Cryptonomicon

thumb|"There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer." — Alan Turing, 1948 (epigraph in Cryptonomicon) Cryptonomicon (1999) is a novel by Neal Stephenson, which follows the exploits of two groups of people in two different time periods. One group are World War II-era Allied codebreakers and tactical-deception operatives affiliated with the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (UK), and disillusioned Axis military and intelligence figures. The second narrative is set in the late 1990s, with characters who employ cryptologic, telecom, and computer technology to build an underground data haven to facilitate anonymous banking. Quotes All quotes are from the trade paperback edition published by Harper Perennial in 2000, 978-0-380-78862-0, 22nd printing Italics as in the book. Ellipses represent brief elisions for the sake of continuity. Bobby departs Shanghai (prologue) to Randy's first visit to Kinakuta (ch. 20) thumb|“Marcos was so smart. He had it all. It's funny; America didn't understand him.“ — Imelda Marcos “There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily.” Alan Turing, epigraph to Cryptonomicon. “Intelligent Machinery: A Report by A. M. Turing,” (Summer 1948), submitted to the National Physical Laboratory (1948) and published in Key Papers: Cybernetics, ed. C. R. Evans and A. D. J. Robertson (1968) and, in variant form, in Machine Intelligence 5, ed. B. Meltzer and D. Michie (1969). This morning [Imelda Marcos] offered the latest in a series of explanations of the billions of dollars that she and her husband, who died in 1989, are believed to have stolen during his presidency.“It so coincided that Marcos had money,” she said. “After the Bretton Woods agreement he started buying gold from Fort Knox. Three thousand tons, then 4,000 tons. I have documents for these: 7,000 tons. Marcos was so smart. He had it all. It's funny; America didn't understand him.” Epigraph to Cryptonomicon, taken from The New York Times, Monday, 4 March, 1996. Two tires fly. Two wail.A bamboo grove, all chopped downFrom it, warring songs. “Prologue” (p. 1) The modern world's hell on haiku writers: “Electrical generator” is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that onto the second line! Prologue (p. 1) thumb|upright|“That should get us all into fuck-you money before we turn forty.” This ain't just your regular Friday p.m. Shanghai bank district money rush. This is an ultimate settling of accounts before the whole Eastern Hemisphere catches fire. Prologue (p. 3) Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Chapter 1, “Barrens” (p. 5) Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead. Chapter 1, “Barrens” (p. 5) When Lawrence understood, it was as if the math teacher had suddenly played the good part of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on a pipe organ the size of the Spiral Nebula in Andromeda. Chapter 1, “Barrens” (p. 7) “You can assume anything that pleases your fancy, Alan,” Rudy responded, “but I am a mathematician and I do not assume anything.” Chapter 1, “Barrens” (p. 13) “It’s like this: when mathematicians begin fooling around with things like the square root of negative one, and quaternions, then they were no longer dealing with things that you could translate into sticks and bottlecaps. And yet they were still getting sound results.”“Or at least internally consistent results,” Rudy said.“Okay. Meaning that math was more than a physics of bottlecaps.”“It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words—are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?” Chapter 1, “Barrens” (p. 15) 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. Chapter 2, “Novus Ordo Seclorum” (p. 26) The word about Avi: his father’s people had just barely gotten out of Prague. As Central European Jews went, they were fairly typical. The only thing about them that was really anomalous was that they were still alive. Chapter 2, “Novus Ordo Seclorum” (p. 29) He (Shaftoe) thinks that he has never seen, and will never see, anything as terrible as those stone-faced Chinese women holding their white babies, not even blinking as the firecrackers explode all around them.Until, that is, he looks into the faces of certain Marines who stare into that crowd and see their own faces looking back at them, pudgy with baby fat and streaked with tears. Chapter 3, “Seaweed” (p. 32) The Last Patrol had been a wild trip. But it was over and they were back in Shanghai now, the safest place you could be in China, and about a hundred times more dangerous than the most dangerous place you could be in America. Chapter 3, “Seaweed” (p. 34) A couple of days into the voyage it becomes apparent that Sergeant Frick has forgotten how to shine his boots.…Now in and of itself this is forgivable. Frick started out his career chasing bandolier-draped desperadoes away from mail trains on the High Chaparral, for God's sake. In '27 he got shipped off to Shanghai on very short notice, and no doubt had to display some adaptability. Chapter 3, “Seaweed” (p. 39; this is the first appearance of “adaptability” a trait valued by both the Shaftoe family and the Marine Corps) Randy used to be fascinated by software, but now he isn’t. It’s hard enough to find human beings who are interesting. Chapter 4, “Forays” (p. 53) So encryptation is definitely a good idea. The question is: how much paranoia is really appropriate? Chapter 4, “Forays” (p. 53) Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and the rest of the band are up on the deck of the Nevada one morning, playing the national anthem and watching the Stars and Stripes ratchet up the mast, when they are startled to find themselves in the midst of one hundred and ninety airplanes of unfamiliar design…This is an incredibly realistic training exercise—even down to the point of using ethnically correct pilots, and detonating fake explosives on the ships. Lawrence heartily approves. Things have just been too lax around this place. Chapter 5, “Indigo” (pp. 62-63) But what if it isn't that clear-cut? What if the action is one that would merely be really improbable unless the Americans were breaking the code? What if the Americans, in the long run, are just too damn lucky? Chapter 5, “Indigo” (p. 74; Lawrence Waterhouse contemplates the downside of an enemy code being broken) He is in the habit of doing a lot of vigorous walking. By the standards of the body nazis who infest California and Seattle, this is only a marginal improvement over (say) sitting in front of a television chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes and eating suet from a tub. Chapter 6, “The Spawn of Onan” (p. 78) Randy enrolled at another Sibling with the aim of getting his master’s degree in astronomy. This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research. Chapter 6, “The Spawn of Onan” (p. 78) “So, you're the UNIX guru.” At the time, Randy was still stupid enough to be flattered by this attention, when he should have recognized them as bone-chilling words.Three years later, he left the Astronomy Department without a degree, and with nothing to show for his labors except six hundred dollars in his bank account and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX. Chapter 6, “The Spawn of Onan” (p. 78) thumb|300px|“Who you talking to, Red?““Long story. Maybe I'll introduce you to some of them…My name is Enoch Root, but you can call me Brother.” The conventional wisdom circa the early nineties had been that the technical wizards of Northern California would meet the creative minds of Southern California halfway and create a brilliant new collaboration. But this was rooted in a naive view of what Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank—a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium. The goal was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the talent had been paid off and sent packing. Chapter 6, “The Spawn of Onan” (p. 79) Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally.Charlene’s crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn’t being told that they were wrong that offended them, though—it was the underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about anything. Chapter 6, “The Spawn of Onan” (p. 80) Just because it’s an old idea doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Chapter 6, “The Spawn of Onan” (p. 85) He has passed into the realm of irrational things that you must simply accept, and in the Philippines this is a nearly infinite domain. Chapter 8, “Pedestrian” (p. 89) Shaftoe needs morphine. He says as much to Red.“If you think you need it now,” Red says, “just wait.” He tosses his rifle to a native, strides up to Shaftoe, and heaves him up over his shoulders in a fireman's carry. Shaftoe screams. A couple of Zeroes fly overhead, as they stride into the jungle. “My name is Enoch Root,” says Red, “but you can call me Brother.” Chapter 9, “Guadalcanal” (p. 96) thumb|upright|“What advice do you have for…Marines on their way to Guadalcanal?”“…kill the one with the sword first.” Ah, the morphine. It can’t be too bad of a nightmare if it comes with morphine, can it? Chapter 11, “Nightmare” (p. 108) Ronald Reagan has a stack of three-by-five cards in his lap. He skids up a new one: “What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young Marines on their way to Guadalcanal?”Shaftoe doesn't have to think very long...“Just kill the one with the sword first.”“Ah,” Reagan says, rising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking his pompadour in Shaftoe's direction. “Smarrrt—you target them because they're the officers, right?”“No, fuckhead!“ Shaftoe yells. “You kill 'em because they've got fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword?” Chapter 11, “Nightmare“ (p. 109) The “sir, yes sir” business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had trouble with military etiquette at first. He soaked up quite bit of it growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter. Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process. Chapter 11, “Nightmare“ (p. 113) “It is a very unusual setup,” the colonel muses,” not the kind of thing that military men would ever dream up. Do you know what I’m saying, Shaftoe?”“Sir, no sir! But I do detect a strong odor of politics in the room now, sir!” Chapter 11, “Nightmare” (p. 115) There is no in-between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. Chapter 12, “Londinium“ (p. 120) Officers actually like it when you forget their orders because it reminds them of how much smarter they are than you. It makes them feel needed. Chapter 15, “Meat” (p. 153) Lawrence meets the Duke of Qwghlm (ch. 21) to Yamamoto meets his death (ch. 39) thumb|300px|“We have another job for you, Marine.”“Sir! Yes sir!”“You're going to be part of something very special.”“Sir! The Marine Raiders are already a very special—”“I mean that this assignment is…unusual.” The next time Waterhouse is really aware of what’s going on, he is sitting in the duke’s office. He thinks that there has been some routine polite conversation along the way, but there is never any point in actually monitoring that kind of thing. Chapter 21, “Qwghlm House” (p. 208) Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn’t give a damn. Pretty soon he’ll probably start being proud of it. Chapter 23, “Crypt” (p. 213) “Shit!” he says.“What’s wrong, Sarge?”“I just always say that when I wake up,” Shaftoe says. Chapter 24, “Lizard” (p. 226) EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING: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…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. Chapter 26, “Why” (pp. 238-239; intro of mock summary of Avi's business plan template) Phase n: before the ink on our Nobel Prize certificates is dry…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. Chapter 26, “Why” (pp. 239-240; conclusion of mock summary of Avi's business plan template) thumb|300px|Shaftoe, lying on his back in the shade of a tree, looked straight up into the air and counted the rivets on the belly of a Henschel Hs 126. Randy reads another message simply because of the return address:root@pallas.eruditorum.orgOn a UNIX machine, “root” is the name of the most godlike of all users, the one who can read, erase, or edit any file,…professional courtesy demands he at least read this message.I read about your project.Why are you doing it?…One has to assume this is an attempt to launch some sort of philosophical debate. Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time. Chapter 26, “Why” (p. 244) thumb|300px|…But the Vickers in the back of this truck was water cooled. It actually had a fucking radiator on it. It had infrastructure. Corporal Benjamin hesitated, one hand poised above his radio key. “Sarge, are you sure they know we're here?”Everyone turned to see how Shaftoe would respond to this mild challenge. He had been slowly gathering a reputation as a man who needed watching.Shaftoe turned on his heel and strolled out into the middle of a clearing a few yards away…The Henschel was coming back for another pass, now so close to the ground that you could probably throw a rock through its windshield.Shaftoe unslung his tommy gun, pulled back the bolt, cradled it, swung it up and around, and opened fire…The Henschel went out of control almost immediately. Chapter 30, “RAM” (p. 268) In Shaftoe's post-high school experience he had found that guns…kicked back and heated up, got dirty, and jammed eventually…But the Vickers in the back of this truck…was water cooled. It actually had a fucking radiator on it. It had infrastructure… and a whole crew of technicians to fuss over it. But once the damn thing was up and running, it could fire continuously for days as long as people kept scurrying up to it with more belts of ammunition. Chapter 30, “RAM” (p. 271) “That would be expensive.”Eberhard waves his hand dismissively. “Bandwidth is cheap.”“That is more an article of faith than a statement of fact,” Randy says, “but it might be true in the future.”“But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now.” Chapter 31, “Diligence” (p. 283) “Got a weird email.”Avi immediately says “From Andy?”“How do you guess?”“You said it was weird.” Chapter 31, “Diligence” (p. 287) Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto. Chapter 32, “Spearhead” (p. 293) Randy watches them in turn: Bad Suit Asians and Good Suit Asians. The former have grizzled buzz cuts and nicotine-tanned skin and look like killers. They are wearing bad suits, not because they can't afford good ones, but because they don't give a shit. They are from China. The Good Suit Asians have high-maintenance haircuts, eyeglasses from Paris, clear skin, ready smiles. They are mostly from Nippon. Chapter 36, “Sultan” (p. 314; description of Crypt clients, specifically General Wing's lieutenants) Lawrence discovers Rudy's code (ch. 40) to Julieta's wedding (ch. 60) Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. Chapter 43, “Shinola” (p. 372) “Something unspeakable?”“I hate that word ‘unspeakable.’ We must speak of it.”“Speak then.”“The Aztecs took twenty-five thousand Nahuatl captives, brought them back to Tenochtitlan, and killed them all in a couple of days.”“Why?”“Some kind of festival. Super Bowl weekend or something. I don’t know. The point is, they did that kind of shit all the time. But now, Randy, when I talk about Holocaust-type stuff happening in Mexico, you give me this shit about the mean nasty old Spaniards! Why? Because history has been distorted, that’s why.”“Don’t tell me you’re about to come down on the side of the Spaniards.”“As the descendant of people who were expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, I have no illusions about them,” Avi says, “but, at their worst, the Spaniards were a million times better than the Aztecs. I mean, it really says something about how bad the Aztecs were that, when the Spaniards showed up and raped the place, things actually got a lot better around there.” Chapter 46, “HEAP” (pp. 399-400) Randy says, “You asked me earlier what is the highest and best purpose to which we could dedicate our lives. And the obvious answer is ‘to prevent future Holocausts.’”Avi laughs darkly. “I’m glad it’s obvious to you, my friend. I was beginning to think I was the only one.”“What!? Get over yourself, Avi. People are commemorating the Holocaust all the time.”“Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad about past holocausts, human nature will magically transform, and no one will want to commit genocide in the future.”“I take it you do not share this view, Avi?”“Look at Bosnia! Avi scoffs. “Human nature doesn’t change, Randy. Education is hopeless. The most educated people in the world can turn into Aztecs or Nazis just like that.” He snaps his fingers.“So what hope is there?”“Instead of trying to educate the potential perpetrators of holocausts, we try to educate the potential victims. They will at least pay some fucking attention.” Chapter 46, “HEAP” (p. 401) “I got e-mail from Doug Shaftoe a few days ago,” Randy says. “From his boat, via satellite phone.”“In the clear?”“Yeah. I keep bothering him to get Ordo and encrypt his e-mail, but he won’t.”“That is really unprofessional,” Avi grumbles. “He needs to be more paranoid.”“He’s so paranoid that he doesn’t even trust Ordo.”Avi’s scowl eases. “Oh. That’s okay then.” Chapter 46, “HEAP” (p. 402) Beck unlocks a desk drawer and produces a bottle of Armagnac.“Conquering France hath its privileges,” Beck says.“Yeah,” Root says, “you blokes really know how to sack a place.” Chapter 47, “Seeky” (p. 406) Lieutenant Reagan is back again, molesting Bobby Shaftoe with a stethoscope that appears to have been kept in a bath of liquid nitrogen until ready for use. Chapter 47, “Seeky” (p. 406) The captain is still nonplussed. Shaftoe is beginning to feel a certain mischievous satisfaction. Playing with officers’ minds isn’t as good as having a brain saturated with highly refined opiates, but it will do in a pinch. Chapter 47, “Seeky” (p. 412) He has always had a weird, sick fascination with women who smoked and drink a lot. Amy does neither, but her complete disregard of modern skin-cancer precautions puts her in the same category: people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy. Chapter 49, “Wreck” (p. 434) Randy has spent almost no time around military people, but he is finding that he gets along with them surprisingly well. His favorite thing about them is their compulsive need to educate everyone around them, all the time.…Randy supposes that when you are in a war, practical knowledge is a good thing to spread around. Chapter 49, “Wreck” (p. 435) The United States Military (Waterhouse has decided) is first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization. Chapter 50, “Santa Monica” (p. 442) This is what a boy of his age out to be doing: working, hard and honest, at a simple job. Kissing girls. Walking into town to buy some smokes and maybe have a beer. The idea of flying around on heavily armed warplanes and using modern weapons systems to kill hundreds of foreign homicidal maniacs now strikes him as dated and inappropriate. Chapter 52, “Meteor” (p. 455) It goes without saying that the Finns have to have their own sui generis brand of automatic weapon. Chapter 52, "Meteor" (p. 455; footnote referenced from first mention of the Suomi machine pistol, possibly indicative of author's appreciation of the Finnish-made Linux It frequently happens, for example, that men are called upon to die willingly that others may live. Shaftoe learned on Guadalcanal that you can never tell when the circumstances will make you into that guy. You can go into battle with the clearest, simplest, smartest plan ever devised, worked out by Annapolis-trained, battle-hardened Marine officers, and based upon tons of intelligence. But ten seconds after the first trigger has been pulled, shit is happening all over the place, people are running around like maniacs. The battle plan that was genius a minute ago suddenly looks as sweetly naive as the inscriptions in your high school yearbook. Guys are dying. Some of them are dying because a shell happens to fall on them, but surprisingly often, they are dying because they are ordered to. Chapter 52, “Meteor” (p. 456) He should have died on the beach on Guadalcanal, along with his buddies, and he didn’t. Everything between then and U-691 was just sort of an extra bonus life. He got a chance to go home and see his family, sort of like Jesus after the Resurrection. Chapter 52, “Meteor” (p. 456) The one to Amy has obviously been written by a man who is desperately in love with her. Reading it is like moisturizing with Tabasco. Chapter 53, “Lavender Rose” (p. 458) Okay, so divers have mastered a large body of occult knowledge. That explains their general resemblance to hackers, albeit physically fit hackers. Chapter 53, “Lavender Rose” (p. 458) Doug has spread out miscellaneous contents on a tabletop to be photographed and cataloged. Ex-Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe has, at the peak of his career, become a sort of librarian. Chapter 53, "Lavender Rose" (pp. 461-462) "So we suspect his name was Rudolf von Hacklheber,"…"There was a man by that name who wrote a couple of mathematics papers back in the thirties. And there are some organizations in and around Leipzig, Germany, that use the name: a hotel, a theater, a defunct reinsurance company."…"Check this out," Doug says, and pings one fingernail against a glass tray full of a transparent liquid. An envelope, unglued and spreadeagled, is floating in it. Randy bends over and peers at it. Something has been written on the back in pencil,…Randy flips the envelope over,…It says:WATERHOUSELAVENDER ROSE. Chapter 53, "Lavender Rose" (p. 462) World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next-best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap'n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap'n Crunch takes about thirty seconds. Chapter 56, "Crunch" (p. 477; portions of this chapter were also published as a short story with the same name in Disco 2000, 1999) Aging Filipinas in prom dresses have come and gone across the lobby of the Manila Hotel for as long as Randy has known the place. He hardly noticed them during the early months when he was actually living there. The first time they appeared, he assumed that some function was underway in the grand ballroom: perhaps a wedding, perhaps a class-action suit being filed by aging beauty contest contestants against the synthetic fibers industry. That was about as far as he got before he stopped burning out his mental circuits trying to figure everything out. Pursuing an explanation for every strange thing you see in the Philippines is like trying to get every last bit of rain water out of a discarded tire. Chapter 56, “Crunch” (p. 481) It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it’s all can openers. Chapter 57, “Girl” (p. 488) When Waterhouse returns from work that evening, he blunders into the parlor and interrupts Mrs. McTeague having tea with a young lady.The young lady's name is Mary Smith;…She is a petite girl dressed in a uniform.She is the only woman Waterhouse has ever seen. She is the only other human being in the universe actually, and when she stands up to shake his hand, his peripheral vision shuts down as if he has been sucking on a tailpipe. Black curtains converge across a silver cyclorama, shuttering down his cosmos to a vertical shaft of carbon-arc glory, a pillar of light, a heavenly follow-spot targeted upon Her.Mrs. McTeague, knowing the score, bids him sit down.Mary is a tiny, white-skinned, red-headed person who is often seized by little fits of self-consciousness. When this happens she averts her eyes from his and swallows, and when she swallows there is a certain cord in her white neck, rounding the concavity from shoulder to ear, that stands out for a moment.…Her skin, as unmarked as clear water, is an extravagant display of vibrant animal power. He wants his tongue on it. The whole curve of her neck, from collarbone to earlobe, would make a perfect cradle for his face.She sees him looking at her, and swallows again.…She may just as well have caved his head in with a stone and tied his penis round a hitching-rail. The effect must be calculated. But apparently she has not ever done it to anyone else, or there would be a band of gold round her pale left ring finger. Chapter 57, "Girl" (pp. 489-490) Von Hacklheber shrugs and looks at the burning tip of his cigarette. "You expect them to throw all those machines away because one mathematician writes a paper?" Chapter 58, "Conspiracy" (p. 495) "I ran statistical analyses of convoy sinkings and U-boat attacks I found some anomalies, some improbable events, but not enough to make a pattern.…"From this I drew no conclusion. Certainly if they were smart enough to break the Enigma they would be smart enough to conceal the fact from us at any cost.…It all came down to a problem of sifting through large amounts of raw data—lengthy and tedious work."Shaftoe cringes, wondering what something would have to be like in order to qualify as lengthy and tedious to this joker.…"It was obvious that Detachment 2702 was in the business of deceiving the Wehrmacht by concealing the fact that the Enigma had been broken."When von Hacklheber explains this, everything that Detachment 2702 ever did suddenly makes sense. Chapter 58, "Conspiracy" (pp. 495-498) thumb|upright|Insignia of the Ghost Army, or 23rd HQ Special Troops (tactical deception) was a real-world Detachment 2702 that misdirected the Wehrmacht. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring makes his way through the car, heading towards the rear of the train, where the most ornate coach is located. His body is about as big as the hull of a torpedo boat, draped in a circus-tent-sized Chinese silk robe, the sash of which drags on the floor behind him, like a leash trailing behind a dog. He has the largest belly of any man Rudy has ever seen, and it is covered with golden hair that deepens as the belly curves under, until it becomes a tawny thicket that completely conceals his genitals. He is not really expecting to see two men sitting here eating breakfast, but seems to consider Rudy and Angelo's presence here to be one of life's small anomalies, not really worth noticing. Chapter 58, "Conspiracy" (p. 500) thumb|upright|[Göring's] body is about as big as the hull of a torpedo boat, draped in a circus tent sized Chinese silk robe. This is why laptops were invented, so that important business persons would not fritter away long flights relaxing. Chapter 59, “Hoard” (p. 508) “She just wants to have all of the good parts of being a Finn without the bad parts.”“What are the bad parts?”“Having to live in Finland,” Shaftoe says. Chapter 60, “Rocket” (pp. 535-536) Give those Finns a grim, stark, bleak moral dilemma and a bottle of schnapps and you could pretty much forget about them for forty-eight hours. Chapter 60, "Rocket" (p. 537) “So let me get this straight,” Shaftoe says, “when you really were fucking Julieta, you said you weren’t and so you were able to remain a priest. Now you’re going to marry her and not fuck her and say that you are.”“If you’re trying to say that my relationship with the Church is very complicated, I already knew that, Bobby.” Chapter 60, “Rocket” (p. 538) Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he'll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison. Chapter 60, "Rocket" (p. 539) Two large black Mercedes issue from the forest, like bad ideas emerging from the dim mind of a green lieutenant.…Germans climb out and stand up.…This is the moment, then. Nazis are right over there and it is the job of Bobby Shaftoe to kill them all. Not just a job but a moral requisite, because they are the living avatars of Satan, who publicly acknowledge being just as bad and vicious as they really are. Chapter 60, "Rocket" (p. 539) The trench-coated officers remain standing, as do a couple of civilian-clad goons, who immediately open fire in their general direction with their submachine guns. This makes a lot of noise but only impresses Shaftoe insofar as it is an impressive display of stupidity. The bullets sail far over their heads. Chapter 60, “Rocket” (p. 539) Swedish people are beginning to come out of their houses. They look exactly like American midwesterners, and Shaftoe's always startled when they fail to speak English. Chapter 60, "Rocket" (p. 542) Lawrence is punched at a dance (ch. 61) to Goto exits Golgotha (ch. 81) Father John snaps awake, and Mr. Drkh looks as if he's just taken a fifty-caliber round in the small of his back. Clearly, Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames. Chapter 64, "Organ" (pp. 574-575) In general, Waterhouse isn't good at just winging it, but he's tired and pissed off and horny, and this is a fucking war, and sometimes you have to. He mounts the podium, dives for a round of chalk, and starts hammering equations onto the blackboard like an ack-ack gun. Chapter 64, "Organ" (p. 575) This hostility was pretty strongly gender-linked, Randy is sad to conclude. Many of the females wouldn’t talk to him it all, or would come near him only the better to fix him with frosty glares and appraise his presumed new girlfriend. This only stands to reason, since, before she left for Yale, Charlene had the better part of a year to popularize her version of events. She has been able to structure the discourse to her advantage, just like a dead white male. Chapter 65, "Home" (p. 584) Weirdly, the ones who adopted the sternest and most terrible Old Testament moral tone were the Modern Language Association types who believed that everything was relative and that, for example, polygamy was as valid as monogamy. The friendliest and most sincere welcome he’d gotten was from Scott, a chemistry professor, and Laura, a pediatrician, who, after knowing Randy and Charlene for many years, had one day divulged to Randy, in strict confidence, that, unbeknownst to the academic community at large, they had been spiriting their three children off to church every Sunday morning, and even had them all baptized. Chapter 65, "Home" (pp. 584-585) Comstock grins and says, “You sound awfully sure of yourself, Waterhouse! I wonder if you can get me to feel that same level of confidence.”Waterhouse frowns at the coffee mug. “Well, it’s all math,” he says. “If the math works, why then you should be sure of yourself. That’s the whole point of math.” Chapter 67, “Computer” (p. 593) thumb|He pretends to admire it from the side, and then flips it over to read the words glazed on the bottom.ROYAL ALBERTLAVENDER ROSE. The Shaftoes produce with admirable coolness from the hot rod's trunk a ferrous, oily chasm all a-bang with tire chains, battered ammo boxes, and, unless Randy's eyes are playing tricks on him, a pair of samurai swords. Chapter 68, “Caravan” (p. 602; 300-year-old Shaftoe family heirlooms "reappear"—although this is their first appearance in a published work by Neal Stephenson) M.A. is a pretty straightforward by-the-book type, the kind who'll get good grades and fit well into any kind of hierarchical organization. Robin, on the other hand, is more of a wild card. He has the makings of either a total loser or a successful entrepreneur, or maybe one of those guys who will oscillate between those two poles. Randy realizes now, in retrospect, that has spilled a hell of a lot of information to Robin, in just a couple of days, about the Internet and electronic money and digital currency and the new global economy. Randy's mental state is such that he is prone to babbling aimlessly for hours at a time. Robin has hoovered it all up. Chapter 68, “Caravan” (p. 604; description of cousins Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe and Robin Shaftoe, resembling their distant Shaftoe forbears, Bob and Jack, in Quicksilver) thumb|"The name of this place is Bundok," Captain Noda tells Goto confidently. "We have chosen it carefully." Five rivers sprawl from its triple summit. There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, at least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol all across the campus. Chapter 70, “Origin” (pp. 621-622) Some people’s insistence that “Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop” seems kind of overly deterministic to Randy; it seems to reflect a kind of lazy or half-witted surrender to bald teleology. Basically, if everyone has a vested interest in believing that they understand everything, or even that people are capable in principle of understanding it (either because believing this dampens their insecurities about the unpredictable world, or makes them feel more intelligent than others, or both) then you have an environment in which dopey, reductionist, simple-minded, pat, glib thinking can circulate, like wheelbarrows filled with inflated currency in the marketplaces of Jakarta. Chapter 70, “Origin” (p. 629) Aunt Nina says, "How about you, Randy? As the eldest son of the eldest son, you must have some feelings about this.""No doubt when my parents' time comes, they will pass on some of Grandma and Grandpa's legacy to me," Randy says."Oh, very circumspect. Well done," Aunt Nina says. "But as the only grandchild who has any memories of your grandfather at all, there must be something here that you might like to have.""There'll probably be some odds and ends that nobody wants," Randy says. Then like an almost perfect moron—like an organism genetically engineered to be a total, stupid idiot—Randy glances directly at the Trunk. Then he tries to hide it, which only makes it more conspicuous.…Aunt Nina is walking around the trunk, kind of spiraling in towards it in a rapidly decaying orbit. "Hmm. What's in here?" Chapter 70, "Origin" (p. 631) "Oh, the gravy boat!" she exclaims, and hoists up something that is more of a heavy cruiser than a boat.…He pretends to admire it from the side, and then flips it over to read the words glazed on the bottom.ROYAL ALBERT—LAVENDER ROSE. Chapter 70, "Origin" (p. 633) Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse's widow and five children agree that Dad did something in the war, and that's about all.…There is not even agreement on whether he was in the Army or the Navy, which seems like a pretty fundamental plot point to Randy. Was he in Europe or Asia? Opinions differ. Chapter 72, "Seattle" (pp. 639-640) "I don't even know when they got married," Randy says. "Isn't that horrible?""September of 1945," Amy says. "I dragged it out of her.""Wow.""Girl talk.""I didn't know you were even rigged for girl talk.""We can all do it." Chapter 72, "Seattle" (pp. 643-644) “I am sorry if I make you feel bad sometimes,” Randy says. “The family is full of scientists. Mathematicians. The least intelligent of us become engineers. Which is sort of what I am.” Chapter 72, “Seattle” (p. 644) “One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he’s socially inept—because everybody’s been there—but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.”“Which is still kind of pathetic.”“It was pathetic when they were in high school,” Randy says. “Now it’s something else. Something very different from pathetic.”“What, then?”“I don’t know. There is no word for it. You’ll see.” Chapter 72, “Seattle” (p. 646) Amy barges curiously into the middle of a four-nerd game. Almost anywhere else, the appearance of a female with discernible waist among these guys would cause some kind of a stir. Their eyes would at least travel rudely up and down her body. But these guys only think about one thing: the cards in their hands, each contained in a clear plastic sleeve to keep it in mint condition, each decorated with a picture of a troll or wizard or some other leaf on the post-Tolkienian evolutionary tree, and printed on the back with elaborate rules. Mentally, these guys are not in a mall on the East Side of greater Seattle. They are on a mountain pass trying to kill each other with edged weapons and numinous fire. Chapter 72, “Seattle” (pp. 647-648) Chester's eyebrows go up. Amy glances out the window; her hair, skin, and clothes take on a pronounced reddish tinge from Doppler effect as she drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity. (p. 653) Chapter 72, "Seattle" thumb|New Guinea is a nasty-looking piece of work: a gangrenous dragon with a wicked, rocky spine. Shaftoe can plainly see that such a country could only be conquered by a man who was completely fucking out of his mind. They have been in suspended animation for more than fifty years, stored on a dead medium, and now Randy is going to breathe life into them again.…Probably they will fail and die, but if they flourish, it should make Randy's life a little more interesting. Not that it's devoid of interest now, but it is easier to introduce new complications than to resolve the old ones. Chapter 72, "Seattle" (pp. 654-655; Randy Waterhouse ponders a crate of punched cards found in his late grandfather's attic.) He has the mysterious physical strength that seems to be common among bald men, and he has a kind of mesmerizing leadership power over the other Chinese. He somehow manages to get them excited about moving the boulder. Chapter 73, "Rock" (p. 656; description of Wing, a Chinese prisoner in a secret Japanese excavation site in the Philippines and future Red Army general) “That time in Seattle—during the lawsuit—was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX.”“Well, that’s something,” Avi says. “Normally those two are mutually exclusive.”“Shut up,” Randy says, “I’m trying to agonize.”“Well I think that agonizing is so fundamentally pathetic that it borders on funny,” Avi says. “But please go ahead.” Chapter 74, “The Most Cigarettes” (p. 666) thumb|Randy hangs up and the phone rings again almost immediately."Who the fuck are you?" Doug Shaftoe says, "I call you on the airplane, and I get a busy signal." "Well," Avi says, "to begin with, I think it's better to aspire to having Amy than to actually have Charlene.""Ouch! You are a cruel man.""Sometimes wanting is better than having." Chapter 74, "The Most Cigarettes." (p. 666; Avi paraphrases a line by TV screenwriter Theodore Sturgeon, spoken by the character Spock in a 1967 episode of Star Trek: The Original Series) In war, no matter how much you plan and prepare and practice, when the big day actually arrives, you still can’t find your ass with both hands. Chapter 75, “Christmas 1944” (p. 681) It is so disorienting to have one's phone ring on an airplane that he doesn't know what to make of it for a while.…When he finally has the thing turned on and at his ear, a voice says, "You call that subtle? You think that you and Doug Shaftoe are the only two people in the world who know that Sultan-Class passengers can receive incoming phone calls?" Randy is certain he's never heard this voice before. It is the voice of an old man. Not a voice worn out or cracking with age, but a voice that's been slowly worn smooth, like the steps of a cathedral. Chapter 78, "Pontifex" (p. 705; Randy's first voice conversation with "root@eruditorum.org") thumb|"That son of a bitch had soldiers and Marines crawling over Luzon, supposedly on training missions…I think they were looking for the Primary." — D.M. Shaftoe "You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you're not.”"Why do you say that?”"Oh, because then you'd be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices—who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much worse than being a moron.” Chapter 78, "Pontifex" (pp. 705-706; Randy's grandfather, Lawrence Waterhouse, never attempted to patent his innovations in computing technology.) Randy hangs up and the phone rings again almost immediately."Who the fuck are you?" Doug Shaftoe says, "I call you on the airplane, and I get a busy signal." Chapter 78, "Pontifex" (p. 709) According to their family lore, the first Shaftoes to come to America worked as indentured servants in tobacco and cotton fields, raising their eyes longingly towards those cool mountains as they stooped in sweltering fields. As soon as they could get away, they did, and headed uphill. The mountains of Luzon beckon Shaftoe in the same way—away from the malarial lowlands, up towards Glory. Chapter 79, "Glory" (p. 714) “I told you, Comstock thought it was a Communist code.”“But that’s bullshit!” Doug says. “Jesus! Haven’t you guys spent any time at all around people like Comstock? Can’t you recognize bullshit? Don’t you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your head, ’My goodness, this appears to be bullshit’?” Chapter 80, “The Primary” (pp. 728-729) thumb|”But this is not so bad," Attorney Alejandro says, radiating insincerity like a mirrored ball in a disco. "You know something?" fires back Doug. "During the Vietnam war—which was Old Man Comstock's brainchild—the American military presence in the Philippines was huge. That son of a bitch had soldiers and marines crawling over Luzon, supposedly on training missions. But I think they were looking for something. I think they were looking for the Primary.” Chapter 80, "The Primary" (p. 729) Randy’s arrest (ch. 82) to Randy on covers of Time and Newsweek (ch. 102) Of course that stuff is encrypted to begin with, but that was done in 1945, and so by modern standards it might as well have been enciphered with a cereal-box decoder ring. Chapter 82, “Bust” (p. 739) In Kinakuta there is less deforestation than there is here, but only because they have oil instead. All of these countries are burning resources at a fantastic rate to get their economies stoked up, gambling that they’ll be able to make the jump into hyperspace—some kind of knowledge economy, presumably—before they run out of stuff to sell and turn into Haiti. Chapter 82, “Bust” (p. 740) The sample messages used [in the Cryptonomicon] are like ONE PLANE REPORTED LOST AT SEA and TROOPS HAVING DIFFICULTY MAINTAINING CONNECTION WITH FORTY FIFTH INFANTRY STOP which Randy finds kind of hokey until he remembers that the book was written by people who probably didn’t know what “hokey” meant, who lived in some radically different pre-hokiness era where planes really did get lost at sea and the people in those planes never came back to see their families and in which people who even raised the issue of hokeyness in conversation were likely to end up pitied or shunned or maybe even psychoanalyzed.Randy feels like a little shit when he thinks about this stuff. Chapter 82, “Bust” (p. 741) thumb|400px|“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.” “Someone is trying to send you a message,” Attorney Alejandro says, scant minutes into his first interview with his new client. Randy’s ready for it. “Why does everyone here have these incredibly cumbersome ways of sending me messages? Don’t you people have e-mail?” Chapter 84, “Captivity” (p. 753) You don’t even need to bother with cigarettes and matches in a jail. Just breathe, and you get the equivalent of one or two packs a day worth of slightly pre-owned tar and nicotine. Chapter 84, “Captivity” (p. 753) “You know what this is? It’s one of those men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus things.”“I have not heard of this phrase but I understand immediately what you are saying.”“It’s one of those American books where once you’ve heard the title you don’t even need to read it,” Randy says.“Then I won’t.” Chapter 84, “Captivity” (p. 760) “Ooh baby,” Amy said and read him a passage about a rugged but sensitive but tough but loving but horny but smart hero having his way with a protesting but willing but struggling but yielding tempestuous female. Chapter 84, “Captivity” (p. 762) “Haven’t you guys figured out yet that banzai charges DON’T FUCKING WORK?”“All of the people who learned that were killed in banzai charges.” Chapter 85, “Glamor” (p. 768) Shaftoe draws a deep breath, tilts his head back, and stares up into a smoky heaven. “God,” he says, “usually I bow my head when I’m talking to you, but I figure this is a good time for us to have a face-to-face. You see and know all things and so I will not explain the situation to You. I would just like to submit a request for You. I know You are getting requests from lonely soldiers all over the fucking place at this time, but since this one has to do with a shitload of women and children, and General MacArthur too, maybe You can jump me to the top of the stack. You know what I want. Let’s get it done.” Chapter 85, “Glamor” (p. 772) Oral surgeons, it seemed, were not comfortable delving more than elbow-deep into a patient’s head. They had been living in big houses and driving to work in Mercedes-Benz sedans long before Randy had dragged his sorry ass into their offices with his horrifying X-ray and they had absolutely nothing to gain by even attempting to remove these—not so much wisdom teeth in the normal sense as apocalyptic portents from the Book of Revelations. The best way to remove these teeth was with a guillotine. Chapter 86, “Wisdom” (p. 777) Shaftoe realizes that his mental concept of what this mission was going to be like, as he reviewed it with the officers in the LCM, bears no relationship to the reality. This is only about the five thousandth time Shaftoe has experienced this phenomenon in the course of the Second World War; you’d think he would no longer be surprised by it. Chapter 87, “Fall” (p. 788) “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. Chapter 88, “Metis” (p. 794) “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?” Chapter 88, “Metis” (pp. 799-800) 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. Chapter 88, “Metis” (p. 803) thumb|“I think we can still agree that something a little peculiar was going on with the nativity of Athena.” “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.” Chapter 88, “Metis” (pp. 801-802) “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.”…“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.” Chapter 88, “Metis” (p. 806) “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 turned 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.” Chapter 88, “Metis” (pp. 806-807) “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.” Chapter 88, “Metis” (pp. 807-808) People smell all kinds of ways before they have burned, but only one way afterwards. Chapter 89, “Slaves” (p. 810) “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.” Chapter 92, “Akihabara” (p. 839) “Gold is the corpse of value,” says Goto Dengo.”I don’t understand.””If you want to understand, look out the window!” says the patriarch, and sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompasses half of Tokyo. “Fifty years ago, it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand? The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn’t care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here—” he points to his head “—in the intelligence of the people, and here—” he holds out his hands “—in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor.” Chapter 95, “Goto-Sama” (p. 858) thumb|500px|“Gold is the corpse of value,” says Goto Dengo. “If you want to understand, look out the window!” “But before this war, all of this gold was out here, in the sunlight. In the world. Yet look what happened.” Goto Dengo shudders. “Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start businesses and build buildings.” Chapter 96, “R.I.P.” (pp. 861-862) Doug says that overestimating the intelligence of the enemy is, if anything, more dangerous than underestimating it. Chapter 97, “Return” (pp. 864-865) America is just the hardest-to-ignore instantiation of a cultural and philosophical system that can be seen in a few other places. Not many. Certainly not in Kinakuta. The closest outpost is really not that far away: the Filipinos, for all of their shortcomings in the human rights department, have imbibed the whole Western freedom thing deeply, in a way that has arguably made them economic laggards compared to Asian countries where no one gives a shit about human rights. Chapter 97, “Return” (p. 866) That nuts are the genitalia of trees is never more obvious than when you are looking at a cluster of swelling young coconuts nestled in the hairy dark groin of a palm tree. It’s surprising that the Spanish missionaries didn’t have the whole species eradicated. Chapter 97, “Return” (p. 867) There sure is a lot of bright stuff in the jungle. Randy figures that, in the natural world, anything that is colored so brightly must be some kind of serious evolutionary badass. Chapter 97, “Return” (p. 874) An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous. Chapter 98, “Cribs” (p. 878) The ability to kill someone is basically a mental stance, and not a question of physical means; a serial killer armed with a couple of feet of clothesline is far more dangerous than a cheerleader with a bazooka. Chapter 99, “Cayuse” (p. 892) Sometimes, if you want to live and breathe tomorrow, you have to dive into the black depths today, and that is a leap of faith—faith in your U-boat, and your crew—beside which the saints’ religious epiphanies amount to nothing. Chapter 101, “Passage” (p. 903) External links Cryptonomicon - The Ultimate Computer Geek Novel Reading Aids Category:Neal Stephenson books Category:Science fiction books Category:American novels