business in the Philippines. I can give you details later if you want. Our work there has positioned us to be aware of some new opportunities in that part of the world. Epiphyte(2) is a California corporation, three weeks old. If things go the way we are hoping they will go, Epiphyte(1) will be folded into it according to some kind of stock transfer scheme the details of which are too boring to talk about now.”

Avi hits the return key. A new window opens on the desktop. It is a color map scanned in from an atlas, tall and narrow. Most of it is oceanic blue. A rugged coastline juts in through the top border, with a few cities labeled: Nagasaki, Tokyo. Shanghai is in the upper left corner. The Philippine archipelago is dead center. Taiwan is directly north of it, and to the south is a chain of islands forming a porous barrier between Asia and a big land mass labeled with English words like Darwin and Great Sandy Desert.

“This probably looks weird to most of you,” Avi says. “Usually these presentations begin with a diagram of a computer network, or a flowchart or something. We don't normally deal with maps. We're all so used to working in a purely abstract realm that it seems almost bizarre to go out into the real world and physically do something.”

“But I like maps. I've got maps all over my house. I'm going to suggest to you that the skills and knowledge we have all been developing in our work—especially pertaining to the Internet—have applications out here.” He taps the whiteboard. “In the real world. You know, the big round wet ball where billions of people live.”

There is a bit of polite snickering as Avi skims his hand over his computer's trackball, whacks a button with his thumb. A new image appears: the same map, with bright color lines running across the ocean, looping from one city to the next, roughly following the coastlines.

“Existing undersea cables. The fatter the line, the bigger the pipe,” Avi says. “Now, what is wrong with this picture?”

There are several fat lines running east from places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Australia, presumably connecting them with the United States. Across the South China Sea, which lies between the Philippines and Vietnam, another fat line angles roughly north-south, but it doesn't connect either of those two countries: it goes straight to Hong Kong, then continues up the China coast to Shanghai, Korea, and Tokyo.

“Since the Philippines are in the center of the map,” John Cantrell says, “I predict that you are going to point out that hardly any fat lines go to the Philippines.”

“Hardly any fat lines go to the Philippines!” Avi announces briskly. He points out the one exception, which runs from Taiwan south to northern Luzon, then skips down the coast to Corregidor. “Except for this one, which Epiphyte(1) is involved with. But it's not just that. There is a general paucity of fat lines in a north-south direction, connecting Australia with Asia. A lot of data packets going from Sydney to Tokyo have to be routed through California. There's a market opportunity.”

Beryl breaks in. “Avi, before you get started on this,” she says, sounding cautious and regretful, “I have to say that laying long-distance, deep sea cables is a difficult business to break into.”

“Beryl is right!” Avi says. “The only people who have the wherewithal to lay those cables are AT&T, Cable & Wireless, and Kokusai Denshin Denwa. It's tricky. It's expensive. It requires massive NRE.”

The abbreviation stands for “non-recoverable expenses,” meaning engineering work to complete a feasibility study that would be money down the toilet if the idea didn't fly.

“So what are you thinking?” Beryl says.

Avi clicks up another map. This one is the same as the previous, except that new lines have been drawn in: a whole series of short island-to-island links. A bewilderingly numerous chain of short hops down the length of the Philippine archipelago.

“You want to wire the Philippines and patch them into the Net via your existing link to Taiwan,” says Tom Howard, in a heroic bid to short-circuit what he senses will be a lengthy part of Avi's presentation.

“The Philippines are going to be hot shit informationally speaking,” Avi says. “The government has its flaws, but basically it's a democracy modeled after Western institutions. Unlike most Asians, they do ASCII. Most of them speak English. Longstanding ties to the United States. These guys are going to be big players, sooner or later, in the information economy.”

Randy breaks in. “We've already established a foothold there. We know the local business environment. And we have cash flow.”

Avi clicks up another map. This one's harder to make out. It looks like a relief map of a vast region of high mountains interrupted by occasional plateaus. Its appearance in the middle of this presentation without any labels or explanation from Avi makes it an implicit challenge to the mental acumen of the other people in the room. None of them is going to ask for help anytime soon. Randy watches them squint and tilt their heads from side to side. Eberhard Föhr, who is good at odd puzzles, gets it first.

“Southeast Asia with the oceans drained,” he says. “That high ridge on the right is New Guinea. Those bumps are the volcanoes of Borneo.”

“Pretty cool, huh?” Avi says. “It's a radar map. U.S. military satellites gathered all this data. You can get it for next to nothing.”

On this map the Philippines can be understood, not as a chain of separate islands, but as the highest regions of a huge oblong plateau surrounded by deep gashes in the earth's crust. To get from Luzon up to Taiwan by going across the ocean floor you would have to plunge into a deep trench, flanked by parallel mountain ranges, and follow it northwards for about three hundred miles. But south of Luzon, in the region where Avi is proposing to lay a network of inter-island cables, it's all shallow and flat.

Avi clicks again, superimposing transparent blue over the parts that are below sea level, green on the islands. Then he zooms in on an area in the center of the map, where the Philippine plateau extends two arms southwest toward northern Borneo, embracing, and nearly enclosing, a diamond-shaped body of water, three hundred and fifty miles across. “The Sulu Sea,” he announces. “No relation to the token Asian on Star Trek.”

No one laughs. They are not really here to be entertained—they are concentrating on the map. All of the different archipelagos and seas are confusing, even for smart people with good spatial relations. The Philippines form the upper right boundary of the Sulu Sea, north Borneo (part of Malaysia) the lower left, the Sulu Archipelago (part of the Philippines) the lower right, and the upper left boundary is one extremely long skinny Philippine island called Palawan.

“This reminds us that national boundaries are artificial and silly,” Avi says. “The Sulu Sea is a basin in the middle of a larger plateau shared by the Philippines and Borneo. So if you're wiring up the Philippines, you can just as easily wire Borneo up to that network at the same time, just by outlining the Sulu Sea with shallow, short-hop cables. Like this.”

Avi clicks again and the computer draws in more colored lines.

“Avi, why are we here?” Eberhard asks.

“That is a very profound question,” Avi says.

“We know the economics of these startups,” Eb says. “We begin with nothing but the idea. That's what the NDA is for—to protect your idea. We work on the idea together—put our brainpower into it—and get stock in return. The result of this work is software. The software is copyrightable, trademarkable, perhaps patentable. It is intellectual property. It is worth some money. We all own it in common, through our shares. Then we sell some more shares to an investor. We use the money to hire more people and turn it into a product, to market it, and so on. That's how the system works, but I'm beginning to think you don't understand it.”

“Why do you say that?”

Eb looks confused. “How can we contribute to this? How can we turn our brainpower into equity that an investor will want to own a part of?”

Everyone looks at Beryl. Beryl's nodding agreement with Eb. Tom Howard says, “Avi. Look. I can engineer big computer installations. John wrote Ordo—he knows everything about crypto. Randy does Internet, Eb does weird stuff, Beryl does money. But as far as I know, none of us knows diddly about undersea cable engineering. What good will our resumes do you when you go up in front of some venture capitalists?”

Avi's nodding. “Everything you say is true,” he concedes smoothly.

“We would have to be crazy to get involved in running cables through the Philippines. That is a job for FiliTel, with whom Epiphyte(1) has been joint-venturing.”

“Even if we were crazy,” Beryl says, “we wouldn't have the opportunity, because no one would give us the money.”

“Fortunately we don't need to worry about that,” Avi says, “because it's being done for us.” He turns to the whiteboard, picks up a red magic marker, and draws a fat line between Taiwan and Luzon, his hands picking up a leprous, mottled look from the shaded relief of the ocean floor that is being projected against his skin. “KDD, which is anticipating major growth in the Philippines, is already laying another big cable here.” He moves down and begins to draw smaller, shorter links between islands in the archipelago. “And FiliTel, which is funded by AVCLA—Asia Venture Capital Los Angeles—is wiring the Philippines.”

“What does Epiphyte(1) have to do with that?” Tom Howard asks.

“To the extent they want to use that network for Internet Protocol traffic, they need routers and network savvy,” Randy explains.

“So, to repeat my question: why are we here?” Eberhard says, patiently but firmly.

Avi works with his pen for a while. He circles an island at one corner of the Sulu Sea, centered in the gap between North Borneo and the long skinny Philippine island called Palawan. He labels it in block letters:

“Kinakuta was run by white sultans for a while. It's a long story. Then it was a German colony,” Avi says. “Back then, Borneo was part of the Dutch East Indies, and Palawan—like the rest of the Philippines—was first Spanish and then American. So this was the Germans' foothold in the area.”

“Germans always ended up holding the shittiest colonies,” Eb says ruefully.

“After the First World War, they handed it over to the Japanese, along with a lot of other islands much farther to the east. All of these islands, collectively, were called the Mandates because Japan controlled them under a League of Nations Mandate. During the Second World War the Japanese used Kinakuta as a base for attacks on the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. They retained a naval base and airfield there. After the war, Kinakuta became independent, as it had been before the Germans. The population is Muslim or ethnic Chinese around the edges, animist in the center, and it's always been ruled by a sultan—even while occupied by the Germans and the Japanese, who both co-opted the sultans but kept them in place as figureheads. Kinakuta had oil reserves, but they were unreachable until the technology got better and prices went up, around the time of the Arab oil embargo, which was also when the current sultan came into power. That sultan is now a very rich man—not as rich as the Sultan of Brunei, who happens to be his second cousin, but rich.”

“The sultan is backing your company?” Beryl asks.

“Not in the way you mean,” Avi says.

“What way do you mean?” Tom Howard asks, impatient.

“Let me put it this way,” Avi says. “Kinakuta is a member of the United Nations. It is every bit as much an independent country and member of the community of nations as France or England. As a matter of fact, it is exceptionally independent because of its oil wealth. It is basically a monarchy—the sultan makes the laws, but only after extensive consultation with his ministers, who set policy and draft legislation. And I've been spending a lot of time, recently, with the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications. I have been helping the minister draft a new law that will govern all telecommunications passing through Kinakutan territory.”

“Oh, my god!” John Cantrell says. He is awestruck.

“One free share of stock to the man in the black hat!” Avi says. “John has figured out Avi's secret plan. John, would you like to explain to the other contestants?”

John takes his hat off and runs his hand back through his long hair. He puts his hat back on and heaves a sigh. “Avi is proposing to start a data haven,” he says.

A little murmur of admiration runs through the room. Avi waits for it to subside and says, “Slight correction: the sultan's starting the data haven. I'm proposing to make money off it.”