Cryptonomicon

Chapter 92 AKIHABARA

As Randy's plane banks into Narita, a low stratum of cloud screens the countryside like a silk veil. It must be Nippon: the only two colors are the orange of the earth-moving equipment and the green of the earth that has not yet been moved. Other than that, everything is greyscale: grey parking lots divided into rectangles by white lines, the rectangles occupied with black, white, or grey cars, fading off into silvery fog beneath a sky the color of aviation alloy. Nippon is soothing, a good destination for a man who has just been rousted from his jail cell, hauled up before a judge, tongue-lashed, driven to the airport, and expelled from the Philippines.

The Nipponese look more American than Americans. Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones. The goal of all such persons seems to be to make themselves cuddly and nonthreatening. The girls in particular are unbearably precious, although perhaps Randy just thinks so because of that troublesome neurological hookup between his brain and Little Man 'tate. The old folks, instead of looking weathered and formidable, tend to wear sneakers and baseball caps. Black leather, studs, and handcuffs-as-accessories are the marks of the powerless lower classes, the people who tend to end up in the pokey in Manila, and not of the persons who actually dominate the world and crush everything in their path.

“The doors are about to close.” “The bus is leaving in five minutes.” Nothing happens in Nippon without a perky, breathy woman's voice giving you a chance to brace yourself. It is safe to say that this is not true of the Philippines. Randy thinks about taking a bus into Tokyo until he comes to his senses and remembers that he's carrying around in his head the precise coordinates of a mine that probably contains not less than a thousand tons of gold. He hails a taxi. On the way into town, he passes by a road accident: a tanker truck has crossed the white line and flipped over on the shoulder. But in Nippon, even traffic accidents have the grave precision of ancient Shinto rituals. White-gloved cops direct traffic, moon-suited rescue workers descend from spotless emergency vans. The taxi passes beneath Tokyo Bay through a tunnel that was built, three decades ago, by Goto Engineering.

Randy ends up in a big old hotel, “old” meaning that the physical structure was constructed during the fifties, when Americans competed with Soviets to build the most brutalistic space-age buildings out of the most depressing industrial materials. And indeed one can easily imagine Ike and Mamie pulling up to the front door in a five-ton Lincoln Continental. Of course the interior has been gutted and redone more frequently than many hotels steam-clean their carpets, and so everything is perfect. Randy has a strong impulse to lie in bed like a sack of shit, but he is tired of being confined. And there are many people he could talk to on the phone, but he is supremely paranoid about telephone conversations now. Any talking that he might do would have to be censored. Talking openly and freely is a pleasure, talking carefully is work, and Randy doesn't feel like work. He calls his parents to tell them everything's fine, calls Chester to thank him.

Then he takes his laptop downstairs and sits in the middle of the hotel's lobby, which is ostentatiously vast by Tokyo standards; the value of the land beneath the lobby alone probably exceeds that of Cape Cod. No one can even get near him with a Van Eck antenna here, and even if they do there will be plenty of interference from the nearby computers of the concierge desk. He starts ordering drinks, alternating between brutally cold pale Nipponese beer and hot tea, and writes a memo explaining more or less what he has spent the last month accomplishing.

He writes it very slowly because his hands are practically immobilized now by carpal tunnel syndrome, and any motion that even faintly resembles typing causes him a lot of pain. He ends up cadging a pencil from the concierge and then using its eraser to punch the keys one at a time. The memo begins with the word “carpal” which is a little code that they have developed to explain why the following text seems unnaturally terse and devoid of capital letters. He's barely got that tapped out when he's approached by a devastatingly cute and fluttery young thing in a kimono who tells him that there is a staff of typists on call in the Business Center to help him with this should he desire it. Randy declines as politely as he knows how, which is probably not politely enough. Kimono Girl backs away in tiny steps, bowing and uttering truncated sub-vocal hais. Randy goes back to work with the pencil eraser. He explains, as briefly and clearly as he can, what he's been doing, and what he thinks is going on with General Wing and Enoch Root. He leaves the subject of what the fuck's going on with the Dentist open for speculation.

When he's done, he encrypts it and then goes up to his room to e-mail it. He can't get over the cleanliness of his lodgings. The sheets appear to have been tightened around the mattress with turnbuckles, then dipped in starch. This is the first time in over a month that he hasn't had the warm wet reek of sewer gas climbing up his nostrils and the ammoniacal tang of evaporating urine stinging his eyes. Somewhere in Nippon, a man in a clean white coverall stands in a room with a fat hose-fed gun vomiting freshly chopped glass fibers slathered with polyester resin onto a curvaceous form; peeled off the form, the result is bath rooms like this one: a single topological surface pierced in at most two or three places by drains and nozzles. While Randy's e-mailing his memo he lets hot water run into the largest and smoothest depression in the bathroom-surface. Then he takes off his clothes and climbs into it. He never takes baths, but between the foulness that seems infused into his flesh now, and the throbbing of his Hunk of Burning Love, there was never a better time.

The last few days were the worst. When Randy finished his project, and displayed the bogus results on the screen, he expected that the cell door would swing open immediately. That he'd walk out onto the streets of Manila and that, just for extra bonus points, Amy might even be waiting for him. But nothing at all happened for a whole day, and then Attorney Alejandro came to tell him that a deal might be possible but that it would take some work. And then it turned out that the deal was actually a pretty bad one: Randy was not going to be exonerated as such. He was going to be deported from the country under orders not to come back. Attorney Alejandro never claimed that this was a particularly good deal, but something in his manner made it clear that there was no point griping about it; The Decision Had Been Made at levels that were not accessible.

He could very easily take care of the Hunk of Burning Love problem now that he has privacy, but astonishes himself by electing not to. This may be perverse; he's not sure. The last month and a half of total celibacy, relieved only by nocturnal emissions at roughly two-week intervals, has definitely got him in a mental space he has never been to before, or come near, or even heard about. When he was in jail he had to develop a fierce mental discipline in order not to be distracted by thoughts of sex. He got alarmingly good at it after a while. It's a highly unnatural approach to the mind/body problem, pretty much the antithesis of every sixties and seventies-tinged philosophy that he ever imbibed from his Baby Boomer elders. It is the kind of thing he associates with scary hardasses: Spartans, Victorians, and mid-twentieth-century American military heroes. It has turned Randy into something of a hardass in his approach to hacking, and meanwhile, he suspects, it has got him into a much more intense and passionate head space than he's ever known when it comes to matters of the heart. He won't really know that until he comes face to face with Amy, which looks like it's going to be a while, since he's just been kicked out of the country where she lives and works. Just as an experiment, he decides he's going to keep his hands off of himself for now. If it makes him a little tense and volatile compared to his pathologically mellow West Coast self, then so be it. One nice thing about being in Asia is that tense, volatile people blend right in. It's not like anyone ever died from being horny.

So he arises from the bath unsullied and wraps himself in a vestal white robe. His cell in Manila did not have a mirror. He knew he was probably losing weight, but not until he climbs out of the bath and gives himself a look in the mirror does he realize just how much. For the first time since he was an adolescent, he has a waist, which makes a white bathrobe into a quasi-practical garment.

He's scarcely recognizable. Before the beginning of this the Third Business Foray he kind of assumed that, going into his mid-thirties, he had figured out who he was, and that he'd keep being the way he was forever, except with a gradually decaying body and gradually increasing net worth. He didn't imagine it was possible to change so much, and he wonders where it's going to end. But this is nothing more than an anomalous moment of reflection. He shakes it off and gets back to his life.

The Nipponese have, and have always had, a marvelous skill with graphic images—this is clear in their manga and their anime, but reaches its fullest expressive flower in safety ideograms. Licking red flames, buildings splitting and falling as the jagged earth parts beneath them, a fleeing figure silhouetted in a doorway, suspended in the stroboscopic flash of a detonation. The written materials accompanying these images are, of course, not understandable to Randy, and so there is nothing for his rational mind to work on; the terrifying ideograms blaze, fragmentary nightmare images popping up on walls, and in the drawers of his room's desk, whenever he lets his guard down for a moment. What he can read is not exactly soothing. Trying to sleep, he lies in bed, mentally checking the locations of his bedside emergency flashlight and the pair of freebie slippers (much too small) thoughtfully left there so that he can sprint out of the burning and collapsing hotel without cutting his feet to sashimi when the next magnitude 8.0 tremblor shivers the windows out of their frames. He stares up at the ceiling, which is fraught with safety equipment whose LEDs form a glowering red constellation, a crouching figure known to the ancient Greeks as Ganymede, the Anally Receptive Cup bearer, and to the Nipponese, as Hideo, the Plucky Disaster Relief Worker, bending over to probe a pile of jagged concrete slabs for anything that's squishy. All of this leaves him in a state of free-floating terror. He gets up at five in the morning, grabs two capsules of Japanese Snack from his minibar, and leaves the hotel, following one of the two emergency exit routes that he has memorized. He starts wandering, thinking it would be fun to get lost. Getting lost happens in about thirty seconds. He should have brought his GPS, and marked the latitude and longitude of the hotel.

The latitude and longitude of Golgotha are expressed, in the Arethusa intercept, in degrees, minutes, seconds, and tenths of a second of latitude and longitude. A minute is a nautical mile, a second is about a hundred feet. In the seconds figure, the Golgotha numbers have one digit after the decimal point, which implies a precision of ten feet. GPS receivers can give you that kind of precision. Randy's not so sure about the sextants that the Nipponese surveyors presumably used during the war. Before he left, he wrote the numbers down on a scrap of paper, but he rounded off the seconds part and just expressed it in the form of “XX degrees and twenty and a half minutes” implying a precision of a couple of thousand feet. Then he invented three other locations in the same general vicinity, but miles away, and put them all into a list, with the real location being number two on the list. Above it he wrote “Who owns these parcels of land?” or, in crypto-speak, WHOOW NSTHE SEPAR etc. and then spent an almost unbelievably tedious evening synchronizing the two decks of cards and encrypting the entire message with the Solitaire algorithm. He gave the ciphertext and the unused deck to Enoch Root, then swiped the plaintext through some of the leftover grease in his dinner tray and left it by the open drain. Within the hour, a rat had come around and eaten it.

He wanders all day. At first it is just bleak and depressing and he thinks he's going to give up very soon, but then he gets into the spirit of it, and learns how to eat: you approach gentlemen on streetcorners selling little fried-octopus balls and make neolithic grunting noises and proffer yen until you discover food in your hands and then you eat it.

Through some kind of nerdish homing instinct he finds Akihabara, the electronics district, and spends a while wandering through stores looking at all of the consumer electronics that will go on sale in the States a year from now. That's where he is when his GSM telephone rings.

“Hello?”

“It's me. I'm standing behind a fat yellow line.”

“Which airport?”

“Narita.”

“Delighted to hear it. Tell your driver to take you to the Mr. Donut in Akihabara.”

Randy's there an hour later, flipping through a phone-book-sized manga epic, when Avi walks in. The unspoken Randy/Avi greeting protocol dictates that they hug each other at this point, so they do, somewhat to the astonishment of their fellow donut-eaters who usually make do with bowing. The Mr. Donut is a three-level affair jammed into a sliver of real estate with approximately the same footprint as a spiral staircase and is quite crowded with people who took compulsory English in their excellent and highly competitive schools. Besides, Randy broadcast the time and location of the meeting over a radio an hour ago. So as long as they are there, Randy and Avi talk about relatively innocuous things. Then they go out for a stroll. Avi knows his way around this neighborhood. He leads Randy through a doorway and into nerdvana.

“Many people,” Avi explains, “do not know that the word normally spelled and pronounced 'nirvana' can be more accurately transliterated 'nirdvana' or, arguably, 'nerdvana.' This is nerdvana. The nucleus around which Akihabara accreted. This is where the pasocon otaku go to get the stuff they need.”

“Pasocon otaku?”

“Personal computer nerds,” Avi says. “But as in so many other things, the Nipponese take it to an extreme that we barely imagine.”

The place is laid out precisely like an Asian food market: it is a maze of narrow aisles winding among tiny stalls, barely larger than phone booths, where merchants have their wares laid out for inspection. The first thing they see is a wire stall: at least a hundred reels of different types and gauges of wire in gaily hued plastic insulation. “How apropos!” Avi says, admiring the display, “we need to talk about wires.” It need not be stated that this place is a great venue for a conversation: the paths between the stalls are so narrow that they have to walk in single file. No one can follow them, or get close to them, here, without being ridiculously blatant. An array of soldering irons bristles wickedly, giving one stall the look of a martial arts store. Coffee-can-sized potentiometers are stacked in pyramids. “Tell me about wires,” Randy says.

“I don't need to tell you how dependent we are on submarine cables,” Avi says.

“ 'We' meaning the Crypt, or society in general?”

“Both. Obviously the Crypt can't even function without communications linkages to the outside world. But the Internet and everything else are just as dependent on cables.”

A pasocon otaku in a trench coat, holding a plastic bowl as shopping cart, hunches over a display of gleaming copper toroidal coils that look to have been hand-polished by the owner. Finger-sized halogen spotlights mounted on an overhead rack emphasize their geometric perfection.

“So?”

“So, cables are vulnerable.”

They wander past a stall that specializes in banana plugs, with a sideline in alligator clips, arranged in colorful rosettes around disks of cardboard.

“Those cables used to be owned by PTAs. Which were basically just branches of governments. Hence they pretty much did what governments told them to. But the new cables going in today are owned and controlled by corporations beholden to no one except their investors. Puts certain governments in a position they don't like very much.”

“Okay,” Randy says, “they used to have ultimate control over how information flowed between countries in that they ran the PTTs that ran the cables.”

“Yes.”

“Now they don't.”

“That's right. There's been this big transfer of power that has taken place under their noses, without their having foreseen it.” Avi stops in front of a stall that sells LEDs in all manner of bubble-gum colors, packed into tiny boxes like ripe tropical fruits in crates, and standing up from cubes of foam like psychedelic mushrooms. He is making big transfer-of-power gestures with his hands, but to Randy's increasingly warped mind this looks like a man moving heavy gold bars from one pile to another. Across the aisle, they are being stared at by the dead eyes of a hundred miniature video cameras. Avi continues, “And as we've talked about many times, there are many reasons why different governments might want to control the flow of information. China might want to institute political censorship, whereas the U.S. might want to regulate electronic cash transfers so that they can keep collecting taxes. In the old days they could ultimately do this insofar as they owned the cables.”

“But now they can't,” Randy says.

“Now they can't, and this change happened very fast, or at least it looked fast to government with its retarded intellectual metabolism, and now they are way behind the curve, and scared and pissed off, and starting to lash out.”

“They are?”

“They are.”

“In what way are they lashing out?”

A toggle switch merchant snaps a rag over rows and columns of stainless steel merchandise. The tip of the rag breaks the sound barrier and generates a tiny sonic pop that blasts a dust mote from the top of a switch. Everyone is politely ignoring them. “Do you have any idea what down time on a state-of-the-art cable costs nowadays?”

“Of course I do,” Randy says. “It can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute.”

“That's right. And it takes at least a couple of days to repair a broken cable. A couple of days. A single break in a cable can cost the companies that own it tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.”

“But that hasn't been that much of an issue,” Randy says. “The cables are plowed in so deeply now. They're only exposed in the deep ocean.”

“Yes—where only an entity with the naval resources of a major government could sever them.”

“Oh, shit!”

“This is the new balance of power, Randy.”

“You can't seriously be telling me that governments are threatening to—”

“The Chinese have already done it. They cut an older cable—first-generation optical fiber—joining Korea to Nippon. The cable wasn't that important—they only did it as a warning shot. And what's the rule of thumb about governments cutting submarine cables?”

“That it's like nuclear war,” Randy says. “Easy to start. Devastating in its results. So no one does it.”

“But if the Chinese have cut a cable, then other governments with a vested interest in throttling information flow can say, 'Hey, the Chinese did it, we need to show that we can retaliate in kind.' ”

“Is that actually happening?”

“No, no, no!” Avi says. They've stopped in front of the largest display of needlenose pliers Randy has ever seen. “It's all posturing. It's not aimed at other governments so much as at the entrepreneurs who own and operate the new cables.”

Light dawns in Randy's mind. “Such as the Dentist.”

“The Dentist has put more money into privately financed submarine cables than just about anyone. He has a minority stake in that cable that the Chinese cut between Korea and Nippon. So he's trapped like a rat. He has no choice—no choice at all—other than to do as he's told.”

“And who's giving the orders?”

“I'm sure that the Chinese are very big in this—they don't have any internal checks and balances in their government, so they are more prone to do something that is grossly irregular like this.”

“And they obviously have the most to lose from unfettered information flow.”

“Yeah. But I'm just cynical enough to suspect that a whole lot of other governments are right behind them.”

“If that's true,” Randy says, “then everything is completely fucked. Sooner or later a cable-cutting war is going to break out. All the cables will get chopped through. End of story.”

“The world doesn't work that way anymore, Randy. Governments get together and negotiate. Like they did in Brussels just after Christmas. They come up with agreements. War does not break out. Usually.”

“So—there's an agreement in place?”

Avi shrugs. “As best as I can make out. A balance of power has been struck between the people who own navies—i.e., the people who have the ability to cut cables with impunity—and the people who own and operate cables. Each side is afraid of what the other can do to it. So they have come to a genteel understanding. The bureaucratic incarnation of it is IDTRO.”

“And the Dentist is in on it.”

“Precisely.”

“So maybe the Ordo siege really was ultimately directed by the government.”

“I very much doubt that Comstock ordered it,” Avi says. “I think it was the Dentist demonstrating his loyalty.”

“How about the Crypt? Is the sultan party to this understanding?”

Avi shrugs. “Pragasu isn't saying much. I told him what I have just told you. I laid out my theory of what is going on. He looked tolerantly amused. He did not confirm or deny. But he did give me cause to believe that the Crypt is still going to be up and running on schedule.”

“See, I find that hard to believe,” Randy says. “It seems like the Crypt is their worst nightmare.”

“Whose worst nightmare?”

“Any government that needs to collect taxes.”

“Randy, governments will always find ways to collect taxes. If worse comes to worst, the IRS can just base everything on property taxes—you can't hide real estate in cyberspace. But keep in mind that the U.S. government is only a part of this thing—the Chinese are very big in it, too.”

“Wing!” Randy blurts. He and Avi cringe and look around them. The pasocon otaku don't care. A man selling rainbow-colored wire ribbons eyes them with polite curiosity, then looks away. They move out of the bazaar and onto the sidewalk. It has started to rain. A dozen nearly identical young women in miniskirts and high heels march in wedge formation down the center of the street sporting huge umbrellas blazoned with the face of a video game character.

“Wing's digging for gold in Bundok,” Randy says. “He thinks he knows where Golgotha is. If he finds it, he'll need a really special kind of bank.”

“He's not the only guy in the world who needs a special bank,” Avi says. “Over the years, Switzerland has done a hell of a lot of business with governments, or people connected with governments. Why didn't Hitler invade Switzerland? Because the Nazis couldn't have done without it. So the Crypt definitely fills a niche.”

“Okay,” Randy says, “so the Crypt will be allowed to remain in existence.”

“It has to. The world needs it,” Avi says. “And we'll need it, when we dig up Golgotha.”

Suddenly Avi's got an impish look on his face; he looks to have shed about ten years of age. This gets a belly-laugh out of Randy, the first time he's really laughed in a couple of months. His mood has gone through some seismic shift all of a sudden, the whole world looks different to him. “It's not enough to know where it is. Enoch Root says that these hoards were buried deep in mines, down in the hard rock. So we're not going to get that gold out without launching a pretty major engineering project.”

“Why do you think I'm in Tokyo?” Avi says. “C'mon, let's get back to the hotel.”

While Avi's checking in, Randy collects his messages from the front desk, and finds a FedEx envelope waiting for him. If it was tampered with en route, the tamperers did a good job of covering their traces. It contains a hand-enciphered message from Enoch Root, who evidently has figured out some way to get himself sprung from the clink with his scruples intact. It is several lines of seemingly random block letters, in groups of five. Randy has been carrying around a deck of cards ever since he got sprung from jail: the prearranged key that will decipher this message. The prospect of several hours of solitaire seems a lot less inviting in Tokyo than it did in prison—and he knows it will take that long to decipher a message as long as this one. But he's already programmed his laptop to play Solitaire according to Enoch's rules, and he's already punched in the key that is embodied in the deck that Enoch gave him and stored it on a floppy disk that he keeps rubber-banded to the deck in his pocket. So he and Avi go up to Avi's room, pausing along the way to collect Randy's laptop, and while Avi sorts through his messages, Randy types in the ciphertext and gets it deciphered. “Enoch's message says that the land above Golgotha is owned by the Church,” Randy mutters, “but in order to reach it we have to travel across land owned by Wing, and by some Filipinos.”

Avi doesn't appear to hear him. He's fixated on a message slip.

“What's up?” Randy asks.

“A little change of plans for tonight. I hope you have a really good suit with you.”

“I didn't know we had plans for tonight.”

“We were going to meet with Goto Furudenendu,” Avi says. “I sort of figured that they were the right guys to approach about digging a big hole in the ground.”

“I'm with you,” Randy says. “What's the change in plan?”

“The old man is coming down from his retreat in Hokkaido. He wants to buy us dinner.”

“What old man?”

“The founder of the company, Goto Furudenendu's father,” Avi says. “Protegé of Douglas MacArthur. Multi-multi-multi-millionaire. Golf partner and confidant of prime ministers. An old guy by the name of Goto Dengo.”