actually be pegged to one specific ethnic group without glossing anything over, and those ethnic groups would be intimidatingly hip ones-not Swedes, let's say, but Lapps, and not Chinese but Hakka, and not Spanish but Basque. Instead of doing this, on her job app for Epiphyte she simply checked 'other' and then wrote in TRANS-ETHNIC. In fact, Kia is trans— just about every system of human categorization, and what she isn't trans— she is post-.
Anyway, Kia does a great job (it is part of the unspoken social contract with these people that they always do an absolutely fantastic job) and she has sent e-mail to Randy notifying him that she has recently fielded four trans-Pacific telephone calls from America Shaftoe, who wants to know Randy's whereabouts, plans, state of mind, and purity of spirit. Kia has informed Amy that Randy's on his way to California and has somehow insinuated, or Amy has somehow figured out, that the purpose of the visit is NOT BUSINESS. Randy senses a small pane of glass shattering over a neurological alarm button somewhere. He is in trouble. This is divine retribution for his having dared to sit still and not do anything for ninety whole minutes. He uses his word processor to whip out a note explaining to Amy that he needs to straighten out some paperwork in order to sever the last clinging tendrils of his dead, dead, dead relationship with Charlene (which was such a lousy idea to begin with that it causes him to lie awake at night questioning his own judgment and fitness to live), and that he has to be in California in order to do it. He faxes the note to Semper Marine in Manila, and also faxes it to
He then does something that probably means he's certifiably crazy. He gets up and strolls up and down the business-class aisle on pretext of using the bathroom, and checks out the people sitting nearby, paying special attention to their luggage, the stuff they've jammed into the overhead compartments, the bags under the seats in front of them. He is looking for anything that might contain a Van Eck phreaking type of antenna. It is a completely useless thing to do, because just about any type of luggage might contain such an antenna and he would never know it. Furthermore, any actual spy who had been planted on this plane to eavesdrop on his computer would not be sitting there holding up a big antenna and peering at an oscilloscope. But performing the check (like checking the rates for live data transmissions to the satellite) is sort of an empty ritual that makes him feel vaguely responsible and arguably non-stupid.
Returning to his seat, he fires up OrdoEmacs, which is a marvelously paranoid piece of software invented by John Cantrell. Emacs in its normal form is the hacker's word processor, a text editor that offers little in the way of fancy formatting capabilities but does the basic job of editing plain text very well. Your normally cryptographically paranoid hacker would create files using Emacs and then encrypt them with Ordo later. But if you forget to encrypt them, or if your laptop gets stolen before you get a chance to, or your plane crashes and you die but your laptop is sieved out of the muck by baffled-but-dogged crash investigators and falls into the hands of federal authorities, your files can be read. For that matter it is possible even to find ghostly traces of old bits on a hard drive's sectors even after the file has been overwritten with new data.
OrdoEmacs, on the other hand, works exactly like regular Emacs, except that it encrypts everything before writing it out to disk. At no time is plaintext ever laid down on a disk by OrdoEmacs-the only place it exists in its plain, readable form is in the pixels on the screen, and in the volatile RAM of the computer, whence it vanishes the moment power is shut down. Not only that, but it's coupled to a screensaver that uses the little built-in CCD camera in the laptop to check to see if you are actually there. It can't recognize your face, but it can tell whether or not a vaguely human-shaped form is sitting in front of it, and if that vaguely human-shaped form goes away, even for a fraction of a second, it will drop into a screen-saver that will blank the display and freeze the machine until such time as you type in a password, or biometrically verify your identity through voice recognition.
Randy opens up a document template that Epiphyte uses for internal memoranda and begins to lay out certain facts that will be fresh, and no doubt stimulating, to Avi, Beryl, John, Tom, and Eb.
MY TRIP TO THE JUNGLE
or
THE DRUMS OF THE HUKS
or
GET A LOAD OF THIS
or
HE SQUEEZED MY TESTICLES
or
THE WEIRD TURN PRO
a tale of adventure and discovery in the majestic rain-forest of northern Luzon
by
Randall Lawrence Waterhouse
As I stepped on this unknown middle-aged Filipina's feet during an ill-advised ballroom dancing foray, she leaned close to me and uttered some latitude and longitude figures with a conspicuously large number of significant digits of precision, implying a maximum positional error on the order of the size of a dinner plate. Gosh, was I ever curious! Subject provided these numbers as part of a conversational gambit/thought experiment concerning the inherent value (as in monetary) of information, a subject (coincidentally?) of interest to us, the Management Team of Epiphyte(2) Corp. Examination of high-res maps of Luzon indicated that the lat. and long, in question were in a hilly (let's just go ahead and call it mountainous) region some 250 km north of Manila. For those of you not familiar with WW2 history, this area was within the final perimeter controlled by General Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya and conqueror of Singapore, at the end of that war, when Gen. MacArthur had driven him and his approx. l0^5 troops out of the populated lowlands. And no, this is not just a fundamentally irrelevant historical note, as we shall see.
Relayed said data to one Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe (refer to my exceptionally colorful and readable status reports on cable survey for more anecdotal material concerning same) who asserted ' someone is trying to send you a message' (note: all cheesy dialog hereinafter is DMS's) and offered his assistance with a vigor bordering on scary aggressiveness. DMS is energetic and enterprising to a degree that from time to time leaves certain persons (e.g. those burdened with a petty fear of death or torture) uneasy (see my prior speculation as to possibility DMS may have been born with a redundant Y chromosome) Primary role of Yours Truly became as follows: source of repetitious and evidently irritating counsels of caution, restraint, other virtues given a low priority by DMS, who cites his longevity (which unavoidably exceeds that of Yours Truly as he was born before me), network of close personal relationships (murky, globe-spanning, reputedly puissant), financial prosperity (commodities, e.g. precious metals, distributed among many locations DMS declines to reveal) and (as trump card) the corporeal perfection of his girlfriend (she must carry an umbrella while out of doors lest her face cause pilots of overflying commercial airliners to pitch forward, dumb and inert, onto their control yokes) all as proof that the ideas shared by Yours Truly vis-a-vis how to avoid death, dismemberment, etc. need not be given more than the most cursory attention. Yours Truly's only bargaining chips were appropriately and ironically enough, information: namely the final few digits of the lat. and long, which were with held from DMS lest he simply go there himself and check them out (note: DMS is honest to a fault, and so the concern is not that DMS might steal or appropriate anything but that situation would get out of hand, to the extent it ever was in hand to begin with)
Plans were made for a journey ('mission' in DMS parlance) to said lat. and long. Extra batteries were purchased for the GPS receiver (see attached expense report). Drinking water, etc. laid in. A jeepney was retained. Concept of jeepney is impossible to convey fully here: a minibus, usually named after a pop star, Biblical figure, or abstract theological concept, whose engine & frame come from American, or Nipponese auto company but whose entire body, seats, upholstery, & encrustations of lurid decor are locally manufactured by high-spirited artisans. Jeepneys are normally made outside of Manila in towns or barangays (semiautonomous neighborhoods) that specialize in same; the design, materials, style, etc. of a jeepney reflect its provenance just as good wine allegedly betrays climate, soil, etc. of its terroir. Ours was (anomalously) a perfectly monochromatic jeepney mfged. out of pure stainless steel in the stainless-steel-fabrication-specialized bgy. of San Pablo, with (unlike normal jeepneys) no colored decorations at all—everything either stainless-steel-colored or (where use was made of electric lights) pure piercing halogen-white with bluish tinge nicely complementing hue of stainless steel. Seats in back were stainless-steel benches with surprisingly ergonomic lumbar support capabilities, Name of our jeepney was THE GRACE OF GOD. Readers of this memo will be disappointed to know that Bong-Bong Gad (sic), designer/owner/driver/proprietor of the vehicle, anticipated the inevitable 'there but for THE GRACE OF GOD go I' witticism by unloading same on Yours Truly while we were still shaking hands (Filipinos go in for long handshakes, and the first party to initiate termination of a handshake-usually the non-Filipino-is invariably left with a nagging
