Cryptonomicon

Chapter 76 PULSE

As Avi walks back through his house, he utters something biblical-sounding in Hebrew that causes his kids to burst into tears, and his nannies to rise from the kid-mat and begin shoving stuff into bags. Devorah emerges from a back room where she's been sleeping off some morning sickness. She and Avi embrace tenderly in the hallway and Randy begins to feel like a fleck of debris lodged in someone's eye. So he heads straight for an exit, goes out to his car and starts driving. He winds through the hills over the San Andreas Fault to Skyline and then heads south. Ten minutes later, Avi's car howls past him in the left lane, doing ninety or a hundred. Randy barely has time to read the bumper sticker: MEAN PEOPLE SUCK.

Randy's looking for a totally anonymous location where he can patch into the Internet. A hotel doesn't work because a hotel keeps good records of outgoing telephone calls. What he should really do is use this packet radio interface he has for his laptop, but even that requires a place to sit down and work undisturbed for a while. Which gets him thinking in terms of a fast food joint, not to be found in the mid-peninsular wasteland. By the time he has reached the northern skirts of the Valley—Menlo Park and Palo Alto—he has decided fuck it, he'll just go to the scene of the action. Maybe he could be of some use there. So he gets off at the El Monte exit and heads into the business district of Los Altos, a pretty typical mid-twentieth-century American downtown gradually being metabolized by franchises.

A major street intersects, at something other than a ninety-degree angle, a smaller commercial street, defining two (smaller) acute-angle lots and two (larger) obtuse-angle lots. On one side of the major street, the obtuse-angle lot is occupied by a two-storey office building, home of Ordo's offices and Tombstone. The acute-angle lot is occupied by the McDonald's. On the opposite side of the major street, the acute-angle lot is occupied by, weirdly enough, a 24 Jam, the only one Randy has ever seen in the Western Hemisphere. The obtuse-angle lot is occupied by a Park 'n' Lock, where you can park for the old-fashioned purpose of wandering around the business district from store to store.

The parking lot of the McDonald's is full, and so Randy pulls through its drive-through window, chooses n, where n is a random number between one and six, and asks for Value Meal n with super-size fries. This having been secured, he guns the Acura directly across the big street into the Park 'n' Lock just in time to see its last available space being seized by a minivan bearing the logo of a San Jose television station. Randy is not planning to stray far from his car, so he just blocks in another car. But as he is setting the parking brake, he notices movement inside it, and with a bit of further attention realizes he is watching a man with long hair and a beard methodically ramming shells into a pump shotgun. The man catches sight of Randy in his rearview mirror and turns around with a scrupulously polite pardon-me-sir-but-you-seem-to-have-blocked-me-in look. Randy recognizes him as Mike or Mark, a graphics card hacker who farms ostriches in Gilroy (quirky hobbies being de rigueur in the high-tech world). He moves the Acura, blocking in what looks like an abandoned van from the Starsky and Hutch epoch.

Randy climbs up on the roof of his car with his laptop and his Value Meal n. Until recently he would never have sat on top of his Acura because his considerable mass would dimple the sheet metal. But after Amy rammed it with the truck, Randy became much less anal, and now sees it as a tool to be used until it is just a moraine of rusted shards. He happens to have a twelve-volt adapter for the laptop, so he runs that down into his cigarette lighter socket. Finally, he's settled, and gets a chance to take a good look around.

The parking lot of Novus Ordo Seclorum's office building is filled with cop cars, and BMWs and Mercedes Benzes that Randy assumes belong to lawyers. Avi's Range Rover is parked jauntily on top of some landscaping, and a few TV camera crews have set up, as well. In front of the building's main entrance a lot of people are jammed into the smallest possible space screaming at each other. They are surrounded by ring after concentric ring of cops, media, and law-firm minions—collectively, what Tolkien would call Men—and a few non– or post-human creatures imbued with peculiar physiognomies and vaguely magical powers: Dwarves (steady, productive, surly) and Elves (brilliant in a more ethereal way). Randy, a Dwarf, has begun to realize that his grandfather may have been an Elf. Avi is a Man with a strong Elvish glow about him. Somewhere in the center of this whole thing, presumably, is Gollum.

There is a little window on the screen of Randy's laptop showing a cheesy 1940s-newsreel-style animation of a radio tower, with zigzaggy conceptual radio waves radiating outwards from it over the whole earth, which is shown ludicrously not to scale in this rendering—the diameter of the earth is about equal to the height of the radio tower. That these Jovian info-bolts are visible and moving is a visual cue that his radio adapter has managed to patch itself into the packet radio network. Randy opens a terminal window and types

and in a few seconds bang! he gets a login prompt. Randy now has another look at the animated window, and notes with approval that the info-bolts have been replaced with gouts of question marks. This means that his computer has recognized laundry.org as a S/WAN machine—running the Secure Wide Area Network protocol—which means that every packet going back and forth between Randy's laptop and laundry.org is encrypted. Definitely a good idea when you are about to do something illegal over the radio.

Mike or Mark gets out of his car, cutting a dramatic figure in a long black Western-style coat, a look rather spoiled by the t-shirt he's got on underneath it: black with a fat red question mark in the middle. He hitches the strap of his shotgun up onto his shoulder and leans into his back door to retrieve a large black cowboy hat, which he places on the roof of his car. He thrusts his elbows into the air and gathers his long hair back behind his ears, staring up at the sky, and then clamps the cowboy hat down on his head. Tied loosely around his neck is a black bandanna with a question-mark pattern, which he now pulls up over the bridge of his nose so that just an eye-slit shows between it and the cowboy hat. Randy would be really alarmed if it weren't for the fact that several of his friends, such as John Cantrell, often go around looking this way. Mike or Mark strides across the Park 'n' Lock, tracked carefully by a panning cameraman, and jogs across the street to the 24 Jam.

Randy logs onto laundry.org using ssh—“secure shell”—a way of further encrypting communications between two computers. Laundry.org is an anonymizing service; all packets routed through it to another computer are stripped of identifying information first, so that anyone down the line who intercepts one of those packets has no way of knowing where it originated. Once he's patched into the anonymizer, Randy types

and hits the return key and then actually, literally, prays. The Crypt is still going through its shakedown period (which, indeed, is the only reason that all of Tombstone's contents have not been moved onto it yet).

In the lot of the 24 Jam, Mike or Mark has joined three other elvishlooking sorts in black cowboy hats and bandannas, whom Randy can identify based on the length and color of their ponytails and beards. There's Stu, a Berkeley grad student who is somehow mixed up in Avi's HEAP project, and Phil, who invented a major programming language a couple of years ago and goes helicopter-skiing in his spare time, and Craig, who knows everything there is to know about encrypted credit-card transactions on the Net and is a devotee of traditional Nipponese archery. Some of these guys are wearing long coats and some aren't. There is a lot of Secret Admirers iconography: t-shirts bearing the number 56, which is a code for Yamamoto, or just pictures of Yamamoto himself, or big fat question marks. They are having an energetic and very happy conversation—though it looks a bit forced—because, to a man, they are carrying long weapons out in plain sight. One of them has a hunting rifle, and each of the others is slinging a rudimentary-looking gun with a banana clip sticking out of the side. Randy thinks, but is not sure, that these are HEAP guns.

This scene, not surprisingly, has caught the attention of the police, who have surrounded these four with squad cars, and who are standing at the ready with rifles and shotguns. It is an oddity of the law in many jurisdictions that, while carrying (say) a concealed one-shot .22 derringer requires a license, openly carrying (e.g.) a big game rifle is perfectly legal. Concealed weapons are outlawed or at least heavily regulated, and unconcealed ones are not. So a lot of Secret Admirers—who tend to be gun nuts—have taken to going around conspicuously armed as a way of pointing out the absurdity of those rules. Their point is this: who gives a shit about concealed weapons anyway, since they are only useful for defending oneself against assaults by petty criminals, which almost never happens? The real reason the Constitution provides for the right to bear arms is defending oneself against oppressive governments, and when it comes to that, your handgun is close to useless. So (according to these guys) if you are going to assert your right to keep and bear arms you should do it openly, by packing something really big.

A bunch of junk scrolls up Randy's screen. WELCOME TO THE CRYPT, it begins, and then there's a paragraph of information about what a great idea the Crypt is and how anyone who gives a damn about privacy should get an account here. Randy truncates the commercial message with the whack of a key, and logs in as Randy. Then he enters the command

and gets two gratifying messages in return: one saying that a connection has been established with Tombstone, and the next saying that a S/WAN link has been automatically negotiated. Finally he gets

which means that he is now free to log on to the machine right across the street from him. And now Mr. Randy has a little decision to make.

So far, he's clean. The bits coming out of his laptop are encrypted; so even if someone is monitoring the local packet radio net, all they know is that some encrypted bits are flying around. They cannot trace any of those bits to Randy's machine without bringing in an elaborate radio direction-finding rig and zeroing in on him most conspicuously. Those encrypted bits are eventually finding their way to laundry.org up in Oakland, which is a big Internet host that probably has thousands of packets rushing in and out of it every second. If someone were tapping laundry.org's T3 line, which would require an enormous investment in computers and communications gear, they would detect a very small number of encrypted packets going out to crypt.kk in Kinakuta. But these packets would have been stripped of any identifying information before leaving laundry.org and so there would be no way to tell where they originated. Now, crypt.kk is also an anonymizer, and so an entity tapping its staggeringly enormous T5 line (a job on the order of eavesdropping on a small country's telecommunications system) might theoretically be able to detect a few packets going back and forth between crypt.kk and Tombstone. But again, these would be stripped of identifying information, and so it would be impossible to trace them even as far back as laundry.org, to say nothing of tracing them all the way back to Randy's laptop.

But in order for Randy to get into Tombstone and begin actually tampering with the evidence, he must now log on. If it were a poorly secured host of the type that used to be legion on the Internet, he could just exploit one of its numerous security holes and crack his way into it, so that if his activities on the machine were discovered, he could claim that it wasn't him—just some cracker who happened to break into the machine at the very moment it was being seized by the cops. But Randy has spent the last several years of his life making machines such as this one impregnable to crackers, and he knows it's impossible.

Furthermore, there's no point in logging on as just any old user—like using a guest account. Guests are not allowed to tamper with system files. In order to do any meaningful evidence-tampering here, Randy has to log on as the superuser. The name of the superuser account is, inconveniently, “randy” and you can't actually log in as “randy” without entering a password that only Randy would know. So after using the very latest in cryptographic technology and trans-oceanic packet-switching communications to conceal his identity, Randy now finds himself faced with the necessity of typing his name into the fucking machine.

A little scenario flashes up in his head in which he sends an anonymous broadcast message to all laundry.org users telling them that the password for the “randy” account on “tombstone.epiphyte.com” is such and such and urging them to spread this information all over the Internet as fast as possible. This might have been a decent idea if he had thought of it an hour ago. Now it is too late; any sentient prosecutor tracing the time stamps on the messages would be able to prove that it was just a blind.

Besides, time is running low. The discussion across the street, which is just a shrill hubbub at this distance, is rising to some sort of climax.

Randy has meanwhile booted up his browser and gone to the ordo.net home page. Usually it's a pretty dull corporate home page, but today all of the blurbs and quotidian press releases have been obliterated by a window showing live color video of what is going on in front of the building (or rather, what was going on a couple of seconds ago; coming over his miserable low-bandwidth radio link, the video changes frames about once every three seconds). The video is originating from Ordo itself, where they've evidently aimed a camera out the window and are slamming the images straight out over their very own T3 line.

Randy glances up just in time to see the guy who invented the term “virtual reality” walking across the lot, deep in conversation with the executive editor of TURING Magazine. Not far behind them is Bruce, an operating systems engineer who, in his spare time, records Tierra del Fuegan folk music and makes it available for free over the Internet.

“Bruce!” Randy shouts.

Bruce falters and looks over in Randy's direction. “Randy,” he says.

“Why are you here?”

“Word on the street is that the Feds were raiding Ordo,” Bruce says.

“Interesting… any particular Feds?”

“Comstock,” Bruce says. Meaning Paul Comstock, who, by virtue of being Attorney General of the United States, runs the FBI. Randy does not believe this rumor, but in spite of himself he scans the area for people fitting the general profile of FBI agents. The FBI hates and fears strong crypto. Meanwhile another Secret Admirer type shouts, “I heard Secret Service!” Which is even creepier, in a way, because the Secret Service is part of the Treasury Department, and is charged with combating wire fraud and protecting the nation's currency.

Randy says, “Would you be open to the possibility that it's all a Net rumor? That what's really going on is that a piece of equipment inside Ordo's offices is being seized as part of a legal squabble?”

“Then why are all these cops here?” Bruce says.

“Maybe the masked men with assault rifles drew them.”

“Well, why did the Secret Admirers show up in the first place if it wasn't a government raid?”

“I don't know. Maybe it's just some kind of spontaneous self-organizing phenomenon—like the origin of life in the primordial soup.”

Bruce says, “Isn't it just as possible that the legal squabble is a pretext?”

“In other words that the squabble is sort of like a Trojan horse put together by Comstock?”

“Yeah.”

“Knowing all of the parties involved, I'd rate it as unlikely,” Randy says, “but let me think about it.”

The noise and intensity of the argument in the Ordo parking lot spike upwards. Randy looks at the video window, which unfortunately has no sound track. The transactions between frames come as isolated blocks of new pixels slapped up one at a time over the old, like a large billboard being posted sections. High-definition TV it ain't. But Randy definitely recognizes Avi, standing there tall, pale, and calm, flanked by one guy who's probably Dave the Ordo president, and another guy who's obviously a lawyer. They are literally standing in the doorway of the building and facing off against two cops and none other than Andrew Loeb, who is in rapid motion and hence poses an insurmountable bandwidth problem. The Internet video gear is smart enough not to mess with parts of an image that aren't changing very much, and so the planted cops get refreshed maybe a couple of times a minute, and then just in a few rectangular image-shards. But Andrew Loeb is waving his arms around, hopping up and down, lunging towards Avi from time to time, pulling back and taking calls on his cellphone, and waving documents in the air. The computers have identified him as a bunch of pixels that require a great deal of attention and bandwidth, and so somewhere some poor algorithm is churning through the high-pressure slurry of compressed pixels that is the image of Andrew Loeb, and doing its level best to freeze the most rapidly-moving parts into discrete frames and chop them up into checkerboard-squares that can be broadcast as packets over the Net. These packets arrive in Randy's computer as the radio network passes them along, i.e., sporadically and in the wrong order. So Andrew Loeb appears as a cubist digital-video artifact, a rectilinear amoeba of mostly trench-coat-beige pixels. From time to time his eyes or his mouth will suddenly appear, disembodied, in the center of an image-block, and remain frozen there for a few seconds, crystallized in a moment of howling rage.

This is weirdly mesmerizing until Randy's startled out of his reverie by a clunk. He looks over to see that the van he's blocked in wasn't abandoned after all; it was full of Dwarves, who have now thrown the back doors open to reveal a nest of cables and wires. A couple of the Dwarves are heaving a boxy apparatus up onto the roof of the van. Cables run out of it to another boxy apparatus down below. The apparatus is electrical in nature—and doesn't appear capable of firing projectiles—so Randy decides not to pay it much attention for the moment.

Voices well up across the street. Randy sees some cops climbing out of a cop-van carrying a battering ram.

Randy types:

and hits the return key. Tombstone answers:

and Randy types it in. Tombstone informs him that he's logged on, and that he has mail.

The fact that Randy has logged on has now been recorded by the system in several locations on the hard drive. He has, in other words, just slapped big greasy fingerprints all over a weapon that the police are moments away from seizing as evidence. If Tombstone is shut down and grabbed by the cops before Randy can erase those traces, they will know he has logged on at the very moment that Tombstone was confiscated, and will put him in prison for tampering with evidence. He very much wishes that Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe could somehow be made aware of what a ballsy thing he is doing here. But then Doug has probably done all kinds of ballsy things of which Randy will never be aware, and Randy respects him anyway because of his bearing. Maybe the way to get that kind of bearing is to go around doing ballsy things in secret that somehow percolate up to the surface of your personality.

Randy could just reformat the hard drive with a single command, but (1) it would take several minutes to execute and (2) it would not thoroughly erase the incriminating bits, which could be lifted from the hard drive by a motivated technician. Because he knows which files have recorded his log-on, he executes a command that finds those files on the hard drive. Then he types another command that causes random numbers to be written over those areas of the hard drive seven times in a row.

The cops are slamming the battering ram against the side door of the office building when Randy's right pinky slams the Enter key and executes that command. He is almost certainly safe from the tampering-with-evidence charge now. But he hasn't actually tampered yet, which is the whole point of this exercise. He needs to find all the copies of the e-mail message that specifies the latitude and longitude of the wreck, and do the same multiple-erase trick on them. If the damn things were not encrypted, he could search for the critical strings of digits. As it is, he will have to search for files that were created during a certain time period, around the time that Randy was out on Glory, anchored over the wreck. Randy knows roughly what day that was, and so he sets the limits of the search to give him any files created five days either side of that, just to be safe, and limits it to only those directories used for e-mail.

The search takes forever, or maybe it just seems that way because the cops have smashed the side door off its hinges now and are inside the building. The video window catches Randy's eye as it changes dramatically; he gets a veering montage of grainy frozen images of a room; a doorway; a hallway; a reception area; and finally a barricade. The Ordo guys have yanked their video camera out of the window and restationed it at their front desk, recording a barrier built of cheap modular office furniture piled against the glass entrance to the reception. The camera tilts up to show that one of the four glass door slabs has already been crystallized by (one supposes) the impact of the battering ram.

Randy's “find” command finally returns with a list of about a hundred files. The half-dozen or so critical ones are on the list somewhere, but Randy doesn't have time to go through the list figuring out which is which. He has the system generate a list of the disk blocks occupied by those files, so that he can go back later and do a super-erase. Once he's got that information, he does a “rm” or “remove” command on all of them. This is a paltry and miserable way to expunge secrets from a hard drive, but Randy's afraid he may not have time to do it more thoroughly. The “rm” only takes a few moments and then Randy goes back and has the system write random numbers on top of those disk blocks seven times in a row, just as he did earlier. By this time the barricade has been scattered all over Ordo's lobby and the cops are inside. They have weapons drawn and pointed at the ceiling and they don't look very happy.

There is one thing left to do. Actually it's a pretty big thing. The Epiphyte people use Tombstone for all kinds of purposes, and there's no way of telling whether other copies of that latitude and longitude exist on it somewhere. Most of Epiphyte is made up of inveterate computer users who would be just the sort to write little scripts to back up all of their old e-mail messages to an archive every week. So he whips up his own script that will just write random information to every sector on the entire hard drive, then go back and do it again, and again, and again, forever—or until the cops pull the plug. Just after he whacks the Enter key to send this command in to Tombstone, he hears an electrical buzzing noise from the van that makes his hair stand on end for a moment. He sees a cop in the video window, frozen. Then the screen of his computer goes blank.

Randy looks over toward the old van. The Dwarves are high-fiving each other.

There is a screeching of tires, and the sound of a low-speed collision, out on the street. About a dozen cars have rolled quietly to a stop, and some have been rear-ended by others that are still functioning. The McDonald's has gone dark. Television technicians are cursing inside their mobile units. Police officers and lawyers are pounding their walkie-talkies and cellphones against their hands.

“Pardon me,” Randy says to the Dwarves, “but would you gentlemen like to share anything with me?”

“We just took out the whole building,” says one of the Dwarves.

“Took it out, in what sense?”

“Nailed it with a big electromagnetic pulse. Fried every chip within range.”

“So it's a scorched-earth kind of deal? Go ahead and confiscate that gear, you damn Feds, it's all worthless junk now?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it certainly worked on those cars,” Randy says, “and it definitely worked on this piece of junk that used to be my computer.”

“Don't worry—it has no effect on hard drives,” the Dwarf says, “so all of your files are intact.”

“I know you are expecting me to take that as good news,” Randy says.