Cryptonomicon (15 page)

R
ESPECT
T
HE
P
EDESTRIAN, SAY THE STREET SIGNS OF
Metro Manila. As soon as Randy saw those he knew that he was in trouble.

For the first couple of weeks he spent in Manila, his work consisted of walking. He walked all over the city carrying a handheld GPS receiver, taking down latitudes and longitudes. He encrypted the data in his hotel room and e-mailed it to Avi. It became part of Epiphyte’s intellectual property. It became equity.

Now, they had secured some actual office space. Randy walks to it, doggedly. He knows that the first time he takes a taxi there, he’ll never walk again.

RESPECT THE PEDESTRIAN
, the signs say, but the drivers, the physical environment, local land use customs, and the very layout of the place conspire to treat the pedestrian with the contempt he so richly deserves. Randy would get more respect if he went to work on a pogo stick with a propeller beanie on his head. Every morning the bellhops ask him if he wants a taxi, and practically lose consciousness when he says no. Every morning the taxi drivers lined up in front of the hotel, leaning against their cars and smoking, shout “Taxi? Taxi?” to him. When he turns them down, they say witty things to each other in Tagalog and roar with laughter.

Just in case Randy hasn’t gotten the message yet, a new red-and-white chopper swings in low over Rizal Park, turns around once or twice like a dog preparing to lie down, and settles in, not far from some palm trees, right in front of the hotel.

Randy has gotten into the habit of reaching Intramuros by cutting through Rizal Park. This is not a direct route. The direct route passes over a no-man’s land, a vast, dangerous intersection lined with squatters’ huts (it is dangerous because of the cars, not the squatters). If you go through the
park, on the other hand, you only have to brush off a lot of whores. But Randy’s gotten good at that. The whores cannot conceive of a man rich enough to stay at the Manila Hotel who voluntarily walks around the city every day, and they have given him up as a maniac. He has passed into the realm of irrational things that you must simply accept, and in the Philippines this is a nearly infinite domain.

Randy could never understand why everything smelled so bad until he came upon a large, crisp rectangular hole in the sidewalk, and stared down into a running flume of raw sewage. The sidewalks are nothing more than lids on the sewers. Access to the depths is provided by concrete slabs with rebar lifting loops protruding from them. Squatters fashion wire harnesses onto those loops so that they can pull them up and create instant public latrines. These slabs are frequently engraved with the initials, team name, or graffiti tag of the gentlemen who manufactured them, and their competence and attentiveness to detail vary, but their esprit de corps is fixed at a very high level.

There are only so many gates that lead into Intramuros. Randy must run a daily gauntlet of horse-drawn taxis, some of whom have nothing better to do than follow him down the street for a quarter of an hour muttering, “Sir? Sir? Taxi? Taxi?” One of them, in particular, is the most tenacious capitalist Randy has ever seen. Every time he draws alongside Randy, a rope of urine uncoils from his horse’s belly and cracks into the pavement and hisses and foams. Tiny comets of pee strike Randy’s pant legs. Randy always wears long pants no matter how hot it is.

Intramuros is a strangely quiet and lazy neighborhood. This is mostly because it was destroyed during the war, and hasn’t been undestroyed yet. Much of it is open weed farms still, which is very odd in the middle of a vast, crowded metropolis.

Several miles south, towards the airport, amid nice suburban developments, is Makati. This would be the logical place to base Epiphyte Corp. It’s got a couple of giant five-star luxury hotels on every block, and office towers that look clean and cool, and modern condos. But Avi, with his perverse real estate sense, has decided to forgo all of that in
favor of what he described on the phone as texture. “I do not like to buy or lease real estate when it is peaking,” he said.

Understanding Avi’s motives is like peeling an onion with a single chopstick. Randy knows there is much more to it: perhaps he’s earning a favor, or repaying one, to a landlord. Perhaps he’s been reading some management guru who counsels young entrepreneurs to get deeply involved in a country’s culture. Not that Avi has ever been one for gurus. Randy’s latest theory is that it all has to do with lines of sight—the latitudes and longitudes.

Sometimes Randy walks along the top of the Spanish wall. Around Calle Victoria, where MacArthur had his headquarters before the war, it is as wide as a four-lane street. Lovers nestle in the trapezoidal gunslits and put up umbrellas for privacy. Below him, to the left, is the moat, a good city block or two in width, mostly dry. Squatters have built shacks on it. In the parts that are still submerged, they dig for mud crabs or string improvised nets among the purple and magenta lotus blossoms.

To the right is Intramuros. A few buildings poke up out of a jumbled wilderness of strewn stone. Ancient Spanish cannon are sprinkled around the place, half-buried. The rubble fields have been colonized by tropical vegetation and squatters. Their clothesline poles and television antennas are all wrapped up in jungle creepers and makeshift electrical wiring. Utility poles jut into the air at odd angles, like widowmakers in a burned forest, some of them almost completely obscured by the glass bubbles of electrical meters. Every dozen yards or so, for no discernable reason, a pile of rubble smolders.

As he goes by the cathedral, children follow him, whining and begging piteously until he puts pesos in their hands. Then they beam and sometimes give him a bright “Thank you!” in perfect American-scented shopping-mall English. The beggars in Manila never seem to take their work very seriously, for even they have been infected by the cultural fungus of irony and always seem to be fighting back a grin, as if they can’t believe they’re doing anything so corny.

They do not understand that he is working. That’s okay.

Ideas have always come to Randy faster than he could use them. He spent the first thirty years of his life pursuing whatever idea appealed to him at the moment, discarding it when a better one came along.

Now he is working for a company again, and has some kind of responsibility to use his time productively. Good ideas come to him as fast and thick as ever, but he has to keep his eye on the ball. If the idea is not relevant to Epiphyte, he has to jot it down and forget about it for now. If it is relevant, he has to restrain his urge to dive into it and consider: has anyone else come up with this idea before him? Is it possible to just go out and buy the technology? Can he delegate the work to a contract coder in the States?

He walks slowly, partly because otherwise he will suffer heatstroke and fall dead in the gutter. Worse yet, he may fall through an open hatch into a torrent of sewage, or brush against one of the squatters’s electrical wires, which dangle from overhead like patient asps. The constant dangers of sudden electrocution from above or drowning in liquid shit below keep him looking up and down as well as side-to-side. Randy has never felt more trapped between a capricious and dangerous heaven and a hellish underworld. This place is as steeped in religion as India, but all of it is Catholic.

At the northern end of Intramuros is a little business district. It is sandwiched between Manila Cathedral and Fort Santiago, which the Spaniards constructed to command the outlet of the Pasig River. You can tell it’s a business district because of the phone wires. As in other Rapidly Developing Asian Economies, it is difficult to tell whether these are pirate wires, or official ones that have been incredibly badly installed. They are a case study in why incrementalism is bad. The bundles are so thick in some places that Randy probably could not wrap both arms around them. Their weight and tension have begun to pull the phone poles over, especially at curves in the roads, where the wires go round a corner and exert a net sideways force on the pole.

All of these buildings are constructed in the least expensive way conceivable: concrete poured in place in wooden forms, over grids of hand-tied rebar. They are blocky, grey,
and completely indistinguishable from one another. A couple of much taller buildings, twenty or thirty stories, loom over the district from a big intersection nearby, wind and birds circulating through their broken windows. They were badly shaken up in an earthquake during the 1980s and have not been put to rights yet.

He passes by a restaurant with a squat concrete blockhouse in front, its openings covered with blackened steel grates, rusty exhaust pipes sticking out the top to vent the diesel generator locked inside. N
O
B
ROWNOUT
has been proudly stenciled all over it. Beyond that is a postwar office building, four stories high, with an especially thick sheaf of telephone wires running into it. The logo of a bank is bolted to the front of the building, down low. There is angle parking in front. The two spaces in front of the main entrance are blocked off with hand-painted signs: R
ESERVED
F
OR
A
RMORED
C
AR
and R
ESERVED
F
OR
B
ANK
M
ANAGER
. A couple of guards stand in front of the entrance clutching the fat wooden pistol grips of riot guns, weapons that have the hulking, cartoonish appearance of action-figure accessories. One of the guards remains behind a bulletproof podium with a sign on it:
PLEASE DEPOSIT GUNS/FIREARMS TO THE GUARD
.

Randy exchanges nods with the gunmen and goes into the building’s lobby, which is just as hot as outside. Bypassing the bank, ignoring the unreliable elevators, he goes through a steel door that takes him into a narrow stairwell. Today, it is dark. The building’s electrical system is a patchwork—several different systems coexisting in the same space, controlled by different panels, some on generators and some not. So blackouts begin and end in phases. Somewhere near the top of the stairwell, small birds chirp, competing with the sound of car alarms being set off outside.

Epiphyte Corp. rents the building’s top floor, although he is the only person working there so far. He keys his way in. Thank god; the air-conditioning has been working. The money they paid for their own generator was worth it. He disables the alarm systems, goes to the fridge, and gets two one-liter bottles of water. His rule of thumb, after a walk, is
to drink water until he begins to urinate again. Then he can consider other activities.

He is too sweaty to sit down. He must keep moving so that the cold dry air will flow around his body. He flicks globes of sweat out of his beard and does an orbit of the floor, looking out the windows, checking out the lines of sight. He pulls a ballistic nylon traveler’s wallet out of his trousers and lets it dangle from his belt loop so that the skin underneath it can breathe. It contains his passport, a virgin credit card, ten crisp new hundred dollar bills, and a floppy disk with his 4096-bit encryption key on it.

Northwards he can survey the greens and ramparts of Fort Santiago, where phalanxes of Nipponese tourists toil, recording their fun with forensic determination. Beyond that is the Pasig River, choked with floating debris. Across the river is Quiapo, a built-up area: high-rise apartment and office buildings with corporate names emblazoned on their top storeys and satellite dishes on the roofs.

Unwilling to stop moving just yet, Randy strolls clockwise around the office. Intramuros is ringed with a belt of green, its former moat. He has just walked up its western verge. The eastern one is studded with heavy neoclassical buildings housing various government ministries. The Post and Telecommunications Authority sits on the Pasig’s edge, at a vertex in the river from which three closely spaced bridges radiate into Quiapo. Beyond the large new structures above the river, Quiapo and the adjoining neighborhood of San Miguel are a patchwork of giant institutions: a train station, an old prison, many universities, and Malacanang Palace, which is farther up the Pasig.

Back on this side of the river, it is Intramuros in the foreground (cathedrals and churches surrounded by dormant land), government institutions, colleges, and universities in the middle ground, and, beyond that, a seemingly infinite sprawl of low-lying, smoky city. Miles to the south is the gleaming business city of Makati, built around a square where two big roads intersect at an acute angle, echoing the intersecting runways at NAIA, a bit farther south. An emerald city of big houses perched on big lawns spreads away from Makati: it is where the ambassadors and corporate
presidents live. Continuing his clockwise stroll he can follow Roxas Boulevard coming toward him up the seawall, marked by a picket line of tall palm trees. Manila Bay is jammed with heavy shipping, big cargo ships filling the water like logs in a boom. The container port is just below him to the west: a grid of warehouses on reclaimed land that is about as flat, and as natural, as a sheet of particle board.

If he looks over the cranes and containers, due west across the bay, he can barely make out the mountainous silhouette of the Bata’an Peninsula, some forty miles distant. Following its black skyline southwards—tracing the route taken by the Nipponese in ’42—he can almost resolve a lump lying off its southern tip. That would be the island of Corregidor. This is the first time he’s ever been able to see it; the air is unusually clear today.

A fragment of historical trivia floats to the surface of his melted brain. The galleon from Acapulco. The signal fire on Corregidor.

He punches in Avi’s GSM number. Avi, somewhere in the world, answers it. He sounds like he is in a taxi, in one of those countries where horn-honking is still an inalienable right. “What’s on your mind, Randy?”