Cryptonomicon

Chapter 88 METIS

The appearance of root@eruditorum.org in the cell right next to Randy's is like the crowning plot twist in this Punch-and-Judy show that has been performed for his benefit ever since his plane landed at NAIA. As with any puppet show, he knows that there must be a lot of people hidden just outside the range of his senses, in furious motion, trying to make it all happen. For all he knows, some significant fraction of the Philippine gross national product is being devoted to keeping up these pretenses for his benefit.

There is a meal waiting on the floor of Randy's cell, and a rat on top of the meal. Randy usually reacts pretty badly to the sight of rats; they rupture the containment system that his upbringing and his education built around the part of his mind where the collective-unconscious stuff dwells, and send him straight into Hieronymus Bosch territory. But in these circumstances it doesn't bother him any more than seeing one at the zoo would. The rat has a surprisingly attractive buckskin-colored pelt and a tail about as thick as a pencil that has evidently run afoul of a farmer's wife with a carving knife, and woggles stiffly in the air like the blunt antenna of a cellphone. Randy is hungry, but he doesn't want to eat anything that a rat has left footprints on, so he just watches it.

His body feels like it slept for a long time. He turns on his computer and types in a command called “date.” The nails of his left hand look funny, as if they all got bruised. Focusing on them he sees a club drawn in blue ballpoint pen ink on the nail of the index finger, a diamond on the forefinger, a heart on the ring finger, a spade on the pinky. Enoch Root told him that in Pontifex, as in bridge, each card in the deck has a numerical value: clubs 1-13, diamonds 14-26, hearts 27-39, spades 40-52. Randy drew the symbols on his nails so he wouldn't forget.

Anyway, “date” tells him that he apparently slept all of yesterday afternoon and evening, all night, and about half of today. So this rat is actually eating his lunch.

Randy's computer runs Finux, so when it boots up it gives him a black screen with big fat white letters scrolling up it one line at a time, a real circa-1975 type of user interface. Also presumably the easiest possible thing to read through Van Eck phreaking. Randy types in “startx” and the screen goes black for a moment and then turns a particular shade of indigo that Randy happens to like, and beige windows appear on it with much smaller and crisper black letters. So now he is running the X Windows System, or X as people like Randy call it, which provides all of the graphical junk that people expect in a user interface: menus, buttons, scroll bars, and so on. As with anything else under UNIX (of which Finux is a variant), there are a million options that only young, lonely, or obsessed people have the time and patience to explore. Randy has been all three at various times of his life and knows a lot about these options. For example, the background of his screen happens to be a uniform indigo at the moment, but it could be an image. Theoretically you could use a movie, so that all of your windows and menus and so on would float around on top of, say, Citizen Kane running in an endless loop. You can, in fact, take any piece of software and make it into your screen background, and it will purr along happily, doing whatever it does, and not even known that it's being used as window-dressing. This has given Randy some ideas on how to approach the Van Eck thing.

In its current state, this computer is just as vulnerable to Van Eck phreaking as it was before Randy started up X. Before it was white letters on a black background. Now it's black on beige. The letters are a little smaller and they live in windows, but it makes no difference: the electronics inside his computer still have to make these transitions between zero and one, i.e. between high intensity (white or beige) and minimal (black) as they trace out these patterns of dots on the screen.

Randy fundamentally does not know what the fuck is going on in his life right now, and probably hasn't for a long time, even back in the days when he thought that he did know. But his working hypothesis is that the people who set this whole situation up (prime candidates: the Dentist and his cohorts in the Bolobolo syndicate) know that he has some cool information on his hard drive. How should they know this? Well, Pontifex—the Wizard—Enoch Root—whatever the fuck he's called—when he phoned Randy on the plane, knew that Randy had Arethusa, so God knows who else might know. Someone set up the fake drug bust at NAIA so that they could nab his laptop and yank the hard drive and make a copy of its contents. Then they found out that it was all doubly encrypted. That is, the Arethusa intercepts are encrypted to begin with in a pretty good World War II cryptosystem, which anyone should be able to break nowadays, but on top of that they are furthermore encrypted in a state-of-the-art modern system that no one can break. If they know what's good for them, they won't even try to break it. The only way for them to get the information is to get Randy to decrypt it for them, which he can do by biometrically identifying himself to his laptop (by talking to it) or by typing in a pass-phrase that only he knows. They are hoping that Randy will decrypt the Arethusa intercept files and, like a moron, display their contents on the screen. The moment that stuff appears on the screen, the game is over. The Dentist's (or whoever's) surveillance guys can feed the intercepts to some kind of a cryptanalytic supercomputer that will break them open in no time.

That doesn't mean that Randy dare not open those files—just that he daren't display them on the screen. This distinction is crucial. Ordo can read the encrypted files from the hard drive. It can write them into the computer's memory. It can decrypt them, and write the results into another region of the computer's memory, and leave that data there indefinitely, and the Van Eck phreakers will never be the wiser. But as soon as Randy tells the computer to show him that information in a window on the screen, the Arethusa intercepts will belong to the Van Eck phreakers; and whoever they are, they can probably break them faster than Randy can.

The fun and interesting thing is that Randy doesn't have to actually see those intercepts in order to work on them. As long as they are sitting in the computer's memory, he can subject them to every cryptanalystic technique in the whole Cryptonomicon.

He starts tapping out some lines in a language called Perl. Perl's a scripting language; useful for controlling your computer's functions and automating repetitive tasks. A UNIX machine like this one is rooted in a filesystem that contains tens of thousands of different files, mostly in straight ASCII text format. There are many different programs for opening these files, displaying them on the screen, and editing them. Randy intends to write a Perl script that will roam through the filesystem choosing files at random, opening each file in a randomly sized and located window, paging through it for a while, and then closing it again. If you run the script fast enough, the windows will pop open all over the place in a kind of rectangularized fireworks-burst that will go on forever. If this script is used as the screen background, in place of solid indigo, then this will go on underneath the one window on the screen where Randy's actually working. The people monitoring his work will go crazy trying to track all of this. Especially if Randy writes a script that will cause the real window to change its shape and location at random every few seconds.

It would be really stupid to open the Arethusa intercepts in a window—he's not going to do that. But he can use this technique to conceal whatever else he's doing in the way of decryption work. It occurs to him, however, when he gets a few lines into writing this Perl script, that if he pulls a stunt like that so early in his incarceration, the people surveilling him will know right away that he is on to them. And maybe it's better if he lets them believe, for a while, that he suspects nothing.

So he saves his Perl script and stops working on it for now. If he writes it in short bursts, opening it once or twice a day to type in a few lines and then closing it, it's unlikely that the surveillors will be able to follow what he is up to, even if they happen to be hackers. Just to be an asshole, he modifies his X Windows options in such a way that none of the windows on the screen will have a title bar at the top. That way the surveillance people won't be able to tell what file he is working on at any given moment, which will make it a lot harder for them to string a long series of observations together into a coherent picture of what's in his Perl script.

Too, he opens up the old message from root@eruditorum.org giving the Pontifex Transform, expressed as a few lines of Perl code. The steps that looked so unwieldy when carried out by a computer seem straight forward—easy, even—now that he construes them as manipulations of a deck of cards.

“Randy.”

“Hmmm?” Randy looks up from the screen and is startled to find that he is in a jail in the Philippines.

“Dinner is served.”

It is Enoch Root, looking at him through the bars. He points at the floor of Randy's cell where a new tray of food has just been slid in. “Actually, it was served an hour ago—you might want to have at it before the rats come.”

“Thank you,” Randy says. Making sure all the windows on his screen have been closed, he goes over and lifts his dinner up from the spatter of old rat-turds on the floor. It is rice and lechon, a simple and traditional pork dish. Enoch Root finished eating a long time ago—he sits on his bed, next to Randy, and plays an unusual game of solitaire, pausing occasionally to mark down a letter. Randy watches the manipulation of the deck carefully, growingly certain that it is the same set of operations he was just reading about in the old e-mail message.

“So what are you in for?” Randy asks.

Enoch Root finishes counting through the deck, glances at a seven of spades, closes his eyes for a few moments, and marks down a W on his napkin. Then he says, “Disorderly conduct. Trespassing. Incitement to riot. I'm probably guilty of the first two.”

“Tell me about it.”

“First tell me what you're in for.”

“Heroin was found in my bag at the airport. I stand accused of being the world's stupidest drug smuggler.”

“Is someone angry at you?”

“That would make for a much longer story,” Randy says, “but I think you have the drift.”

“Well, in my case, it's like this. I have been working at a mission hospital up in the mountain.”

“You're a priest?”

“Not anymore. I'm a lay worker.”

“Where's your hospital?”

“South of here. Out in the boondocks,” Enoch Root says. “The people there cultivate pineapple, coffee, coconut, bananas, and a few other cash crops. But their land is being torn apart by treasure hunters.”

Funny that Enoch Root should suddenly be on the subject of buried treasure. And yet he has been so tight-lipped. Randy guesses he's intended to play stupid. He takes a stab at it: “Is there supposed to be some treasure down there?”

“The old-timers say that many Nipponese trucks went down a particular road during the last few weeks before MacArthur's return. Past a certain point it was not possible to know where they went, because the road was blocked, and minefields set up to discourage the curious.”

“Or kill them,” Randy says.

Enoch Root takes this in stride. “That road gives way to a rather vast area in which gold might hypothetically have been hidden. Hundreds of square miles. Much of it is jungle. Much has difficult topography. Lots of volcanoes, some extinct, some vomiting up mudflows from time to time. But some is flat enough to grow tropical crops, and in those places, people have settled during the decades since the war, and put together the rudiments of an economy.”

“Who owns the land?”

“You've gotten to know the Philippines well,” Enoch Root says. “You go immediately to the central question.”

“Around here, asking who owns the land is like complaining about the weather in the Midwest,” Randy muses.

Enoch Root nods. “I could spend a long time answering your question. The answer is that patterns of ownership changed just after the war, and then changed again under Marcos, and yet again in the last few years. So we have several epochs, if you will. First epoch: before the war. Land owned by certain families.”

“Of course.”

“Of course. Second epoch: the war. A vast area sealed off by the Nipponese. Some of the families who owned the land prospered under the occupation. Others went bankrupt. Third epoch: postwar. The bankrupt families went away. The prosperous ones expanded their holdings. As did the church and the government.”

“Why?”

“The government made part of the land—the jungle—into a national park. And after the eruptions, the church established the mission where I work.”

“Eruptions?”

“In the early 1950s, just to make things interesting—you know, things are never interesting enough in the Philippines—the volcanoes acted up. A few lahars came through the area, wiped out some villages, redirected some rivers, displaced many people. The church set up the hospital to help those people.”

“A hospital doesn't take up very much land,” Randy observes.

“We also have farms. We are trying to help the locals become more self-reliant.” Enoch Root acts like he basically does not want to talk about this. “At any rate, things then settled down into a pattern that more or less endured until the Marcos era, when various people were forced to sell some of their holdings to Ferdinand and Imelda and various of their cousins, nephews, cronies, and bootlicks.”

“They were looking for Nipponese war gold.”

“Certain of the locals have made a business of pretending to remember where the gold is,” Enoch Root says. “Once it was understood just how remunerative this could be, it spread like a virus. Everyone claims to have hazy memories of the war now, or of tales that Dad or Granddad told them. The Marcos-era treasure-hunters did not display the cautious skepticism that might have been expected from people with more piercing intellects. Many holes were dug. No gold was found. Things settled down. Then, in the last few years, the Chinese came in.”

“Filipinos of Chinese ancestry, or—”

“Chinese of Chinese ancestry,” Enoch Root says. “Northern Chinese. Robust ones who like spicy food. Not the usual gracile Cantonese-speaking fish-eaters.”

“These people are from where, then—Shanghai?”

Root nods. “Their company is one of these post-Maoist monstrosities. Headed up by an actual Long March veteran. Wily survivor of many purges. Name of Wing. Mr. Wing—or General Wing as he likes to be addressed when he is feeling nostalgic—handled the transition to capitalism rather deftly. Built hydroelectric projects with slave labor during the Great Leap Forward, parlayed that into control of a very large government ministry which has now become a sort of corporation. Mr. Wing has the ability to shut off the electricity to just about any home or factory or even military base in China, and by Chinese standards this makes him into a distinguished elder statesman.”

“What does Mr. Wing want there?”

“Land. Land. More land.”

“What sort of land?”

“Land in the jungle. Oddly enough.”

“Maybe he wants to build a hydroelectric project.”

“Yes, and maybe you're a heroin smuggler. Say, Randy, don't think I'm rude for saying so, but you have sauce in your beard.” Enoch Root thrusts a hand through the bars, proffering a paper napkin. Randy takes it and, lifting it to his face, notes that the following letters are written on it: OSKJJ JGTMW. Randy pretends to daub sauce off his beard.

“Now I've gone and done it,” says Enoch Root, “given you my whole supply of bumwad.”

“Greater love hath no man,” Randy says. “And I see you gave me your other deck of cards too—you are too generous.”

“Not at all—I thought you might want to play solitaire, just as I did.”

“Don't mind if I do,” Randy says, setting his dinner tray aside and reaching for the deck.

The card on top is an eight of spades. Skimming it and a few more cards out of the way, he finds a joker, with small stars in the corners; according to hints that Enoch has already dropped, this is the A joker. It's the work of a moment to slip it beneath the card below, which happens to be a Jack of clubs. About two-thirds of the way down into the pack he finds a big-star joker, and B stands for Big, so he knows that is Joker B; he moves it down two cards, below the six of clubs and the nine of diamonds. Straightening up the pack and then smearing though it once more, he sticks various fingers in as he re-finds those jacks, and ends up with a good half of the pack—the full inter-Joker span, plus the two Jokers themselves—trapped between his index and forefingers. The thinner stacks above and below he pulls out and swaps with each other. Enoch watches all of this and seems to approve.

Randy pushes out the bottom-most card, now, and it turns out to be a jack of clubs. On second thought he pulls that jack out and leaves it on his knee for the time being, so he won't mess the next part up. According to the mnemonic symbols he's marked on his fingernails, the numerical value of this jack of clubs is simply 11. So, starting from the top of the deck, he counts down to the eleventh card, cuts the deck below it, then swaps the two halves, and finally takes the jack of clubs off his knee and puts it on the bottom of the deck again.

The card on the top of the deck is now a joker. “What's the numerical value for a joker?” he asks, and Enoch Root says, “it's fifty-three, for either one of them.” So Randy gets a free ride this time; he knows that if he begins counting down from the top of the deck, when he reaches 53 he'll be staring at the last card. And that card happens to be the Jack of Clubs, with a value of 11. Eleven, then is the first number in the keystream.

Now, the first letter in the ciphertext that Enoch Root wrote on the napkin is O, and (setting the deck of cards down, now, so that he can count through the alphabet on his fingers) O is letter fifteen. If he subtracts eleven from that, he gets four, and he doesn't even have to count on his fingers to know that letter number four is D. He has one letter deciphered.

Randy remarks, “We still haven't gotten to your being arrested.”

“Yes! Well, it's like this,” says Enoch Root. “Mr. Wing has been digging some holes of his own up in the jungle lately. A lot of trucks have been going through. Ruining the roads. Running over stray dogs, which as you know are an important food source for these people. A boy was hit by one of these trucks and has been in our hospital ever since. The runoff from Mr. Wing's operations has been fouling the river that many people rely on for fresh water. And there are questions of ownership too—some feel that Mr. Wing is encroaching on land that is properly owned by the government. Which in some extremely attenuated sense, means it is owned by the people.”

“Does he have a permit?”

“Ah! Once again your knowledge of local politics is evident. As you know, the normal procedure is for local officials to approach people who are digging large holes in the ground, or undertaking any kind of productive or destructive activity whatsoever, and demand that they obtain a permit, which simply means that they want a bribe or else they'll raise a stink about it. Mr. Wing's company has not obtained a permit.”

“Has a stink been raised?”

“Yes. But Mr. Wing has forged a very strong relationship with certain Filipinos of Chinese ancestry who are well placed in the government, and so the stink has been unavailing.”

The second time through, the joker-moving part went quickly since one of the jokers started out on top. The King of Hearts ends up on the bottom, and hence on Randy's knee. That son of a bitch has a numerical index of 39, and so Randy has to count most of the way through the deck to reach the card in the thirty-ninth position, which is a ten of diamonds. He splits and swaps the deck, then puts the King of Hearts back on the bottom. Top card is now a four of diamonds, which translates to an index of seventeen. Counting the seventeen top cards into his hand he stops and looks at the eighteenth, which is a four of hearts. That works out to a value of 26 + 4 = 30. But everything here is modulo 26, so adding the 26 was a waste of time, because now he has to subtract it right off again. The result is four. The second letter in Enoch's ciphertext is S, which is the nineteenth letter in the alphabet, and subtracting four from that gives him O. So the plaintext, so far, is “DO.”

“I get the picture.”

“I was sure that you would, Randy.”

Randy doesn't know what to make of the Wing business. It puts him in mind of Doug Shaftoe's yarns. Maybe Wing is looking for the Primary, and maybe Enoch Root is too, and maybe the Primary is what Old Man Comstock was trying to find by decrypting the Arethusa messages. Maybe, in other words, the location of the Primary is sitting on Randy's hard drive right now, and Root's worried that Randy, like an idiot, is going to give it away.

How'd he arrange to get into a cell next to Randy's? Presumably the Church's internal lines of communication are first-rate. Root could have known for a few days that Randy was in the clink. Time enough to hatch a plan.

“How'd you end up here, then?” Randy asks.

“We decided to raise a bit of a stink ourselves.”

“We being the Church?”

“What do you mean by the Church? If you are asking me whether the Pontifex Maximus and the College of Cardinals put on their pointy bifurcated hats and sat down together in Rome and drew up plans for a stink, the answer is no. If by 'church' you mean the local community in my neighborhood, almost all of whom happen to be devout Catholics, then yes.”

“So the community protested, or something, and you were the ring leader.”

“I was an example.”

“An example?”

“It frequently does not occur to these people to challenge the powers that be. When someone actually does, they always find it incredibly novel, and derive much entertainment from it. That was my role. I had been making a stink about Mr. Wing for quite some time.”

Randy can almost guess what the next two letters are going to be, but he has to keep working through the algorithm or the deck will get out of whack. He generates a 23 and then a 47 which, modulo 26, is 21, and subtracting the 23 and the 21 from the next two ciphertext letters K and J (again, modulo 26) gives him N and O as expected. So he has “DONO” deciphered. And continuing to work through it, one letter at a time, the cards getting a little sweaty in his hands now, he eventually gets DONOTUSEP and finally loses his place while trying to generate the last keystream letter. So now the deck is out of whack and completely unrecoverable, reminding him that he'd better be careful next time. But he can guess that this message must be: DO NOT USE PC. Enoch is worried that Randy did not anticipate Van Eck phreaking.

“So. There was a demonstration. You blocked a road or something?”

“We blocked roads, we lay down in front of bulldozers. Some people slashed a few tires. The locals put their ingenuity to work, and things got a bit out of hand. Mr. Wing's dear friends in the government took offense and called out the Army. Seventeen people were arrested. Unreasonably high bail was set for them as a punitive measure—if these people can't get out of jail they can't make money and their families suffer terribly. I could get bailed out if I wanted to, but have elected to stay behind bars as a gesture of solidarity.”

It all seems like a plausible enough cover story to Randy. “But I'm guessing that a lot of people in the government are appalled by the fact that they have thrown a saint into jail,” he says, “and so they have moved you here, to the high-prestige luxury jail with private cells.”

“Once again your understanding of the local culture is conspicuous,” Enoch Root says. He shifts position on the bed and his crucifix swings back and forth ponderously. He also has a medallion around his neck with something startling written on it.

“Do you have some occult symbol there?” Randy asks, squinting.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I can make out the word 'occult' on your medallion there.”

“It says ignoti et quasi occulti, which means 'unknown and partly hidden' or words to that effect,” says Enoch Root. “It is the motto of a society to which I belong. You must know that the word 'occult' does not intrinsically have anything to do with Satanic rituals and drinking blood and all of that. It—”

“I was trained as an astronomer,” Randy says. “So I learned all about occultation—the concealment of one body behind another, as during an eclipse.”

“Oh. Well, then, I'll shut up.”

“In fact, I know more than you might think about occultation,” Randy says. It might seem like he's beating a dead horse, except that he catches the eye of Enoch Root while he's saying it, and gives a significant sidelong glance at his computer. Root processes this for a moment and then nods.

“Who's the lady in the middle? The Virgin Mary?” Randy asks.

Root fingers the medallion without looking at it, and says, “Reasonable guess. But wrong. It's Athena.”

“The Greek goddess?”

“Yes.”

“How do you square that with Christianity?”

“When I phoned you the other day, how did you know it was me?”

“I don't know. I just recognized you.”

“Recognized me? What does that mean? You didn't recognize my voice.”

“Is this some roundabout way of answering my question about Athena worship v. Christianity?”

“Doesn't it strike you as remarkable that you can look at a stream of characters on the screen of your computer—e-mail from someone you've never seen—and later 'recognize' the same person on the phone? How does that work, Randy?”

“I haven't the faintest idea. The brain can do some weird—”

“Some complain that e-mail is impersonal—that your contact with me, during the e-mail phase of our relationship, was mediated by wires and screens and cables. Some would say that's not as good as conversing face-to-face. And yet our seeing of things is always mediated by corneas, retinas, optic nerves, and some neural machinery that takes the information from the optic nerve and propagates it into our minds. So, is looking at words on a screen so very much inferior? I think not; at least then you are conscious of the distortions. Whereas, when you see someone with your eyes, you forget about the distortions and imagine you are experiencing them purely and immediately.”

“So what's your explanation of how I recognized you?”

“I would argue that inside your mind was some pattern of neurological activity that was not there before you exchanged e-mail with me. The Root Representation. It is not me. I'm this big slug of carbon and oxygen and some other stuff on this cot right next to you. The Root Rep, by contrast, is the thing that you'll carry around in your brain for the rest of your life, barring some kind of major neurological insult, that your mind uses to represent me. When you think about me, in other words, you're not thinking about me qua this big slug of carbon, you are thinking about the Root Rep. Indeed, some day you might get released from jail and run into someone who would say, 'You know, I was in the Philippines once, running around in the boondocks, and I ran into this old fart who started talking to me about Root Reps.' And by exchanging notes (as it were) with this fellow you would be able to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the Root Rep in your brain and the Root Rep in his brain were generated by the same actual slug of carbon and oxygen and so on: me.”

“And this has something to do, again, with Athena?”

“If you think of the Greek gods as real supernatural beings who lived on Mount Olympus, no. But if you think of them as being in the same class of entities as the Root Rep, which is to say, patterns of neurological activity that the mind uses to represent things that it sees, or thinks it sees, in the outside world, then yes. Suddenly, Greek gods can be just as interesting and relevant as real people. Why? Because, in the same way as you might one day encounter another person with his own Root Rep so, if you were to have a conversation with an ancient Greek person, and he started talking about Zeus, you might—once you got over your initial feelings of superiority—discover that you had some mental representations inside your own mind that, though you didn't name them Zeus and didn't think of them as a big hairy thunderbolt-hurling son of a Titan, nonetheless had been generated as a result of interactions with entities in the outside world that are the same as the ones that cause the Zeus Representation to appear in the Greek's mind. And here we could talk about the Plato's Cave thing for a while—the Veg-O-Matic of metaphors—it slices! it dices!”

“In which,” Randy says, “the actual entities in the real world are the three-dimensional, real things that are casting the shadows, this Greek dude and I are the wretches chained up looking at the shadows of those things on the walls, and it's just that the shape of the wall in front of me is different from the shape of the wall in front of the Grecian—”

“—so that given a shadow projected on your wall is going to adopt a different shape from the same shadow projected on his wall, where the different wall-shapes here correspond to let's say your modern scientific worldview versus his ancient pagan worldview.”

“Yeah. That Plato's Cave metaphor.”

At this very moment some wag of a prison guard, out in the corridor, throws a switch and shuts off all of the lights. The only illumination now is from the screensaver on Randy's laptop, which is running animations of colliding galaxies.

“I think we can stipulate that the wall in front of you, Randy, is considerably flatter and smoother, i.e., it generally gives you a much more accurate shadow than his wall, and yet it's clear that he's still capable of seeing the same shadows and probably drawing some useful conclusions about the shapes of the things that cast them.”

“Okay. So the Athena that you honor on your medallion isn't a supernatural being—”

“—who lives on a mountain in Greece, et cetera, but rather whatever entity, pattern, trend, or what-have-you that, when perceived by ancient Greek people, and filtered through their perceptual machinery and their pagan worldview, produced the internal mental representation that they dubbed Athena. The distinction being quite important because Athena the-supernatural-chick-with-the-helmet is of course nonexistent, but 'Athena' the external-generator-of-the-internal-representation-dubbed-Athena-by-the-ancient-Greeks must have existed back then, or else the internal representation never would have been generated, and if she existed back then, the chances are excellent that she exists now, and if all that is the case, then whatever ideas the ancient Greeks (who, though utter shitheads in many ways, were terrifyingly intelligent people) had about her are probably still quite valid.”

“Okay, but why Athena and not Demeter or someone?”

“Well, it's a truism that you can't understand a person without knowing something about her family background, and so we have to do kind of a quick Cliff's Notes number on the ancient Greek Theogony here. We start out with Chaos, which is where all theogonies start, and which I like to think of as a sea of white noise—totally random broadband static. And for reasons that we don't really understand, certain polarities begin to coalesce from this—Day, Night, Darkness, Light, Earth, Sea. Personally, I like to think of these as crystals—not in the hippy-dippy Californian sense, but in the hardass technical sense of resonators, that received certain channels buried in the static of Chaos. At some point, out of certain incestuous couplings among such entities, you get Titans. And it's arguably kind of interesting to note that the Titans provide really the full complement of basic gods—you've got the sun god, Hyperion, and an ocean god, Oceanus, and so on. But they all get overthrown in a power struggle called the Titanomachia and replaced with new gods like Apollo and Poseidon, who end up filling the same slots in the organizational chart, as it were. Which is kind of interesting in that it seems to tie in with what I was saying about the same entities or patterns persisting through time, but casting slightly different shaped shadows for different people. Anyway, so now we have the Gods of Olympus as we normally think of them: Zeus, Hera, and so on.

“A couple of basic observations about these: first, they all, with one exception I'll get to soon, were produced by some kind of sexual coupling, either Titan-Titaness or God-Goddess or God-Nymph or God-Woman or basically Zeus and whom– or whatever Zeus was fucking on any particular day. Which brings me to the second basic observation, which is that the Gods of Olympus are the most squalid and dysfunctional family imaginable. And yet there is something about the motley asymmetry of this pantheon that makes it more credible. Like the Periodic Table of the Elements or the family tree of the elementary particles, or just about any anatomical structure that you might pull up out of a cadaver, it has enough of a pattern to give our minds something to work on and yet an irregularity that indicates some kind of organic provenance—you have a sun god and a moon goddess, for example, which is all clean and symmetrical, and yet over here is Hera, who has no role whatsoever except to be a literal bitch goddess, and then there is Dionysus who isn't even fully a god—he's half human—but gets to be in the Pantheon anyway and sit on Olympus with the Gods, as if you went to the Supreme Court and found Bozo the Clown planted among the justices.

“Now what I'm getting to here is that Athena was exceptional in every way. To begin with she wasn't created through sexual reproduction in any kind of normal sense; she sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus. According to some versions of the story, this happened after Zeus fucked Metis, about whom we'll hear more in due course. Then he was warned that Metis would later give birth to a son who would dethrone him, and so he ate her, and later Athena came out of his head. Whether you buy into the Metis story or not, I think we can still agree that something a little peculiar was going on with the nativity of Athena. She was also exceptional in that she did not participate in the moral squalor of Olympus; she was a virgin.”

“Aha! I knew that was a picture of a virgin on your medallion.”

“Yes, Randy, you do have a keen eye for virgins. Hephaestus leg fucked her once but did not achieve penetration. She's quite important in the Odyssey, but there are really very few myths, in the usual sense of that term, that involve her. The one exception really proves the rule: the story of Arachne. Arachne was a superb weaver who became arrogant and began taking credit herself, instead of attributing her talent to the gods. Arachne went so far as to issue an open challenge to Athena, who was the goddess of weaving, among other things.

“Now keep in mind that the typical Greek myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering around in a daze, that god's wife or lover, in a jealous rage, turns him—the helpless, innocent victim, that is—into let's say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the sun forever to be repeatedly disemboweled by army ants and stung by hornets or something. So if Arachne had dissed anyone else in the Pantheon, she would have been just a smoking hole in the ground before she knew what hit her.

“But in this case, Athena appeared to her in the guise of an old woman and recommended that she display the proper humility. Arachne declined her advice. Finally Athena revealed herself as such and challenged Arachne to a weaving contest, which you'll have to admit was uncommonly fair-minded of her. And the interesting thing is that the contest turned out to be a draw—Arachne really was just as good as Athena! Only problem was that her weaving depicted the gods of Olympus at their shepherd-raping, interspecies-fucking worst. This weaving was simply a literal and accurate illustration of all of those other myths, which makes this into a sort of meta-myth. Athena flew off the handle and whacked Arachne with her distaff, which might seem kind of like poor anger management until you consider that during the struggle against the Giants, she wasted Enceladus by dropping Sicily on him! The only effect was to cause Arachne to recognize her own hubris, at which she became so ashamed that she hanged herself. Athena then brought her back to life in the form of a spider.

“So anyway, you probably learned in elementary school that Athena wears a helmet, carries a shield called Aegis, and is the goddess of war and of wisdom, as well as crafts—such as the aforementioned weaving. Kind of an odd combination, to say the least! Especially since Ares was supposed to be the god of war and Hestia the goddess of home economics—why the redundancy? But a lot's been screwed up in translation. See, the kind of wisdom that we associate with old farts like yours truly, and which I'm trying to impart to you here, Randy Waterhouse, was called dike by the Greeks. That's not what Athena was the goddess of! She was the goddess of metis, which means cunning or craftiness, and which you'll recall was the name of her mother in one version of the story. Interestingly Metis (the personage, not the attribute) provided young Zeus with the potion that caused Cronus to vomit up all of the baby gods he'd swallowed, setting the stage for the whole Titanomachia. So now the connection to crafts becomes obvious—crafts are just the practical application of metis.”

“I associate the word 'crafts' with making crappy belts and ashtrays in summer camp,” Randy says. “I mean, who wants to be the fucking goddess of macrame?”

“It's all bad translation. The word that we use today, to mean the same thing, is really technology.”

“Okay. Now we're getting somewhere.”

“Instead of calling Athena the goddess of war, wisdom, and macrame, then, we should say war and technology. And here again we have the problem of an overlap with the jurisdiction of Ares, who's supposed to be the god of war. And let's just say that Ares is a complete asshole. His personal aides are Fear and Terror and sometimes Strife. He is constantly at odds with Athena even though—maybe because—they are nominally the god and goddess of the same thing—war. Heracles, who is one of Athena's human proteges, physically wounds Ares on two occasions, and even strips him of his weapons at one point! You see the fascinating thing about Ares is that he's completely incompetent. He's chained up by a couple of giants and imprisoned in a bronze vessel for thirteen months. He's wounded by one of Odysseus's drinking buddies during the iliad. Athena knocks him out with a rock at one point. When he's not making a complete idiot of himself in battle, he's screwing every human female he can get his hands on, and—get this—his sons are all what we would today call serial killers. And so it seems very clear to me that Ares really was a god of war as such an entity would be recognized by people who were involved in wars all the time, and had a really clear idea of just how stupid and ugly wars are.

“Whereas Athena is famous for being the backer of Odysseus, who, let's not forget, is the guy who comes up with the idea for the Trojan Horse. Athena guides both Odysseus and Heracles through their struggles, and although both of these guys are excellent fighters, they win most of their battles through cunning or (less pejoratively) metis. And although both of them engage in violence pretty freely (Odysseus likes to call himself 'sacker of cities') it's clear that they are being held up in opposition to the kind of mindless, raging violence associated with Ares and his offspring—Heracles even personally rids the world of a few of Ares's psychopathic sons. I mean, the records aren't totally clear—it's not like you can go to the Thebes County Courthouse and look up the death certificates on these guys—but it appears that Heracles, backed up by Athena all the way, personally murders at least half of the Hannibal Lecterish offspring of Ares.

“So insofar as Athena is a goddess of war, what really do we mean by that? Note that her most famous weapon is not her sword but her shield Aegis, and Aegis has a gorgon's head on it, so that anyone who attacks her is in serious danger of being turned to stone. She's always described as being calm and majestic, neither of which adjectives anyone ever applied to Ares.”

“I don't know, Enoch. Defensive versus offensive war, maybe?”

“The distinction is overrated. Remember when I said that Athena got leg-fucked by Hephaestus?”

“It generated a clear internal representation in my mind.”

“As a myth should! Athena/Hephaestus is sort of an interesting coupling in that he is another technology god. Metals, metallurgy, and fire were his specialties—the old-fashioned Rust Belt stuff. So, no wonder Athena gave him a hard-on! After he ejaculated on Athena's thigh, she's all eeeeeyew! and she wipes it off and throws the rag on the ground, where it somehow combines with the earth and generates Erichthonius. You know who Erichthonius was?”

“No.”

“One of the first kings of Athens. You know what he was famous for?”

“Tell me.”

“Invented the chariot—and introduced the use of silver as a currency.”

“Oh, Jesus!” Randy clamps his head between his hands and makes moaning noises, only for a little while.

“Now in many other mythologies you can find gods that have parallels with Athena. The Sumerians had Enki, the Norse had Loki. Loki was an inventor-god, but psychologically he had more in common with Ares; he was not only the god of technology but the god of evil too, the closest thing they had to the Devil. Native Americans had tricksters—creatures full of cunning—like Coyote and Raven in their mythologies, but they didn't have technology yet, and so they hadn't coupled the Trickster with Crafts to generate this hybrid Technologist-god.”

“Okay,” Randy says, “so obviously where you're going with this is that there must be some universal pattern of events that when filtered through the sensory apparatus and the neural rigs of primitive, superstitious people always gives rise to internal mental representations that they identify as gods, heroes, etc.”

“Yes. And these can be recognized across cultures, in the same way that two persons with Root Reps in their mind might 'recognize' me by comparing notes.”

“So, Enoch, you want me to believe that these gods—which aren't really gods, but it's a nice concise word—all share certain things in common precisely because the external reality that generated them is consistent and universal across cultures.”

“That is right. And in the case of Trickster gods the pattern is that cunning people tend to attain power that un-cunning people don't. And all cultures are fascinated by this. Some of them, like many Native Americans, basically admire it, but never couple it with technological development. Others, like the Norse, hate it and identify it with the Devil.”

“Hence the strange love-hate relationship that Americans have with hackers.”

“That's right.”

“Hackers are always complaining that journalists cast them as bad guys. But you think that this ambivalence is deeper-seated.”

“In some cultures. The Vikings—to judge from their mythology—would instinctively hate hackers. But something different happened with the Greeks. The Greeks liked their geeks. That's how we get Athena.”

“I'll buy that—but where does the war-goddess thing come in?”

“Let's face it, Randy, we've all known guys like Ares. The pattern of human behavior that caused the internal mental representation known as Ares to appear in the minds of the ancient Greeks is very much with us today, in the form of terrorists, serial killers, riots, pogroms, and aggressive tinhorn dictators who turn out to be military incompetents. And yet for all their stupidity and incompetence, people like that can conquer and control large chunks of the world if they are not resisted.”

“You must meet my friend Avi.”

“Who is going to fight them off, Randy?”

“I'm afraid you're going to say we are.”

“Sometimes it might be other Ares-worshippers, as when Iran and Iraq went to war and no one cared who won. But if Ares-worshippers aren't going to end up running the whole world, someone needs to do violence to them. This isn't very nice, but it's a fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence. Cunning. Metis.”

“Tactical cunning, like Odysseus and the Trojan Horse, or—”

“Both that, and technological cunning. From time to time there is a battle that is out-and-out won by a new technology—like longbows at Crecy. For most of history those battles happen only every few centuries—you have the chariot, the compound bow, gunpowder, ironclad ships, and so on. But something happens around, say, the time that the Monitor, which the Northerners believe to be the only ironclad warship on earth, just happens to run into the Merrimack, of which the Southerners believe exactly the same thing, and they pound the hell out of each other for hours and hours. That's as good a point as any to identify as the moment when a spectacular rise in military technology takes off—it's the elbow in the exponential curve. Now it takes the world's essentially conservative military establishments a few decades to really comprehend what has happened, but by the time we're in the thick of the Second World War, it's accepted by everyone who doesn't have his head completely up his ass that the war's going to be won by whichever side has the best technology. So on the German side alone we've got rockets, jet aircraft, nerve gas, wire-guided missiles. And on the Allied side we've got three vast efforts that put basically every top-level hacker, nerd, and geek to work: the codebreaking thing, which as you know gave rise to the digital computer; the Manhattan Project, which gave us nuclear weapons; and the Radiation Lab, which gave us the modern electronics industry. Do you know why we won the Second World War, Randy?”

“I think you just told me.”

“Because we built better stuff than the Germans?”

“Isn't that what you said?”

“But why did we build better stuff, Randy?”

“I guess I'm not competent to answer, Enoch, I haven't studied that period well enough.”

“Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena.”

“And am I supposed to gather that you, or your organization, had something to do with all that?”

“Oh, come now, Randy! Let's not allow this to degenerate into conspiracy theories.”

“Sorry. I'm tired.”

“So am I. Goodnight.”

And then Enoch goes to sleep. Just like that. Randy doesn't.

To the Cryptonomicon!

Randy is mounting a known-ciphertext attack: the hardest kind. He has the ciphertext (the Arethusa intercepts) and nothing else. He doesn't even know the algorithm that was used to encrypt them. In modern cryptanalysis, this is unusual; normally the algorithms are public knowledge. That is because algorithms that have been openly discussed and attacked within the academic community tend to be much stronger than ones that have been kept secret. People who rely on keeping their algorithms secret are ruined as soon as that secret gets out. But Arethusa dates from World War II, when people were much less canny about such things.

This would be a hell of a lot easier if Randy knew some of the plaintext that is encrypted within these messages. Of course, if he knew all of the plaintext, he wouldn't even need to decrypt them; breaking Arethusa in that case would be an academic exercise.

There is a compromise between the two extremes of, on the one hand, not knowing any of the plaintext at all, and, on the other, knowing all of it. In the Cryptonomicon that falls under the heading of cribs. A crib is an educated guess as to what words or phrases might be present in the message. For example if you were decrypting German messages from World War II, you might guess that the plaintext included the phrase “HEIL HITLER” or “SIEG HEIL.” You might pick out a sequence of ten characters at random and say, “Let's assume that this represented HEIL HITLER. If that is the case, then what would it imply about the remainder of the message?”

Randy's not expecting to find any HEILHITLERs in the Arethusa messages, but there might be other predictable words. He's been making a list of cribs in his head: MANILA, certainly. WATERHOUSE, perhaps. And now he's thinking GOLD and BULLION. So, in the case of MANILA he could pick out any six-character string from the intercepts and say, “What if these characters are the encrypted form of MANILA?” and then work from there. If he were working with an intercept only six characters long, then there would be only one such six-character segment to choose from. A seven-character-long message would give him two possibilities: it could be the first six or the last six characters. The upshot is that for a message intercept that is n characters long, the number of six-character-long segments is equal to (n–5). In the case of a 105-character-long intercept, he will have 100 different possible locations for the word MANILA. Actually, a hundred and one: because it's of course possible—even likely—that MANILA is not in there at all. But each of these 100 guesses has its own set of ramifications vis-à-vis all of the other characters in the message. What those ramifications are, exactly, depends on what assumptions Randy is making about the underlying algorithm.

As far as that goes: the more he thinks about it, the more he believes he has some good stuff to go on—thanks to Enoch, who (in retrospect) has been feeding him some useful clues when not spamming him through the bars with theogonical analysis. Enoch mentioned that when the NSA started attacking what later turned out to be the fake Arethusa intercepts, they were going on the assumption that they were somehow related to another cryptosystem dubbed Azure. And sure enough, Randy learns from the Cryptonomicon that Azure was an oddball system used by both the Nipponese and the Germans that employed a mathematical algorithm to generate a different one-time pad every day. This is awfully vague, but it helps Randy rule out a lot. He knows for example that Arethusa isn't a rotor system like Enigma. And he knows that if he can find two messages that were sent on the same day, they will probably use the same one-time pad.

What kind of mathematical algorithm was used? The contents of Grandpa's trunk provide clues. He remembers the photograph of Grandpa with Turing and von Hacklheber at Princeton, where all three of them were evidently fooling around with zeta functions. And in the trunk were several monographs on the same subject. And the Cryptonomicon states that zeta functions are even today being used in cryptography, as sequence generators—which is to say, machines for spitting out series of pseudo-random numbers, which is exactly what a one-time pad is. Everything points to that Azure and Arethusa are siblings and that both are just implementations of zeta functions.

The big thing standing in his way right now is that he doesn't have any textbooks on zeta functions sitting around his jail cell. The contents of Grandpa's trunk would be an excellent resource—but they are currently stored in a room in Chester's house. But on the other hand, Chester's rich, and he wants to help.

Randy calls for a guard and demands to see Attorney Alejandro. Enoch Root goes very still for a few moments, and then shunts directly back into the loping, untroubled sleep of a man who is exactly where he wants to be.