Cryptonomicon Page 4

  “Did you solve the problem?” Alan asked him.

  “Well you can turn that Universal Turing Machine of yours into any machine by changing the presets—”

  “Presets?”

  “Sorry, Alan, I think of your U.T.M. as being kind of like a pipe organ.”

  “Oh.”

  “Once you’ve done that, anyway, you can do any calculation you please, if the tape is long enough. But gosh, Alan, making a tape that’s long enough, and that you can write symbols on, and erase them, is going to be sort of tricky—Atanasoff’s capacitor drum would only work up to a certain size—you’d have to—”

  “This is a digression,” Alan said gently.

  “Yeah, okay, well—if you had a machine like that, then any given preset could be represented by a number—a string of symbols. And the tape that you would feed into it to start the calculation would contain another string of symbols. So it’s Gödel’s proof all over again—if any possible combination of machine and data can be represented by a string of numbers, then you can just arrange all of the possible strings of numbers into a big table, and then it turns into a Cantor diagonal type of argument, and the answer is that there must be some numbers that cannot be computed.”

  “And ze Entscheidungsproblem?” Rudy reminded him.

  “Proving or disproving a formula—once you’ve encrypted the formula into numbers, that is—is just a calculation on that number. So it means that the answer to the question is, no! Some formulas cannot be proved or disproved by any mechanical process! So I guess there’s some point in being human after all!”

  Alan looked pleased until Lawrence said this last thing, and then his face collapsed. “Now there you go making unwarranted assumptions.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Lawrence!” Rudy said. “He’s going to tell you that our brains are Turing machines.”

  “Thank you, Rudy,” Alan said patiently. “Lawrence, I submit that our brains are Turing machines.”

  “But you proved that there’s a whole lot of formulas that a Turing machine can’t process!”

  “And you have proved it too, Lawrence.”

  “But don’t you think that we can do some things that a Turing machine couldn’t?”

  “Gödel agrees with you, Lawrence,” Rudy put in, “and so does Hardy.”

  “Give me one example,” Alan said.

  “Of a noncomputable function that a human can do, and a Turing machine can’t?”

  “Yes. And don’t give me any sentimental nonsense about creativity. I believe that a Universal Turing Machine could show behaviors that we would construe as creative.”

  “Well, I don’t know then… I’ll try to keep my eye out for that kind of thing in the future.”

  But later, as they were riding back towards Princeton, he said, “What about dreams?”

  “Like those angels in Virginia?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Just noise in the neurons, Lawrence.”

  “Also I dreamed last night that a zeppelin was burning.”

  Soon, Alan got his Ph.D. and went back to England. He wrote Lawrence a couple of letters. The last of these stated, simply, that he would not be able to write Lawrence any more letters “of substance” and that Lawrence should not take it personally. Lawrence perceived right away that Alan’s society had put him to work doing something useful—probably figuring out how to keep it from being eaten alive by certain of its neighbors. Lawrence wondered what use America would find for him.

  He went back to Iowa State, considered changing his major to mathematics, but didn’t. It was the consensus of all whom he consulted that mathematics, like pipe-organ restoration, was a fine thing, but that one needed some way to put bread on the table. He remained in engineering and did more and more poorly at it until the middle of his senior year, when the university suggested that he enter a useful line of work, such as roofing. He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy.

  They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?

  Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier-Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn’t prove his intelligence, what would?

  Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.

  Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.

  The sack of mail carrying Lawrence’s contribution to the mathematical literature arrived just in the nick of time. Lawrence’s ship, and quite a few of her sisters, had until then been based in California. But at just this moment, all of them were transferred to some place called Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in order to show the Nips who was boss.

  Lawrence had never really known what he wanted to do with his life, but he quickly decided that being glockenspiel player on a battleship in Hawaii during peacetime was a long way from the worst life you could possibly have. The harshest part of the job was sometimes having to sit or march in very warm conditions, and enduring occasional fluffed notes by other band members. He had abundant free time, which he spent working on a series of new theorems in the field of information theory. The field had been invented and pretty much encompassed by his friend Alan, but there was much detail work to be done. He and Alan and Rudy had sketched out a general plan of what needed to be proved or disproved. Lawrence tore through the list. He wondered what Alan and Rudy were up to in Britain and Germany, but he couldn’t write to them and find out, so he kept his work to himself. When he wasn’t playing the glockenspiel or working out theorems, there were bars and dances to go to. Waterhouse did some penis work of his own, got the clap, had it cured,* bought condoms. All of the sailors did this. They were like three-year olds who shove pencils in their ears, discover that it hurts, and stop doing it. Lawrence’s first year went by almost instantly. Time just blazed by. Nowhere could be sunnier, more relaxing, than Hawaii.

  NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM

  * * *

  “FILIPINOS ARE A WARM, GENTLE, CARING, GIVING people,” Avi says, “which is a good thing since so many of them carry concealed weapons.”

  Randy is in Tokyo’s airport, ambling down a concourse with a slowness that is infuriating to his fellow travelers. They have all spent the last half-day strapped into bad chairs, stuffed into an aluminum tube aslosh with jet fuel. Over the safety-engineered nubs molded into the jetway floor, their rolling suitcases drone like fighter planes. They graze the backs of his knees as they bank around his husky columnar body. Randy is holding his new GSM phone to the side of his head. Supposedly it works
anywhere in the world, except for the United States. This is his first chance to try it out.

  “You sound clear as a bell,” Avi says. “How was the flight over?”

  “All right,” Randy says. “They had one of those animated maps up on the video screen.”

  Avi sighs. “All the airlines have those now,” he announces monotonically.

  “The only feature between San Francisco and Tokyo was Midway Island.”

  “So?”

  “It kind of hung there for hours. MIDWAY. Mute embarrassment all around.”

  Randy reaches the departure gate for Manila, and pauses to admire a five-foot-wide high-definition TV set bearing the logo of a major Nipponese consumer-electronics company. It is running a video in which a wacky cartoon professor and his adorable canine sidekick cheerfully tick off the three transmission routes of the AIDS virus.

  “I have a fingerprint for you,” Randy says.

  “Shoot.”

  Randy stares at the palm of his hand, on which he has written a string of numbers and letters in ballpoint pen. “AF 10 06 E9 99 BA 11 07 64 C1 89 E3 40 8C 72 55.”

  “Got it,” Avi says. “That’s from Ordo, right?”

  “Right. I e-mailed you the key from SFO.”

  “The apartment situation is still resolving,” Avi says. “So I just reserved you a suite at the Manila Hotel.”

  “What do you mean, it’s still resolving?”

  “The Philippines is one of those post-Spanish countries with no clear boundaries between business and personal relationships,” Avi says. “I don’t think you can secure lodgings there without marrying into a family with a major street named after it.”

  Randy takes a seat in the departure area. Perky gate attendants in jaunty, improbable hats zero in on Filipinos with too many carry-ons, and subject them to a public ritual of filling out little tags and surrendering their possessions. The Filipinos roll their eyes and stare longingly out the windows. But most of the waiting passengers are Nipponese—some businessmen, mostly vacationers. They are watching an educational video about how to get mugged in foreign countries.

  “Huh,” Randy says, looking out the window, “got another 747 down to Manila.”

  “In Asia, no decent airline bothers to dick around anything smaller than a 747,” Avi snaps. “If someone tries to pack you on board a 737 or god forbid an Airbus, run, don’t walk, away from the boarding lounge, and call me on my Sky Pager and I’ll send in a chopper to evacuate you.”

  Randy laughs.

  Avi continues. “Now, listen. This hotel you’re going to is very old, very grand, but it’s in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Why would they build a grand hotel in the middle of nowhere?”

  “It used to be a happening place—it’s on the waterfront, right on the edge of Intramuros.”

  Randy’s high-school Spanish is enough to translate that: Inside the Walls.

  “But Intramuros was annihilated by the Nipponese in 1945,” Avi continues. “Systematically. All of the business hotels and office buildings are in a new neighborhood called Makati, much closer to the airport.”

  “So you want to put our office in Intramuros.”

  “How’d you guess?” Avi says, sounding a little spooked. He prides himself on unpredictability.

  “I’m not an intuitive guy generally,” Randy says, “but I’ve been on a plane for thirteen hours and my brain has been turned inside out and hung up to dry.”

  Avi rattles off canned justifications: office space is much cheaper in Intramuros. Government ministries are closer. Makati, the gleaming new business district, is too isolated from the real Philippines. Randy pays no attention to it.

  “You want to work out of Intramuros because it was systematically annihilated, and because you’re obsessed with the Holocaust,” Randy finally says, quietly and without rancor.

  “Yeah. So?” Avi says.

  Randy stares out the window of the Manila-bound 747, sipping on a fluorescent green Nipponese soft drink made from bee extracts (at least, it has pictures of bees on it) and munching on something that a flight attendant handed him called Japanese Snack. Sky and ocean are the same color, a shade of blue that makes his teeth freeze. The plane is so high that, whether he looks up or down, he sees foreshortened views of boiling cumulonimbus stacks. The clouds erupt from the hot Pacific as if immense warships were exploding all over the place. The speed and power of their growth is alarming, the forms they adopt as bizarre and varied as those of deep-sea organisms, and all of them, he supposes, are as dangerous to an airplane as punji stakes to a barefoot pedestrian. The red-orange meatball painted on the wingtip startles him when he notices it. He feels like he’s been thrown into an old war film.

  He turns on his laptop. Electronic mail from Avi, encrypted to a fare-thee-well, has been piling up in his in-box. It is a gradual accumulation of tiny files, thrown at him by Avi whenever a thought popped into his head over the last three days; it would be obvious, even if Randy didn’t know it, that Avi owns a portable e-mail machine that talks to the Internet by radio. Randy fires up a piece of software that is technically called Novus Ordo Seclorum but that everyone calls Ordo for short. It is a fairly strained pun based on the fact that Ordo’s job, as a piece of cryptographic software, is to put a message’s bits in a New Order and that it will take Centuries for nosy governments to decrypt it. A scanned image of a Great Pyramid appears in the middle of his screen, and a single eye gradually materializes at its apex.

  Ordo can handle this in one of two ways. The obvious way is to decrypt all of the messages and convert them into plaintext files on his hard disk, which he can then read any time he wants. The problem with this (if you are paranoid) is that anyone who gets his hands on Randy’s hard disk can then read the files. For all he knows, the customs officials in Manila will decide to ransack his computer for child pornography. Or, fogged by jet lag, he’ll leave his laptop in a taxi. So instead he puts Ordo into a streaming mode where it will decrypt the files just long enough for him to read them and then, when he closes the windows, expunge the plaintext from the computer’s memory and from its hard drive.

  The subject heading of Avi’s first message is: “Guideline 1.”

  We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that pop. is about to explode— — —we can predict that just by looking at age histogram— — —and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck-you money before we turn forty.

  This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for “fuck-you money.” It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the current value of “fuck-you money” at a glance.

  The second message, sent a couple of hours later, is called “Guideline 2.”

  Two: pick a tech where no one can compete with us. Right now, that=networking. We’re kicking the crap out of everyone else in the world when it comes to networking. It’s not even funny.

  The next day, Avi sent a message called, simply, “More.” Perhaps he had lost track of the number of guidelines he’d issued so far.

  Another principle: this time we retain control of the corporation. That means that we keep at least fifty percent of the shares— — —which means little to no outside investment until we’ve built up some value.

  “You don’t have to convince me,” Randy mumbles to himself, as he reads this.

  This shapes the kinds of businesses we can get into. Forget anything that requires a big initial investment.

  Luzon is green-black jungle mountains gouged with rivers that would appear to be avalanches of silt. As the navy-blue ocean verges on its khaki beach
es, the water takes on the shocking iridescent hue of a suburban swimming pool. Farther south, the mountains are swidden-scarred—the soil beneath is bright red and so these parts look like fresh lacerations. But most is covered with foliage that looks like the nubby green stuff that model railroaders put over their papiér-mâche hills, and in vast stretches of the mountains there are no signs whatsoever that human beings have ever existed. Closer to Manila, some of the slopes are de forested, sprinkled with structures, ribboned with power-line cuts. Rice paddies line the basins. The towns are accretions of shanties, nucleated around large cross-shaped churches with good roofs.

  The view gets blurry as they belly down into the pall of sweaty smog above the city. The plane begins to sweat like a giant glass of iced tea. The water streams off in sheets, collects in crevices, whips off the flaps’ trailing edges.

  Suddenly they are banking over Manila Bay, which is marked with endless streaks of brilliant red—some kind of algal bloom. Oil tankers trail long time-delayed rainbows that flourish in their wakes. Every cove is jammed with long skinny boats with dual outriggers, looking like brightly painted water skaters.

  And then they are down on the runway at NAIA, Ninoy Aquino International Airport. Guards and cops of various stripes are ambling around with M-16s or pistol-handled pump shotguns, wearing burnooses fashioned from handkerchiefs clamped to the head with American baseball caps. A man dressed in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ dispensing mercy on a world of sinners. Sulfurous, fulminating tropical air begins to leak in through the jumbo’s air vents. Everything moistens and wilts.

  He is in Manila. He takes his passport out of his shirt pocket. It says, RANDALL LAWRENCE WATERHOUSE.

  This is how Epiphyte Corporation came into existence: