Cryptonomicon (36 page)

For a moment, Waterhouse thinks that one wall of the building has collapsed, exposing them to the direct light of the sun. But Ghnxh has simply turned on the galvanick lucipher, which soon becomes about ten times brighter, as Ghnxh adjusts a bronze thumbscrew. Crushed with shame, Waterhouse puts his Navy flashlight back into its prissy little belt holster, and precedes Ghnxh out of the room, the galvanick lucipher casting palpable warmth on the back of his neck. “We’ve got about two hours before she goes dead on us,” Ghnxh says significantly.

They work out a
modus vivendi,
all right: Waterhouse kicks an old door open and then Ghnxh strides into the room that is on the other side and sweeps the beam of the lantern around as if it were a flamethrower, driving back dozens or hundreds of squealing skerries. Waterhouse clambers cautiously into the room, typically making his way over the collapsed remnants of whatever roof or story used to be overhead. He gives the place a quick inspection, trying to gauge how much effort would be required to make it liveable for any more advanced organism.

Half of the castle has, at one point or another, been burned down by a combination of Barbary corsairs, lightning bolts, Napoleon, and smoking in bed. The Barbary corsairs did the best job of it (probably just trying to stay warm), or maybe it’s just that the elements have had longer to decompose what little was left behind by the flames. In any case, in that section of the castle, Waterhouse finds a place where there’s not too much rubble to shovel out, and where they can quickly enclose an adequate space with a
combination of tarps and planks. It is diametrically opposed to the part of the castle that is still inhabited, which exposes it to winter storms but protects it from the prying eyes of the staff. Waterhouse paces off some rough measurements, then goes to his room, leaving Ghnxh to see to the decommissioning of the galvanick lucipher.

Waterhouse sketches out some plans for the upcoming work, at long last putting his hitherto misspent engineering skills to some use. He draws up a bill of required materials, naturally involving a good many numbers: 100 8’ 2 x 4s is a typical entry. He writes out the list a second time, in words not numbers: ONE HUNDRED EIGHT FOOT TWO BY FOURS. This wording is potentially confusing, so he changes it to TWO BY FOUR BOARDS ONE HUNDRED COUNT LENGTH EIGHT FEET.

Next he pulls a sheet of what looks like ledger paper, divided vertically into groups of five columns. Into these columns he transcribes the message, ignoring spaces:

T  W  O  B  Y

F  O  U  R  B

O  A  R  D  S

O  N  E  H  U

N  D  R  E  D

C  O  U  N  T

L  E  N  G  T

H  E  I  G  H

T  F  E  E  T

and so on. Wherever he encounters a letter J he writes I in its stead, so that JOIST comes out as IOIST. He only uses every third line of the page.

Ever since he left Bletchley Park, he has been carrying several sheets of onionskin paper around in his breast pocket; when he sleeps, he puts them under his pillow. Now he takes them out and selects one page, which has a serial number typed across the top and is otherwise covered with neatly typed letters like this:

A  T  H  O  P

C  O  G  N  Q

D  L  T  U  I

C  A  P  R  H

M  U  L  E  P

and so on, all the way down to the bottom of the page.

These sheets were typed up by a Mrs. Tenney, an aged vicar’s wife who works at Bletchley Park. Mrs. Tenney has a peculiar job which consists of the following: she takes two sheets of onionskin paper and puts a sheet of carbon paper between them and rolls them into a typewriter. She types a
serial number at the top. Then she turns the crank on a device used in bingo parlors, consisting of a spherical cage containing twenty-five wooden balls, each with a letter printed on it (the letter J is not used). After spinning the cage the exact number of times specified in the procedure manual, she closes her eyes, reaches through a hatch in the cage, and removes a ball at random. She reads the letter off the ball and types it, then replaces the ball, closes the hatch, and repeats the process. From time to time, serious-looking men come into the room, exchange pleasantries with her, and take away the sheets that she has produced. These sheets end up in the possession of men like Waterhouse, and men in infinitely more desperate and dangerous circumstances, all over the world. They are called one-time pads.

He copies the letters from the one-time pad into the empty lines beneath his message:

T  W  O  B  Y

A  T  H  O  P

F  O  U  R  B

C  O  G  N  Q

O  A  R  D  S

D  L  T  U  I

O  N  E  H  U

C  A  P  R  H

N  D  R  E  D

M  U  L  E  P

When he is finished, two out of every three lines are occupied.

Finally, he returns to the top of the page one last time and begins to consider the letters two at a time. The first letter in the message is T. The first letter from the one-time pad, directly below it in the same column, is A.

A is the first letter in the alphabet and so Waterhouse, who has been doing this cipher stuff for much too long, thinks of it as being synonymous with the number 1. In the same way, T is equivalent to 19 if you are working in a J-less alphabet. Add 1 to 19 and you get 20, which is the letter U. So, in the first column beneath T and A, Waterhouse writes a U.

The next vertical pair is W and T, or 22 and 19, which in normal arithmetic add up to 41, which has no letter equivalent; it’s too large. But it has been many years since Waterhouse did normal arithmetic. He has retrained his mind to work in modular arithmetic—specifically, modulo 25, which means that you divide everything by 25 and consider only the remainder. 41 divided by 25 is 1 with a remainder of 16. Throw
away the 1 and the 16 translates into the letter Q, which is what Waterhouse writes in the second column. In the third column, O and H give 14 + 8 = 22 which is W. In the fourth, B and O give 2 + 14 = 16 which is Q. And in the fifth, Y and P give 24 + 15 which is 39. 39 divided by 25 is 1 with a remainder of 14. Or, as Waterhouse would phrase it, 39 modulo 25 equals 14. The letter for 14 is O. So the first code group looks like

T  W  O  B  Y

A  T  H  O  P

U  Q  W  Q  O

By adding the random sequence ATHOP onto the meaningful sequence TWOBY, Waterhouse has produced undecipherable gibberish. When he has enciphered the entire message in this way, he takes out a new page and copies out only the ciphertext—UQWQO and so on.

The duke has a cast-iron telephone which he has put at Waterhouse’s disposal. Waterhouse heaves it out of its cradle, rings the operator, places a call across the island to the naval station, and gets through to a radio man. He reads the ciphertext message to him letter by letter. The radio man copies it down and informs Waterhouse that it will be transmitted forthwith.

Very soon, Colonel Chattan, down in Bletchley Park, will receive a message that begins with UQWQO and goes on in that vein. Chattan possesses the other copy of Mrs. Tenney’s one-time pad. He will write out the ciphertext first, using every third line. Beneath the ciphertext he will copy in the text from the one-time pad:

U  Q  W  Q  O

A  T  H  O  P

He will then perform a subtraction where Waterhouse performed an addition. U minus A means 20 minus 1 which equals 19 which gives the letter T. Q minus T means 16 minus 19 which equals -3, giving us 22 which is W. And so on. Having deciphered the whole message, he’ll get to
work, and eventually two by fours one hundred count will show up at the Pier.

EPIPHYTE CORP.’S BUSINESS
plan is about an inch thick, neither fat nor skinny as these things go. The interior pages are slickly and groovily desktop-published out of Avi’s laptop. The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores. An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross.

The actual content of the business plan hews to a logical structure straight out of the
Principia Mathematica.
Lesser entrepreneurs purchase business-plan-writing software: packages of boilerplate text and spreadsheets, craftily linked together so that you need only go through and fill in a few blanks. Avi and Beryl have written enough business plans between the two of them that they can smash them out from brute memory. Avi’s business plans tend to go something like this:

MISSION: At [name of company] it is our conviction that [to do the stuff we want to do] and to increase shareholder value are not merely complementary activities—they are inextricably linked.

PURPOSE: To increase shareholder value by [doing stuff]

EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING (printed on a separate page, in red letters on a yellow background): Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy
as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly-up and only returned her ninety-nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril—you are dead certain to lose everything you’ve got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.

Still reading? Great. Now that we’ve scared off the lightweights, let’s get down to business.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: We will raise [some money], then [do some stuff] and increase shareholder value. Want details? Read on.

INTRODUCTION: [This trend], which everyone knows about, and [that trend], which is so incredibly arcane that you probably didn’t know about it until just now, and [this other trend over here] which might seem, at first blush, to be completely unrelated, when all taken together, lead us to the (proprietary, secret, heavily patented, trademarked, and NDAed) insight that we could increase shareholder value by [doing stuff]. We will need $ [a large number] and after [not too long] we will be able to realize an increase in value to $ [an even larger number], unless [hell freezes over in midsummer].

DETAILS:

Phase 1: After taking vows of celibacy and abstinence and forgoing all of our material possessions for homespun robes, we (viz. appended resumes) will move into a modest complex of scavenged refrigerator boxes in the central Gobi Desert, where real estate is so cheap that we are actually being paid to occupy it, thereby enhancing shareholder
value even before we have actually done anything. On a daily ration consisting of a handful of uncooked rice and a ladleful of water, we will [begin to do stuff].

Phase 2, 3, 4, . . . , n - 1: We will [do more stuff, steadily enhancing shareholder value in the process] unless [the earth is struck by an asteroid a thousand miles in diameter, in which case certain assumptions will have to be readjusted; refer to Spreadsheets 397-413].

Phase n: Before the ink on our Nobel Prize certificates is dry, we will confiscate the property of our competitors, including anyone foolish enough to have invested in their pathetic companies. We will sell all of these people into slavery. All proceeds will be redistributed among our shareholders, who will hardly notice, since Spreadsheet 265 demonstrates that, by this time, the company will be larger than the British Empire at its zenith.

SPREADSHEETS: [Pages and pages of numbers in tiny print, conveniently summarized by graphs that all seem to be exponential curves screaming heavenward, albeit with enough pseudo-random noise in them to lend plausibility].

RESUMES: Just recall the opening reel of
The Magnificent Seven
and you won’t have to bother with this part; you should crawl to us on hands and knees and beg us for the privilege of paying our salaries.

To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master calendar, motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living document. Its spreadsheets are palimpsests, linked to the company’s bank accounts and financial records so that they automatically adjust whenever money flows in or out. Beryl handles that stuff. Avi handles the words—the underlying, abstract plan, and the concrete details, that inform those spreadsheets—interpreting the numbers. Avi’s part of the plan mutates too, from week to week, as he gets new input from articles in the
Asian Wall Street Journal,
conversations with government officials in flyblown Shenzhen karaoke bars, remote-sensing data pouring in from satellites, and obscure technical journals analyzing the latest advances in optical fiber technology. Avi’s brain also digests the ideas of Randy and the other members of
the group and incorporates them into the plan. Every quarter, they take a snapshot of the business plan in its current state, trowel some Maybelline onto it, and ship out new copies to investors.

Plan Number Five is about to be mailed simultaneous with the company’s first anniversary. An early draft had been sent to each of them a couple of weeks ago in an encrypted e-mail message, which Randy hadn’t bothered to read, assuming he knew its contents. But little cues that he’s picked up in the last few days tell him that he’d better find out what the damn thing actually says.

He fires up his laptop, plugs it into a telephone jack, opens up his communications software, and dials a number in California. This last turns out to be easy, because this is a modern hotel and Kinakuta has a modern phone system. If it hadn’t been easy, it probably would have been impossible.

In a small, stuffy, perpetually dark, hot-plastic-scented wiring closet, in a cubicled office suite leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Incorporated, sandwiched between an escrow company and a discount travel agent in the most banal imaginable disco-era office building in Los Altos, California, a modem wakes up and spews noise down a wire. The noise eventually travels under the Pacific as a pattern of scintillations in a filament of glass so transparent that if the ocean itself were made out of the same stuff, you’d be able to see Hawaii from California. Eventually the information reaches Randy’s computer, which spews noise back. The modem in Los Altos is one of half a dozen that are all connected to the back of the same computer, an entirely typical looking tower PC of a generic brand, which has been running, night and day, for about eight months now. They turned its monitor off about seven months ago because it was just wasting electricity. Then John Cantrell (who is on the board of Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Inc., and made arrangements to put it in the company’s closet) borrowed the monitor because one of the coders who was working on the latest upgrade of Ordo needed a second screen. Later, Randy disconnected the keyboard and mouse because, without a monitor, only bad information could be fed into the system. Now it is just a faintly hissing
off-white obelisk with no human interface other than a cyclopean green LED staring out over a dark landscape of empty pizza boxes.

But there is a thick coaxial cable connecting it to the Internet. Randy’s computer talks to it for a few moments, negotiating the terms of a Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP connection, and then Randy’s little laptop is part of the Internet, too; he can send data to Los Altos, and the lonely computer there, which is named Tombstone, will route it in the general direction of any of several tens of millions of other Internet machines.

Tombstone, or tombstone.epiphyte.com as it is known to the Internet, has an inglorious existence as a mail drop and a cache for files. It does nothing that a thousand online services couldn’t do for them more easily and cheaply. But Avi, with his genius for imagining the most horrific conceivable worst-case scenarios, demanded that they have their own machine, and that Randy and the others go through its kernel code one line at a time to verify that there were no security holes. In every bookstore window in the Bay Area, piled in heaps, were thousands of copies of three different books about how a famous cracker had established total control over a couple of well-known online services. Consequently, Epiphyte Corp. could not possibly use such an online service for its secret files while with a straight face saying that it was exerting due diligence on its shareholders’ behalf. Thus tombstone.epiphyte.com.

Randy logs on and checks his mail: forty-seven messages, including one that came two days ago from Avi ([email protected]) that is labeled: epiphyteBizPlan.5.4.ordo. Epiphyte Business Plan, 5th edition, 4th draft, in a file format that can only be read by [Novus] Ordo [Seclorum], which is wholly owned by the company of the same name, but whose hard parts were written, as it happens, by John Cantrell.

He tells the computer to begin downloading that file—it’s going to take a while. In the meantime, he scrolls through the list of other messages, checking the names of their senders, subject headings, and sizes, trying to figure out, first of all, how many of these can simply be thrown away unread.

Two messages jump out because they are from an address that ends with aol.com, the cyberspace neighborhood of parents and children but never of students, hackers, or people who actually work in high-tech. Both of these are from Randy’s lawyer, who is trying to get Randy’s financial affairs disentangled from Charlene’s with as little rancor as possible. Randy feels his blood pressure spiking, millions of capillaries in the brain bulging ominously. But they are very short files, and the subject headings seem innocuous, so he calms down and decides not to worry about them now.

Five messages originate from computers with extremely familiar names—systems that are part of the campus computer network he used to run. The messages come from system administrators who took over the reins when Randy left, guys who long ago asked him all the easy questions, such as
What’s the best place to order pizza?
and
Where did you hide the staples?
and have now gotten to the point of e-mailing him chunks of arcane code that he wrote years ago with questions like,
Was this an error, or something incredibly clever I haven’t figured out yet?
Randy declines to answer those messages just now.

There are about a dozen messages from friends, some of them just passing along Net humor that he’s already seen a hundred times. Another dozen from other members of Epiphyte Corp., mostly concerning the details of their itineraries as they all converge on Kinakuta for tomorrow’s meeting.

That leaves a dozen or so other messages which belong in a special category that did not exist until a week ago, when a new issue of
TURING Magazine
came out, containing an article about the Kinakuta data haven project, and a cover photo of Randy on a boat in the Philippines. Avi had gone to some lengths to plant this article so that he would have something to wave in the faces of the other participants in tomorrow’s meeting.
TURING
is such a visual magazine that it cannot be viewed without the protection of welding goggles, and so they insisted on a picture. A photographer was dispatched to the Crypt, which was found visually wanting. A tizzy ensued. The photographer was diverted to Manila Bay where he captured Randy standing on
a boat deck next to a big reel of orange cable, a volcano rising from the smog in the background. The magazine won’t even be on newsstands for another month, but the article is on the Web as of a week ago, where it instantly became a subject of discussion on the Secret Admirers mailing list, which is where all of the cool guys like John Cantrell hang out to discuss the very latest hashing algorithms and pseudo-random-number generators. Because Randy happened to be in the picture, they have mistakenly fastened upon him as being more of a prime mover than he really is. This has spawned a new category of messages in Randy’s mailbox: unsolicited advice and criticism from crypto freaks worldwide. At the moment there are fourteen such messages in his in-box, eight of them from a person, or persons, identifying himself, or themselves, as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

It would be tempting to ignore these, but the problem is that a solid majority of people on the Secret Admirers mailing list are about ten times as smart as Randy. You can check the list anytime you want and find a mathematics professor in Russia slugging it out with another mathematics professor in India, kilobyte for kilobyte, over some stupefyingly arcane detail in prime number theory, while an eighteen-year-old, tube-fed math prodigy in Cambridge jumps in every few days with an even more stupefying explanation of why they are both wrong.

So when people like this send him mail, Randy tries to at least skim it. He is a little leery of the ones who identify themselves as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, or with the number 56 (which is a code meaning Yamamoto). But just because they are political-verging-on-flaky doesn’t mean they don’t know their math.