Cryptonomicon

Chapter 23 CRYPT

The terminal is supposed to echo the lines of a row of Malay longhouses jammed together side by side. A freshly painted jetway gropes out like a giant lamprey and slaps its neoprene lips onto the side of the plane. The elderly Nipponese tour group makes no effort to leave the plane, respectfully leaving the aisles clear for the businessmen: You go ahead, the people we're going to visit won't mind waiting.

On his march up the jetway, humidity and jet fuel condense onto Randy's skin in equal measure, and he begins to sweat. Then he's in the terminal, which notwithstanding the Malay longhouses allusion has been engineered specifically to look like any other brand-new airport terminal in the world. The air-conditioning hits like a spike through the head. He puts his bags down on the floor and stands there for a moment, collecting his wits beneath a Leroy Neiman painting the dimensions of a volleyball court, depicting the sultan in action on a polo pony. Trapped in a window seat during a short and choppy flight, he had never made it out to the lavatory, so he goes to one now and pees so hard that the urinal emits a sort of yodeling noise.

As he steps back, perfectly satisfied, he becomes conscious of a man backing away from an adjacent urinal—one of the Nipponese businessmen who just got off the plane. A couple of months ago, the presence of this man would have ruled out Randy's taking a leak at all. Today, he didn't even notice that the guy was there. As a longtime bashful kidney sufferer, Randy is delighted to have stumbled upon the magic remedy: not to convince yourself that you are a dominating Alpha Male, but rather to be too lost in your thoughts to notice other people around you. Bashful kidney is your body's way of telling you that you're thinking too hard, that you need to get off the campus and go get a fucking job.

“You were looking at the Ministry of Information site?” the businessman says. He is in a perfect charcoal-grey pinstripe suit, which he wears just as easily and comfortably as Randy does his souvenir t-shirt from the fifth Hackers Conference, surfer's jams, and Teva sandals.

“Oh!” Randy blurts, annoyed with himself. “I completely forgot to look for it.” Both men laugh. The Nipponese man produces a business card with some deft sleight-of-hand. Randy has to rip open his nylon-and-velcro wallet and delve for his. They exchange cards in the traditional Asian two-handed style, which Avi has forced Randy to practice until he gets it nearly right. They bow at each other, triggering howls from the nearest couple of computerized self-flushing urinals. The bath room door swings open and an aged Nip wanders in, a precursor of the silver horde.

Nip is the word used by Sergeant Sean Daniel McGee, U.S. Army, Retired, to refer to Nipponese people in his war memoir about Kinakuta, a photocopy of which document Randy is carrying in his bag. It is a terrible racist slur. On the other hand, people call British people Brits, and Yankees Yanks, all the time. Calling a Nipponese person a Nip is just the same thing, isn't it? Or is it tantamount to calling a Chinese person a Chink? During the hundreds of hours of meetings, and megabytes of encrypted e-mail messages, that Randy, Avi, John Cantrell, Tom Howard, Eberhard Föhr, and Beryl have exchanged, getting Epiphyte(2) off the ground, each of them has occasionally, inadvertently, used the word Jap as shorthand for Japanese—in the same way as they used RAM to mean Random Access Memory. But of course Jap is a horrible racist slur too. Randy figures it all has to do with your state of mind at the time you utter the word. If you're just trying to abbreviate, it's not a slur. But if you are fomenting racist hatreds, as Sean Daniel McGee occasionally seems to be not above doing, that's different.

This particular Nipponese individual is identified, on his card, as GOTO Furudenendu (“Ferdinand Goto”). Randy, who has spent a lot of time recently puzzling over organizational charts of certain important Nipponese corporations, knows already that he is a vice president for special projects (whatever that means) at Goto Engineering. He also knows that organizational charts of Nipponese companies are horseshit and that job titles mean absolutely nothing. That he has the same surname as the guy who founded the company is presumably worth taking note of.

Randy's card says that he is Randall L. WATERHOUSE (“Randy”) and that he is vice president for network technology development at Epiphyte Corporation.

Goto and Waterhouse stroll out of the washroom and start to follow the baggage-claim icons that are strung across the terminal like bread-crumbs. “You have jet lag now?” Goto asks brightly—following (Randy assumes) a script from an English textbook. He's a handsome guy with a winning smile. He's probably in his forties, though Nipponese people seem to have a whole different aging algorithm so this might be way off.

“No,” Randy answers. Being a nerd, he answers such questions badly, succinctly, and truthfully. He knows that Goto essentially does not care whether Randy has jet lag or not. He is vaguely conscious that Avi, if he were here, would use Goto's question as it was intended—as an opening for cheery social batter. Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn't give a damn. Pretty soon he'll probably start being proud of it. In the meantime, just for the sake of the common enterprise, he tries his best. “I've actually been in Manila for several days, so I've had plenty of time to adjust.”

“Ah! Did your activities in Manila go well?” Goto fires back.

“Yes, very well, thank you,” Randy lies, now that his social skills, such as they are, have had a moment to get unlimbered. “Did you come directly from Tokyo?”

Goto's smile freezes in place for a moment, and he hesitates before saying, “Yes.”

This is, at root, a patronizing reply. Goto Engineering is headquartered in Kobe and they would not fly out of the Tokyo airport. Goto said yes anyway, because, during that moment of hesitation, he realized that he was just dealing with a Yank, who, when he said “Tokyo,” really meant “the Nipponese home islands” or “wherever the hell you come from.”

“Excuse me,” Randy says, “I meant to say Osaka.”

Goto grins brilliantly and seems to execute a tiny suggestion of a bow. “Yes! I came from Osaka today.”

Goto and Waterhouse drift apart from each other at the luggage claim, exchange grins as they breeze through immigration, and run into each other at the ground transportation section. Kinakutan men in brilliant white quasinaval uniforms with gold braid and white gloves are buttonholing passengers, proffering transportation to the local hotels.

“You are staying at the Foote Mansion also?” Goto says. That being the luxury hotel in Kinakuta. But he knows the answer already—tomorrow's meeting has been planned as exhaustively as a space shuttle launch.

Randy hesitates. The largest Mercedes-Benz he's ever seen has just pulled up to the curb, condensed moisture not merely fogging its windows but running down them in literal streamlines. A driver in Foote Mansion livery has erupted from it to divest Mr. Goto of his luggage, Randy knows that he need only make a subtle move toward that car and he will be whisked to a luxury hotel where he can take a shower, watch TV naked while drinking a hundred-dollar bottle of French wine, go swimming, get a massage.

Which is precisely the problem. He can already feel himself wilting in the equatorial heat. It's too early to go soft. He's only been awake for six or seven hours. There's work to be done. He forces himself to stand up at attention, and the effort makes him break a sweat so palpably that he almost expects to moisten everything within a radius of several meters. “I would enjoy sharing a ride to the hotel with you,” he says, “but I have one or two errands to run first.”

Goto understands. “Perhaps drinks this evening.”

“Leave me a message,” Randy says. Then Goto's waving at him through the smoked glass of the Mercedes as it pulls seven gees away from the curb. Randy does a one-eighty, goes back inside to the halal Dunkin' Donuts, which accepts eight currencies, and sates himself. Then he reemerges and turns imperceptibly toward a line of taxis. A driver hurls himself bodily towards Randy and tears his garment bag loose from his shoulder. “Ministry of Information,” Randy says.

In the long run, it may, or may not, be a good idea for the Sultanate of Kinakuta to have a gigantic earthquake-, volcano-, tsunami-, and thermonuclear-weapon-proof Ministry of Information with a cavernous sub-sub-basement crammed with high-powered computers and data switches. But the sultan has decided that it would be sort of cool. He has hired some alarming Germans to design it, and Goto Engineering to build it. No one, of course, is more familiar with staggering natural disasters than the Nipponese, with the possible exception of some peoples who are now extinct and therefore unable to bid on jobs like this. They also know a thing or two about having the shit bombed out of them, as do the Germans.

There are subcontractors, of course, and a plethora of consultants. Through some miraculous feat of fast talking, Avi managed to land one of the biggest consulting contracts: Epiphyte(2) Corporation is doing “systems integration” work, which means plugging together a bunch of junk made by other people, and overseeing the installation of all the computers, switches, and data lines.

The drive to the site is surprisingly short. Kinakuta City isn't that big, hemmed in as it is by steep mountain ranges, and the sultan has endowed it with plenty of eight-lane superhighways. The taxi blasts across the plain of reclaimed land on which the airport is built, swings wide around the stump of Eliza Peak, ignoring two exits for Technology City, then turns off at an unmarked exit. Suddenly they are stuck in a queue of empty dump trucks—Nipponese behemoths emblazoned with the word GOTO in fat macho block letters. Coming towards them is a stream of other trucks that are identical except that these are fully laden with stony rubble. The taxi driver pulls onto the right shoulder and zooms past trucks for about half a mile. They're heading up—Randy's ears pop once. This road is built on the floor of a ravine that climbs up into one of the mountain ranges. Soon they are hemmed in by vertiginous walls of green, which act like a sponge, trapping an eternal cloud of mist, through which sparks of brilliant color are sometimes visible. Randy can't tell whether they are birds or flowers. The contrast between the cloud forest's lush vegetation and the dirt road, battered by the house-sized tires of the heavy trucks, is disorienting.

The taxi stops. The driver turns and looks at him expectantly. Randy thinks for a moment that the driver has gotten lost and is looking to Randy for instructions. The road terminates here, in a parking lot mysteriously placed in the middle of the cloud forest. Randy sees half a dozen big air-conditioned trailers bearing the logos of various Nipponese, German, and American firms; a couple of dozen cars; as many buses. All the accoutrements of a major construction site are here, plus a few extras, like two monkeys with giant stiff penises fighting over some booty from a Dumpster, but there is no construction site. Just a wall of green at the end of the road, green so dark it's almost black.

The empty trucks are disappearing into that darkness. Full ones come out, their headlights emerging from the mist and gloom first, followed by the colorful displays that the drivers have built onto the radiator grilles, followed by the highlights on their chrome and glass, and finally the trucks themselves. Randy's eyes adjust, and he can see now that he is staring into a cavern, lit up by mercury-vapor lamps.

“You want me to wait?” the driver asks.

Randy glances at the meter, does a quick conversion, and figures out that the ride to this point has cost him a dime. “Yes,” he says, and gets out of the taxi. Satisfied, the driver kicks back and lights up a cigarette.

Randy stands there and gapes into the cavern for a minute, partly because it's a hell of a thing to look at and partly because a river of cool air is draining out of it, which feels good. Then he trudges across the lot and goes to the trailer marked “Epiphyte.”

It is staffed by three tiny Kinakutan women who know exactly who he is, though they've never met him before, and who give every indication of being delighted to see him. They wear long, loose wraps of brilliantly colored fabric on top of Eddie Bauer turtlenecks to ward off the nordic chill of the air conditioners. They are all fearsomely efficient and poised. Everywhere Randy goes in Southeast Asia he runs into women who ought to be running General Motors or something. Before long they have sent out word of his arrival via walkie-talkie and cell-phone, and presented him with a pair of thick knee-high boots, a hard hat, and a cellular phone, all carefully labeled with his name. After a couple of minutes, a young Kinakutan man in hard hat and muddy boots opens the trailer's door, introduces himself as “Steve,” and leads Randy into the entrance of the cavern. They follow a narrow pedestrian board walk illuminated by a string of caged lightbulbs.

For the first hundred meters or so, the cave is just a straight passage barely wide enough to admit two Goto trucks and the pedestrian lane. Randy trails his hand along the wall. The stone is rough and dusty, not smooth like the surface of a natural cavern, and he can see fresh gouges wrought by jackhammers and drills.

He can tell by the echo that something's about to change. Steve leads him out into the cavern proper. It is, well, cavernous. Big enough for a dozen of the huge trucks to pull around in a circle to be laden with rock and muck. Randy looks up, trying to find the ceiling, but all he sees is a pattern of bluish-white high-intensity lights, like the ones in gymnasiums, perhaps ten meters above. Beyond that it's darkness and mist.

Steve goes off in search of something and leaves Randy alone for a few minutes, which is useful since it takes a long time for him to get his bearings.

Some of the cavern wall is smooth and natural; the rest of it is rough, marking the enlargements conceived by the engineers and executed by the contractor. Likewise, some of the floor is smooth, and not quite level. Some places it has been drilled and blasted to bring it down, others it has been filled in to bring it up.

This, the main chamber, looks to be about finished. The offices of the Ministry of Information will be here. There are two other, smaller chambers, deeper inside the mountain, still being enlarged. One will contain the engineering plant (power generators and so forth) and the other will be the systems unit.

A burly blond man in a white hard hat emerges from a hole in the chamber wall: Tom Howard, Epiphyte Corporation's vice president for systems technology. He takes his hard hat off and waves to Randy, then beckons him over.

The passageway that leads to the systems chamber is big enough that you could drive a delivery van down it, but it's not as straight or as level as the main entryway. It is mostly occupied by a conveyor system of terrifying power and speed, which is carrying tons of dripping grey muck out towards the main chamber to be dumped into the Goto trucks. In terms of apparent cost and sophistication, it beats the same relationship to a normal conveyor belt as an F-15 does to a Sopwith Camel. It is possible to speak but impossible to be heard when you are near it, and so Tom and Randy and the Kinakutan who calls himself Steve trudge silently down the passage for another hundred or so meters until they reach the next cavern.

This one is only large enough to contain a modest one-story house. The conveyor passes right through the middle of it and disappears down another hole; the muck is coming from deeper yet in the mountain. It's still too loud in here to talk. The floor has been leveled by pouring in concrete, and conduits rise from it every few meters with orange cables dangling from their open tops: optical fiber lines.

Tom walks towards another opening in the wall. It appears that several subsidiary caverns branch away from this one. Tom leads Randy through the opening, then turns to put a hand on his arm and steady him: they are at the top of a steep wooden staircase that has been built down a nearly vertical shaft that descends a good five meters or so.

“What you just saw is the main switch room,” Tom says. “That'll be the largest router in the world when it's finished. We're using some of these other chambers to install computers and mass storage systems. The world's largest RAID, basically, buffered with a big, big RAM cache.”

RAID means Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks; it is a way to store vast quantities of information cheaply and reliably, and exactly the kind of thing you would want to have in a data haven.

“So we're still cleaning out some of these other chambers,” Tom continues. “We discovered something, down here, that I thought you'd find interesting.” He turns around and begins to descend the staircase. “Did you know that these caves were used as an air raid shelter by the Japanese, during the war?”

Randy has been carrying the map page from his photocopied book around in his pocket. He unfolds it and holds it up near a lightbulb. Sure enough, it includes a site, up in the mountains, labeled ENTRANCE TO AIR RAID SHELTER & COMMAND POST.

“And a command post?” Randy says.

“Yeah. How'd you know that?”

“Interlibrary loan,” Randy says.

“We didn't know it until we got here and found all of these old cables and electrical shit strung around the place. We had to tear it out so we could string in our own.”

Randy begins to descend the steps.

“This shaft was full of rocks,” Tom says, “but we could see wires going down into it, so we knew something had to be down here.”

Randy looks nervously at the ceiling. “Why was it full of rocks? Was there a cave-in?”

“No,” Tom says, “the Japanese soldiers did it. They threw rocks down the shaft until it was full. It took a dozen of our laborers two weeks to pull all the rocks out by hand.”

“So, what did the wires lead to?”

“Lightbulbs,” Tom says, “they were just electrical wires—no communications.”

“Then what was it they were trying to hide down here?” Randy asks. He has almost reached the bottom of the staircase, and he can see that there is a room-sized cavity.

“See for yourself” Tom says, and flicks a light switch.

The cavity is about the size of a one—car garage, with a nice level floor. There is a wooden desk, chair, and filing cabinet, fuzzy with fifty years' growth of grey-green fungus. And there is a metal footlocker, painted olive-drab, stenciled with Nipponese characters.

“I forced the lock on this thing,” Tom says. He steps over to the footlocker and flips the lid open. It is filled with books.

“You were expecting maybe gold bars?” Tom says, laughing at the expression on Randy's face.

Randy sits down on the floor and grabs his ankles. He's staring open-mouthed at the books in the chest.

“You okay?” Tom asks. “Heavy, heavy déjà vu,” Randy says. “From this?”

“Yeah,” Randy says, “I've seen this before.”

“Where?”

“In my grandmother's attic.”

Randy finds his way up out of the network of caverns and into the parking lot. The warm air feels good on his skin, but by the time he has reached the Epiphyte Corp. trailer to turn in his hard hat and boots, he has begun to sweat again. He bids good-bye to the three women who work there, and once again is struck by their attentiveness, their solicitousness. Then he remembers that he is not just some interloper. He is a shareholder, and an important officer, in the corporation that employs them—he is paying them or oppressing them, take your pick.

He trudges across the parking lot, moving very slowly, trying not to get that metabolic furnace het up. A second taxi has pulled alongside the one that is waiting for Randy, and the drivers are leaning out of their windows shooting the breeze.

As Randy approaches his taxi, he happens to glance back towards the entrance of the cavern. Framed in its dark maw, and dwarfed by the mountainous shapes of the Goto dump trucks, is a solitary man, silver-haired, stooped, but trim and almost athletic-looking in a warmup suit and sneakers. He is standing with his back to Randy, facing the cavern, holding a long spray of flowers. He seems rooted in the mud, perfectly motionless.

The front door of the Goto Engineering trailer flies open. A young Nipponese man in a white shirt, striped tie, and orange hard hat descends the stairs and moves briskly towards the old man with the flowers. When he is still some distance away, he stops, puts his feet together, and executes a bow. Randy hasn't spent enough time around Nipponese to understand the minutiae, but this looks to him like an extraordinarily major bow. He approaches the old man with a bright smile and holds one beckoning hand out towards the Goto trailer. The old man seems disoriented—maybe the cavern doesn't look like it used to—but after a few moments he returns a perfunctory bow and allows the young engineer to lead him out of the stream of traffic.

Randy gets in his taxi and says, “Foote Mansion,” to the driver.

He has been harboring an illusion that he will read Sean Daniel McGee's war memoir slowly and thoroughly, from beginning to end, but this has now gone the way of all illusions. He hauls the photocopied stack out of his bag during the drive to the hotel and begins ruthless triage. Most of it has nothing to do with Kinakuta at all—it's about McGee's experiences fighting in New Guinea and the Philippines. McGee is no Churchill, but he does have a distant blarney-tinged narrative talent, which makes even banal anecdotes readable. His skills as raconteur must have made him a big hit around the bar at the NCOs' Club; a hundred tipsy sergeants must have urged him to write some of this shit down if he ever made it back to South Boston alive.

He did make it back, but unlike most of the other GIs who were in the Philippines on V-J day, he didn't go straight back home. He took a little detour to the Sultanate of Kinakuta, which was still home to almost four thousand Nipponese troops. This explains an oddity about his book. In most war memoirs, V-E Day or V-J Day happens on the last page, or at least in the last chapter, and then our narrator goes home and buys a Buick. But V-J day happens about two-thirds of the way through Sean Daniel McGee's book. When Randy sets aside the pre-August 1945 material, an ominously thick stack of pages remains. Clearly, Sergeant McGee has something to get off his chest.

The Nipponese garrison on Kinakuta had long since been bypassed by the war, and like the other bypassed garrisons, had turned what energies they had left to vegetable farming, and waiting for the extremely sporadic arrivals of submarines, which, towards the close of the war, the Nipponese used to haul the most extremely vital cargo and to ferry certain desperately needed specialists, like airplane mechanics, from one place to another. When they got Hirohito's broadcast from Tokyo, ordering them to lay down their arms, they did so dutifully but (one has to suspect) gladly.

The only hard part was finding someone to surrender to. The Allies had concentrated on planning the invasion of the Nipponese home islands, and it took them a while to get troops out to the bypassed garrisons like Kinakuta. McGee's account of the confusion in Manila is mordant—at this point in the book McGee starts to lose his patience, and his charm. He starts to rail. Twenty pages later, he's sloshing ashore at Kinakuta City. He stands at attention while his company captain accepts the surrender of the Nipponese garrison. He posts a guard around the entrance to the cavern, where a few diehard Nips have refused to surrender. He organizes the systematic disarming of the Nipponese soldiers, who are terribly emaciated, and sees to it that their rifles and ammunition are dumped into the ocean even as food and medical supplies are brought ashore. He helps a small contingent of engineers string barbed wire around the airfield, turning it into an internment camp.

Randy flips through all of this during the drive to the hotel. Then, words like “impaled” and “screams” and “hideous” catch his eye, so he flips back a few pages and begins to read more carefully.

The upshot is that the Nipponese had, since 1940, marched thousands of tribesmen out of the cool, clean interior of the island to its hot, pestilential edge, and put them to work. These slaves had enlarged the big cavern where the Nipponese built their air raid shelter and command post; improved the road to the top of Eliza Peak, where the radar and direction-finding stations were perched; built another runway at the air field; filled in more of the harbor; and died by thousands of malaria, scrub typhus, dysentery, starvation, and overwork. These same tribesmen, or their bereaved brothers, had then watched, from their redoubts high in the mountains, as Sean Daniel McGee and his comrades came and stripped the Nipponese of their armaments and concentrated them all in the airfield, guarded by a few dozen exhausted GIs who were frequently drunk or asleep. Those tribesmen worked around the clock, up there in the jungle, making spears, until the next full moon illuminated the sleeping Nipponese like a searchlight. Then they poured out of the forest in what Sean Daniel McGee describes as “a horde,” “a plague of wasps,” “a howling army,” “a black legion unleashed from the gates of Hell,” “a screaming mass,” and in other ways he could never get away with now. They flattened and disarmed the GI's, but did not hurt them. They flung tree limbs over the barbed wire until the fence had become a highway, and then swarmed into the airfield with their spears at the ready. McGee's account goes on for about twenty pages, and, as much as anything else, is the story of the night that one affable sergeant from South Boston became permanently unhinged.

“Sir?”

Randy is startled to realize that the taxi's door is open. He looks around and finds that he's under the awning of the Hotel Foote Mansion. The door is being held open for him by a wiry young bellhop with a different look than most of the Kinakutans Randy has encountered so far. This kid perfectly matches Sean Daniel McGee's description of a tribesman from the interior.

“Thank you,” Randy says, and makes a point of tipping the fellow generously.

His room is all done up in furniture designed in Scandinavia but assembled locally from various endangered hardwoods. The view is towards the interior mountains, but if he goes onto his tiny balcony he can see a bit of water, a containership being unloaded, and most of the memorial garden built by the Nipponese on the site of the massacre.

Several messages and faxes await him: mostly the other members of Epiphyte Corp., notifying him that they have arrived, and letting him know in which room they can be found. Randy unpacks his bags, takes a shower, and sends his shirts down to the laundry for tomorrow. Then he makes himself comfortable at his little table, boots his laptop, and pulls up the Epiphyte (2) Corporation Business Plan.