decorated combat veteran and retired tool-and-die maker who, as it happened, was not merely alive but in excellent health, and, since the death of his wife from breast cancer, had spent his retirement roaming around the Deep South in his pickup truck, helping to rebuild black churches that had been torched by drunken yahoos.
The artist who had designed the poster then confessed that he had simply copied it from a book and had made no effort whatsoever to obtain permission-the entire concept of getting permission to use other people's work was faulty, since all art was derivative of other art. High-powered trial lawyers converged, like dive bombers, on the small town in Kentucky where the aggrieved veteran was up on the roof of a black church with a mouthful of nails, hammering down slabs of A/D exterior plywood and mumbling 'no comment' to a horde of reporters down on the lawn. After a series of conferences in a room at the town's Holiday Inn, the veteran emerged, accompanied by one of the five most famous lawyers on the face of the planet, and announced that he was filing a civil suit against the Three Siblings that would, if it succeeded, turn them and their entire community into a flat, smoking abrasion in the earth's crust. He promised to split the proceeds between the black churches and various disabled veterans' and breast cancer research groups.
The organizing committee pulled the poster from circulation, which caused thousands of bootleg copies to go up on the World Wide Web and, in general, brought it to the attention of millions who never would have seen it otherwise. They also filed suit against the artist, whose net worth could be tallied up on the back of a ticket stub: he had assets of about a thousand dollars and debts (mostly student loans) amounting to sixty-five thousand.
All of this happened before the conference even began. Randy was aware of it only because Charlene had roped him into providing computer support for the conference, which meant setting up a Web site and e-mail access for the attendees. When all of this hit the news, e-mail began to flood in, and quickly jammed up all of the lines and filled up all of the disk capacity that Randy had spent the last month setting up.
Conferees began to arrive. A lot of them seemed to be sleeping in the house where Randy and Charlene had been living together for seven years. It was a big old Victorian house and there was plenty of room. They stumbled in from Heidelberg and Paris and Berkeley and Boston, then sat around Randy and Charlene's kitchen table drinking coffee and talking at great length about the Spectacle. Randy inferred that the Spectacle meant the poster furor, but as they went on and on about it, he sensed that they were using the word not in a conventional sense but as part of some academic jargon; that it carried a heavy load of shadings and connotations to them, none of which Randy would ever understand unless he became one of them.
To Charlene, and to all of the people attending War as Text, it was self-evident that the veteran who filed the lawsuit was the very worst kind of human being-just the sort they had gathered together to debunk, burn in effigy, and sweep into the ash-bin of posthistorical discourse. Randy had spent a lot of time around these people, and thought he'd gotten used to them, but during those days he had a headache all the time, from clenching his teeth, and he kept jumping to his feet in the middle of meals or conversations and going out for solitary walks. This was partly to keep himself from saying something undiplomatic, and partly as a childish but fruitless tactic to get the attention he craved from Charlene.
He knew the whole poster saga was going to be a disaster from early on. He kept warning Charlene and the others. They listened coolly, clinically, as if Randy were a test subject on the wrong side of a one-way mirror.
Randy forces himself to stay awake long enough for it to get dark. Then he lies in bed for a few hours trying to sleep. The container port is just north of the hotel, and all night long, Rizal Boulevard, along the base of the old Spanish wall, is jammed from one end to the other with container-carrying semis. The whole city is a cauldron of internal combustion. Manila seems to have more pistons and exhaust pipes than the rest of the world combined. Even at two in the morning the hotel's seemingly unshakable mass hums and rattles from the seismic energy pouring from all of those motors. The noise detonates car alarms down in the hotel's lot. The noise of one alarm triggers others, and so on. It is not the noise that keeps Randy awake so much as the insane stupidity of this chain reaction. It is an object lesson: the kind of nightmarish, snowballing technological fuck-up that keeps hackers awake at night even when they
He paws open a Heineken from his minibar and stands in front of the window, looking. Many of the trucks are adorned with brilliant displays of multicolored lights-not quite as flashy as those of the few jeepneys that scurry and jostle among them. Seeing so many people awake and working puts sleep out of the question.
He is too jet-lagged to accomplish anything that requires actual thought-but there is one important job he can do, which requires no thinking whatsoever. He starts up his laptop again. Seeming to levitate in the center of his dark room, the screen is a perfect rectangle of light the color of diluted milk, of a Nordic dawn. This light originates in small fluorescent tubes imprisoned in the polycarbonate coffin of his computer's display. It can only escape through a pane of glass, facing Randy, which is entirely covered by small transistors arranged in a grid, which let photons through, or don't, or let through only those of a particular wavelength, cracking the pale light into colors. By turning those transistors on and off according to some systematic plan, meaning is conveyed to Randy Waterhouse. A good filmmaker could convey a whole story to Randy by seizing control of those transistors for a couple of hours.
Unfortunately, there are a lot more laptop computers floating around than there are filmmakers worth paying attention to. The transistors are almost never put into the hands of human beings. They are controlled, instead, by software. Randy used to be fascinated by software, but now he isn't. It's hard enough to find human beings who are interesting.
The pyramid and the eyeball appear. Randy spends so much time using Ordo now that he has his machine boot it up automatically.
Nowadays the laptop has only one function for Randy: he uses it to communicate with other people, through e-mail. When he communicates with Avi, he has to use Ordo, which is a tool for taking his ideas and converting them into streams of bits that are almost indistinguishable from white noise, so that they can be sent to Avi in privacy. In exchange, it receives noise from Avi and converts it into Avi's thoughts. At the moment, Epiphyte has no assets other than information-it is an idea, with some facts and data to back it up. This makes it eminently stealable. So encryption is definitely a good idea. The question is: how much paranoia is really appropriate?
Avi sent him encrypted e-mail:
When you get to Manila t would like you to generate a 4O96 bit key pair and keep it on a floppy disk that you carry on your person at all times. Do not keep it on your hard disk. Anyone could break into your hotel room while you're out and steal that key.
Now, Randy pulls down a menu and picks an item labeled: 'New key. . .'
A box pops up giving him several KEY LENGTH options: 768 bits, 1024, 1536, 2048, 3072, or Custom. Randy picks the latter option and then, wearily, types in 4096.
Even a 768-bit key requires vast resources to break. Add one bit, to make it 769 bits long, and the number of possible keys doubles, the problem becomes much more difficult. A 770-bit key is that much more difficult yet, and so on. By using 768-bit keys, Randy and Avi could keep their communications secret from nearly every entity in the world for at least the next several years. A 1024-bit key would be vastly, astronomically more difficult to break.
Some people go so far as to use keys 2048 or even 3072 bits in length. These will stop the very best codebreakers on the face of the earth for astronomical periods of time, barring the invention of otherworldly technologies such as quantum computers. Most encryption software-even stuff written by extremely security- conscious cryptography experts-can't even handle keys larger than that. But Avi insists on using Ordo, generally considered the best encryption software in the world, because it can handle keys of unlimited length-as long as you don't mind waiting for it to crunch all the numbers.
Randy begins typing. He is not bothering to look at the screen; he is staring out the window at the lights on the trucks and the jeepneys. He is only using one hand, just flailing away loosely at the keyboard.
Inside Randy's computer is a precise clock. Whenever he strikes a key, Ordo uses that clock to record the current time, down to microseconds. He hits a key at 03:03:56.935788 and he hits another one at 03:05:57.290664, or about .354876 seconds later. Another .372307 seconds later, he hits another one. Ordo keeps track of all of these intervals and discards the more significant digits (in this example the .35 and the .37) because these parts will tend to be similar from one event to the next.
