Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги

Chapter 41 PHREAKING

The dentist is gone, the door locked, the phone unplugged. Randall Lawrence Waterhouse lies naked on the starched, turned-down sheets of his king-sized bed. His head is propped up on a pillow so that he can peer through the vee of his feet at a BBC World Service newscast on the television. A ten-dollar minibar beer is near at hand. It's six in the morning in America and so rather than a pro basketball game, he has to settle for this BBC newscast, which is strongly geared to South Asian happenings. A long and very sober story about a plague of locusts on the India/Pakistan border follows a piece on a typhoon about to nail Hong Kong. The king of Thailand is calling in some of his government's more corrupt officials to literally prostrate themselves before him. Asian news always has this edge of the fantastic to it, but it's all dead serious, no nods or winks anywhere. Now he's watching a story about a nervous system disease that people in New Guinea come down with as a consequence of eating other people's brains. Just your basic cannibal story. No wonder so many Americans come here on business and never really go home again—it's like stepping into the pages of Classics Comics.

Someone is knocking on his door. Randy gets up and puts on his plush white hotel bathrobe. He peers through the peephole, half expecting to see a pygmy standing there with a blowpipe, though he wouldn't mind a seductive Oriental courtesan. But it's just Cantrell. Randy opens the door. Cantrell is already holding up his hands, palms out, in a cheerful “shut up already” gesture. “Don't worry,” Cantrell says, “I'm not here to talk about Biz.”

“In that case I won't break this beer bottle over your head,” Randy says. Cantrell must feel exactly the same way Randy does, which is that so much wild shit happened today that the only way to deal with it is not to talk about it at all. Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.

“Come to my room,” Cantrell says. “Pekka is here.”

“The Finn who got blown up?”

“The same.”

“Why is he here?”

“Because there's no reason not to be. After he got blown up he adopted a technomadic lifestyle.”

“So it's just a coincidence, or—”

“Nah,” Cantrell says. “He's helping me win a bet.”

“What kind of bet?”

“I was telling Tom Howard about Van Eck phreaking a few weeks ago. Tom said it sounded like bullshit. He bet me ten shares of Epiphyte stock that I couldn't make it actually work outside of a laboratory.”

“Is Pekka good at that kind of thing?”

By way of saying yes, Cantrell adopts a serious look and says, “Pekka is writing a whole chapter about it for the Cryptonomicon. Pekka feels that only by mastering the technologies that might be used against us can we defend ourselves.”

This sounds almost like a call to arms. Randy would have to be some kind of loser to retreat to his bed after that, so he backs into the room and steps into his trousers, which are standing there telescoped into the floor where he dropped them upon his return from the sultan's palace. The sultan's palace! The television is now broadcasting a news story about pirates plying the waters of the South China Sea, making freighter crews walk the plank. “This whole continent is like fucking Disneyland without the safety precautions,” Randy observes. “Am I the only person who finds it surreal?”

Cantrell grins, but says, “If we begin talking about surreal, we'll end up talking about today.”

“You got that right,” Randy says. “Let's go.”

* * *

Before Pekka became known around Silicon Valley as the Finn Who Got Blown Up, he was known as Cello Guy, because he had a nearly autistic devotion to his cello and took it with him everywhere, always trying to stuff it into overhead luggage racks. Not coincidentally, he was an analog kind of guy from way back whose specialty was radio.

When packet radio started to get big as an alternative to sending data down wires, Pekka moved to Menlo Park and joined a startup. His company bought their equipment at used-computer stores, and Pekka ended up scoring a pretty nice nineteen-inch high-res multisync monitor perfectly adequate for his adaptable twenty-four-year-old eyes. He hooked it up to a slightly used Pentium box jammed full of RAM.

He also installed Finux, a free UNIX operating system created by Finns, almost as a way of proclaiming to the rest of the world “this is how weird we are,” and distributed throughout the world on the Net. Of course Finux was fantastically powerful and flexible and enabled you, among other things, to control the machine's video circuitry to the Nth degree and choose many different scanning frequencies and pixel clocks, if you were into that kind of thing. Pekka most definitely was into it, and so like a lot of Finux maniacs he set his machine up so that it could display, if he chose, a whole lot of tiny little pixels (which displayed a lot of information but was hard on the eyes) or, alternatively, fewer and larger pixels (which he tended to use after he had been hacking for twenty-four hours straight and lost ocular muscle tone), or various settings in-between. Every time he changed from one setting to another, the monitor screen would go black for a second and there would be an audible clunk from inside of it as the resonating crystals inside locked in on a different range of frequencies.

One night at three A.M., Pekka caused this to happen, and immediately after the screen went black and made that clunking noise, it exploded in his face. The front of the picture tube was made of heavy glass (it had to be, to withstand the internal vacuum) which fragmented and sped into Pekka's face, neck, and upper body. The very same phosphors that had been glowing beneath the sweeping electron beam, moments before, conveying information into Pekka's eyes, were now physically embedded in his flesh. A hunk of glass took one of his eyes and almost went through into his brain. Another one gouged out his voicebox, another zinged past the side of his head and bit a neat triangular hunk out of his left ear.

Pekka, in other words, was the first victim of the Digibomber. He almost bled to death on the spot, and his fellow Eutropians hovered around his hospital bed for a few days with tanks of Freon, ready to jump into action in case he died. But he didn't, and he got even more press because his startup company lacked health insurance. After a lot of hand-wringing in local newspapers about how this poor innocent from the land of socialized medicine had not had the presence of mind to buy health insurance, some rich high-tech guys donated money to pay his medical bills and to equip him with a computer voicebox like Stephen Hawking's.

And now here is Pekka, sitting in Cantrell's hotel room. His cello stands in the corner, dusty around the bridge from powdered rosin. He is facing a blank wall to which he has duct-taped a bunch of wires in precise loops and whorls. These lead to some home-brewed circuit boards which are in turn hooked up to his laptop.

“Hello Randy congratulations on your success,” says a computer-generated voice as soon as the door is shut behind Randy and Cantrell. This is a little greeting that Pekka has obviously typed in ahead of time, anticipating his arrival. None of the foregoing seems particularly odd to Randy except for the fact that Pekka seems to think that Epiphyte has already achieved some kind of success.

“How are we doing?” Cantrell asks.

Pekka types in a response. Then he cups one hand to his mutilated ear while using his other hand to cue the voice generator: “He showers.” Indeed, it's possible now to hear the pipes hissing in the wall. “His laptop radiates.”

“Oh,” Randy says, “Tom Howard's room is right next door?”

“Just on the other side of that wall,” Cantrell says. “I specifically requested it, so that I could win this bet. See, his room is a mirror image of this one, so his computer is only a few inches away, just on the other side of this wall. Perfect conditions for Van Eck phreaking.”

“Pekka, are you receiving signals from his computer right now?” Randy asks.

Pekka nods, types, and fires back, “I tune. I calibrate.” The input device for his voice generator is a one-handed chord-board strapped to his thigh. He puts his right hand on it and makes flopping and groping motions. Moments later speech emerges, “I require Cantrell.”

“Excuse me,” Cantrell says, and goes to Pekka's side. Randy watches over their shoulders for a bit, understanding vaguely what they're doing.

If you lay a sheet of white paper on an old gravestone, and sweep the tip of a pencil across it, you get one horizontal line, dark in some places and faint in others, and not very meaningful. If you move downwards on the page by a small distance, a single pencil-line-width, and repeat, an image begins to emerge. The process of working your way down the page in a series of horizontal sweeps is what a nerd would call raster-scanning, or just rastering. With a conventional video monitor—a cathode-ray tube—the electron beam physically rasters down the glass something like sixty to eighty times a second. In the case of a laptop screen like Randy's, there is no physical scanning; the individual pixels are turned on or off directly. But still a scanning process is taking place; what's being scanned and made manifest on the screen is a region of the computer's memory called the screen buffer. The contents of the screen buffer have to be slapped up onto the screen sixty to eighty times every second or else (1) the screen flickers and (2) the images move jerkily.

The way that the computer talks to you is not by controlling the screen directly but rather by manipulating the bits contained in that buffer, secure in the knowledge that other subsystems inside the machine handle the drudge work of pipelining that information onto the actual, physical screen. Sixty to eighty times a second, the video system says shit! time to refresh the screen again, and goes to the beginning of the screen buffer—which is just a particular hunk of memory, remember—and it reads the first few bytes, which dictate what color the pixel in the upper left-hand corner of the screen is supposed to be. This information is sent on down the line to whatever is actually refreshing the screen, whether it's a scanning electron beam or some laptop-style system for directly controlling the pixels. Then the next few bytes are read, typically for the pixel just to the right of that first one, and so on all the way to the right edge of the screen. That draws the first line of the grave-rubbing.

Since the right edge of the screen has now been reached, there are no more pixels off in that direction. It is implicit that the next bytes read from memory will be for the leftmost pixel in the second raster-line down from the top. If this is a cathode-ray tube type of screen, we have a little timing problem here in that the electron beam is currently at the right edge of the screen and now it's being asked to draw a pixel at the left edge. It has to move back. This takes a little while-not long, but much longer than the interval of time between drawing two pixels that are cheek-by-jowl. This pause is called the horizontal retrace interval. Another one will occur at the end of every other line until the rastering has proceeded to the last pixel at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and completed a single grave-rubbing. But then it's time to begin the process all over again, and so the electron beam (if there is one) has to jump diagonally all the way up to the upper left-hand pixel. This also takes a little while and is called the vertical retrace interval.

These issues all stem from inherent physical limitations of sweeping electron beams through space in a cathode-ray tube, and basically disappear in the case of a laptop screen like the one Tom Howard has set up a few inches in front of Pekka, on the other side of that wall. But the video timing of a laptop screen is still patterned after that of a cathode-ray tube screen anyway. (This is simply because the old technology is universally understood by those who need to understand it, and it works well, and all kinds of electronic and software technology has been built and tested to work within that framework, and why mess with success, especially when your profit margins are so small that they can only be detected by using techniques from quantum mechanics, and any glitches vis-à-vis compatibility with old stuff will send your company straight into the toilet.)

On Tom's laptop, each second of time is divided into seventy-five perfectly regular slices, during which a full grave-rubbing is performed followed by a vertical retrace interval. Randy can follow Pekka and Cantrell's conversation well enough to gather that they have already figured out, from analyzing the signals coming through the wall, that Tom Howard has his screen set up to give him 768 lines, and 1,024 pixels on each line. For every pixel, four bytes will be read from the video buffer and sent on down the line to the screen. (Tom is using the highest possible level of color definition on his screen, which means that one byte apiece is needed to represent the intensity of blue, green, and red and another is basically left over, but kept in there anyway because computers like powers of two, and computers are so ridiculously fast and powerful now that, even though all of this is happening on a timetable that would strike a human being as rather aggressive, the extra bytes just don't make any difference.) Each byte is eight binary digits or bits and so, 1,024 times a line, 4 x 8 = 32 bits are being read from the screen buffer.

Unbeknownst to Tom, his computer happens to be sitting right next to an antenna. The wires Pekka taped to the wall can read the electromagnetic waves that are radiating out of the computer's circuitry at all times.

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 9303 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 semantic 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 designed 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 IA, 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.

To: root@eruditorum.org

From: dwarf@siblings.net

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—

“We've got bits,” Cantrell says. “Are you in the middle of something?”

“Nothing I'm not eager to get out of,” Randy says, putting the palm-top down. He gets off the bed and stands behind Pekka. The screen of Pekka's computer has a number of windows on it, of which the biggest and frontmost is the image of another computer's screen. Nested within that are various other windows and icons: a desktop. It happens to be a Windows NT desktop, which is noteworthy and (to Randy) bizarre because Pekka's computer isn't running Windows NT, it's running Finux. A cursor is moving around on that Windows NT desktop, pulling down menus and clicking on things. But Pekka's hand is not moving. The cursor zooms over to a Microsoft Word icon, which changes color and expands to form a large window.

This copy of Microsoft Word is registered to THOMAS HOWARD.

“You did it!” Randy says.

“We see what Tom sees,” Pekka says.

A new document window opens up, and words begin to spill across it.

Note to myself: let's see “Letters to Penthouse” print this!

I don't suppose that graduate students of either gender are exactly sought out by sexual connoisseurs for their great fucking skills. We think about it too much. Everything has to be verbalized. A person who believes that fucking is a sexual discourse is simply never going to be any good in the sack.

I have a thing about stockings. They have to be sheer black stockings, preferably with seams up the back. When I was thirteen years old I actually shoplifted some black pantyhose from a grocery store just so that I could play with them. Walking out of that store with those L'eggs in my backpack, my heart was pounding, but the excitement of the crime was nothing compared to opening up the package and pulling them out, rubbing them against my fuzzy, adolescent cheeks. I even tried pulling them on, but this just looked grotesque—what with my hairy legs—and did absolutely nothing for me. I didn't want to wear them. I wanted someone else to. I masturbated four times that day.

It disturbed the shit out of me when I thought about it. I was a smart boy. Smart boys are supposed to be rational. So, when I was in college I figured out a rationalization for this. There wasn't that many women who wore sheer black stockings in college, but sometimes I would go into the city and see the well-dressed office workers walking down the street on their lunch breaks and make scientific observations of their legs. I noticed that where the stocking stretched itself thin to go over a wide part of the leg, such as the muscle of the calf, it became paler, just as a colored balloon becomes paler when it is inflated. Conversely, it was darker in narrow regions such as the ankle. This made the calf look more shapely and the ankle look more slender. The legs, as a whole, looked healthier, implying that just above the place where they joined together, a higher class of DNA was to be found.

Q.E.D. My thing about black stockings was a highly rational adaptation. It merely proved how smart I was, how rational even the most irrational parts of my brain were. Sex held no power over me. It was nothing to fear.

This was quintessentially sophomoric thinking, but nowadays most educated people hold quintessentially sophomoric opinions well into their thirties and so this stuck with me for a long time. My wife Virginia probably had some equally self-serving rationalization for her own sexual needs—of which I was not to become aware for many years. So it's no surprise that our premarital sex life was mediocre. Neither one of us admitted it was mediocre, of course. If I had admitted it, I would have had to admit that it was mediocre because Virginia didn't like to wear stockings, and at the time I was too concerned with being a Sensitive New Age Guy to admit such heresy, I loved Virginia for her mind. How could I be so shallow, so insensitive, so perverse as to spurn her because she didn't like to pull filmy tubes of nylon over her legs? As a pudgy nerd, I was lucky to have her.

Five years into our marriage, I attended the Comdex convention as president of a small new high-tech company. I was a little less pudgy and a little less nerdy. I met a marketing girl for a big software distribution chain. She was wearing sheer black stockings. We ended up fucking in my hotel room. It was the best sex I'd ever had. I went home baffled and ashamed. After that, my sex life with Virginia was pretty miserable. We had sex maybe a dozen times over the next couple of years.

Virginia's grandmother died and we went back to upstate New York for the funeral. Virginia had to wear a dress, which meant she had to shave her legs and wear stockings—something she'd done on only a handful of occasions since our marriage. I practically fell over when I saw her, and suffered through the funeral with a big, scratchy erection, trying to figure out how I could get her alone.

Now, Granny had lived by herself in a big old house on a hill until a couple of months earlier when she had fallen down and broken her hip, and been moved into a nursing home. All of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren came together for the funeral, and that house became the central gathering-place. It was a nice place full of good old furniture, but in her declining years Granny had become something of a compulsive pack rat and so there were heaps of newspapers and accumulated mail squirreled away everywhere. In the end we had to haul away several truckloads of junk.

In some other ways, Granny had been pretty well-organized and had left behind a very specific last will and testament. Each one of her descendants knew exactly which pieces of furniture, dishes, rugs, and curios they were going to take home. She had a lot of possessions, but she also had a lot of descendants, and so the loot had to be sliced pretty thin. Virginia ended up with a black walnut dresser which was stored in an unused bedroom. We went up there to have a look at it, and I ended up fucking her there. I stood up with the flimsy trousers of my dark suit collapsed around my ankles while she sat on top of that dresser with her legs wrapped around me and her stocking-clad heels digging into my butt-cheeks. It was the best fuck we'd ever had, bar none. Fortunately there were a lot of people eating, drinking, and talking downstairs or they would have heard her moaning and hollering.

I finally came clean to her about the stockings. It felt good. I'd been reading a lot about how the brain develops and had finally come to accept my stocking kink. It seems that when you are a certain age, somewhere between about two and five years, your mind just gels. The part of it that's responsible for sex becomes set into a pattern that you'll carry with you for the rest of your life. All of the gay people I've ever discussed it with have told me that they knew they were gay, or at least different, years before they even began thinking about sex, and all of them agree that gayness cannot be converted into straightness, or vice versa, no matter how hard you might try.

The part of your brain that handles sex frequently gets cross-wired into other, seemingly irrelevant areas at this age. This is when people pick up an orientation towards sexual dominance or submission, or when a lot of guys pick up highly specific kinks—say, rubber, feathers, or shoes. Some of them are unfortunate enough to get turned on by little kids, and those guys are essentially doomed from that point onwards—there is nothing to do except castrate them or lock them up. No therapy will unkink the brain once it has kinked.

So, all things considered, being turned on by black stockings wasn't such a bad sexual card to have been dealt. I laid this all out to Virginia during the trip home. I was surprised by how calmly she accepted it. I was too big of a jerk to realize that she was thinking about how it all applied to her.

After we got back home, she gamely went out and bought some stockings and tried to wear them on occasion. This was not easy. Stockings imply a whole lifestyle. They look stupid with jeans and sneakers. A woman in stockings has to wear a dress or a skirt, and not just a blue denim skirt but something nicer, more formal. She also has to wear the type of shoes that Virginia didn't own and didn't like to wear. Stockings are not really compatible with riding a bicycle to work. They were not even really compatible with our house. During our frugal grad-student days we had accumulated a lot of furniture from Goodwill, or I had hammered it together myself out of two-by-fours. This furniture turned out to be riddled with hidden snags that a person in blue jeans would never notice but that would destroy a pair of stockings in a moment. Likewise, our half-finished house and our old junker cars had many small sharp edges that were death to stockings. On the other hand, when we went away for an anniversary trip to London, getting around in black taxis, staying in a nice hotel, and eating in good restaurants, we spent a whole week moving in a world that was perfectly adapted to stockings. It just went to show us how radically we would have to change our circumstances in order for her to dress that way routinely.

So, much money was spent on stockings in a fit of good intentions. Some good sex was had, though I seemed to enjoy it much more than Virginia did. She never achieved the shocking, animal intensity she had shown at Granny's house after the funeral. Attrition reduced her supply of stockings very quickly, sheer inconvenience prevented her from renewing it, and within a year after the funeral we were back to square one.

Other things were changing, though. I made a lot of money by cashing in some stock options, and we bought a new house up in the hills. We hired some movers to come pick up all of our junky furniture and move it into that house, where it looked much shabbier. Virginia's new job forced her to commute in a car. I didn't think our old junker was safe, and so I bought her a nice little Lexus with leather seats and wool carpet, all of it nicely snag-free. Soon, kids came along and I traded in my old beater pickup truck for a minivan.

Still, I couldn't bring myself to begin spending money on furniture until my back started going bad on me, and I realized it was because of the slack, twenty-year-old Goodwill mattress that Virginia and I were sleeping on. We had to buy a new bed. Since it was my back at stake, I went out and did the shopping.

I 'd rather stub out cigarettes on my tongue than go shopping. The idea of hitting every big furniture store in the area, comparing beds, made me want to die. All I wanted was to go to one place and buy a bed and have done with it. But I didn't want a shitty bed that I'd be sick of in a year, or a cheap mattress that would mess up my back again in five years.

So I went straight down to my local Gomer Bolstrood Home Gallery. I had heard people talk about Gomer Bolstrood furniture. Women, in particular, seemed to speak of it in hushed, religious tones. Their factory was said to be up in some New England town where they had been based for the last three hundred years. It was said that loose curls of walnut and oak from Gomer Bolstroods block plane had been used as tinder beneath the pyres of convicted witches. Gomer Bolstrood was the answer to a question I'd been ruminating over ever since Granny's funeral, namely: where does all of this high-quality grandma furniture come from? In every family, young people go to grandma's house for Thanksgiving, or other obligatory visits, and lust over the nice antique furniture, wondering which pieces they will take home when the old lady kicks the bucket. Some people lose patience and go to estate sales or antique stores and buy the stuff.

But if the supply of old, high-grade, heirloom-quality furniture is fixed, then where will the grannys of the future come from? I could see a situation, half a century in the future, when Virginia's and my descendants would all be squabbling over that one black walnut dresser, while bringing in Ryder trucks to haul the rest of our stuff straight to the dump. As the population grows, and the supply of old furniture remains constant, this kind of thing is inevitable. There must be a source for new granny-grade furniture, or else the Americans of tomorrow will all end up sitting in vinyl beanbag chairs, leaking little foam beads all over the floor.

The answer is Gomer Bolstrood, and the price is high. Each Gomer Bolstrood chair and table really ought to come in a little felt-lined box, like a piece of jewelry. But at the time, I was rich and impatient. So I drove to Gomer Bolstrood and stormed through the door, only to be brought up short by a receptionist. I felt tacky in my white tennis shoes and jeans. She had probably seen a lot of high-tech millionaires come through those doors, and took it pretty calmly. Before I knew it a middle-aged woman had emerged from the back of the store and appointed herself my personal design consultant. Her name was Margaret. “Where are the beds?” I asked. She stiffened and informed me that this not the kind of place where you could walk into a Bed Room and see a row of beds lined up like pig's feet at a butcher shop. A Gomer Bolstrood Home Design Gallery consists of a series of exquisitely decorated rooms, some of which happen to be bedrooms and to contain beds. Once we had that all straightened out. Margaret showed me the bedrooms. As she led me from one room to the next. I couldn't help noticing that she was wearing black stockings with seams up the back—perfectly straight seams.

My erotic feelings for Margaret made me uncomfortable. For a while, I had to restrain the impulse to say “just sell me the biggest, most expensive bed you have.” Margaret showed me beds in different styles. The names of the styles meant nothing to me. Some looked modern and some looked old-fashioned. I pointed to a very large, high four-poster that looked like granny furniture and said. “I'll take one of those.”

There was a three-month delay while the bed was hand-carved by New England craftsmen working at the same wage as plumbers or psychotherapists. Then it showed up at our house and was assembled by technicians in white coveralls, like the guys who work in semiconductor chip fabrication plants. Virginia came home from work. She was wearing a denim skirt, heavy wool socks, and Birkenstocks. The kids were still at school. We had sex on the bed. I performed dutifully enough, I suppose. I could not really sustain an erection and ended up with my head stuck between her bristly thighs. Even with my ears blocked by her quadriceps, I could hear her moaning and screaming. She went into erotic convulsions near the end, and almost snapped my neck. Her climax must have lasted for two or three full minutes. This was the moment when I first came to terms with the fact that Virginia could not achieve orgasm unless she was in close proximity to—preferably on top of—a piece of heirloom-grade furniture that she owned.

The window containing the image of Tom Howard's desktop vanishes. Pekka has clicked it into oblivion.

“I could not stand it any more,” he says, in his electronically generated deadpan.

“I predict a ménageà trois—Tom, his wife, and Margaret doing it on a bed at the furniture store, after hours,” Cantrell says ruminatively.

“Is it Tom? Or a fictional character of Tom's?” Pekka asks.

“Does this mean you win the bet?” Randy asks.

“If only I can figure out how to collect on it,” Cantrell says.