Cryptonomicon

As Goto Dengo walks away, he hears the young motorcycle driver mumble something.

'What did he say?' Lieutenant Mori asks.

'He said, 'Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.' It's a religious thing,' Goto Dengo explains.

Chapter 63 CALIFORNIA

Half of the people who work at SFO, San Francisco International Airport, now seem to be Filipino, which certainly helps to ease the shock of reentry. Randy gets singled out, as he always does, for a thorough luggage search by the exclusively Anglo customs officials. Men traveling by themselves with practically no luggage seem to irritate the American authorities. It's not so much that they think you are a drug trafficker as that you fit, in the most schematic possible way, the profile of the most pathologically optimistic conceivable drug trafficker, and hence practically force them to investigate you. Irritated that you have forced their hand in this manner, they want to teach you a lesson: travel with a wife and four kids next time, or check a few giant trundling bags, or something, man! What were you thinking? Never mind that Randy is coming in from a place where DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS is posted all over the airport the way CAUTION: WET FLOOR is here.

The most Kafkaesque moment is, as always, when the customs official asks what he does for a living, and he has to devise an answer that will not sound like the frantic improvisations of a drug mule with a belly full of ominously swelling heroin-stuffed condoms. 'I work for a private telecommunications provider' seems to be innocuous enough. 'Oh, like a phone company?' says the customs official, as if she's having none of it. 'The phone market isn't really that available to us,' Randy says, 'so we provide other communications services. Mostly data.'

'Does that involve a lot of traveling around from place to place then?'asks the customs official, paging through the luridly stamped back pages of Randy's passport. She makes eye contact with a more senior customs official who sidles over towards them. Randy now feels himself getting nervous, exactly the way your drug mule would, and fights the impulse to scrub his damp palms against his pant legs, which would probably guarantee him a trip through the magnetic tunnel of a CAT scanner, a triple dose of mint-flavored laxative, and several hours of straining over a stainless-steel evidence bucket. 'Yes, it does,' Randy says.

The senior customs official, trying to be unobtrusive and low key in a way that makes Randy stifle a sort of gasping, pained outburst of laughter, begins to flip through some appalling communications-industry magazine that Randy stuffed into his briefcase on his way out the door back in Manila. The word INTERNET appears at least five times on the front cover. Randy stares directly into the eyes of the female customs official and says, 'The Internet.' Totally factitious understanding dawns on the woman's face, and her eyes ping bosswards. The boss, still deeply absorbed in an article about the next generation of high-speed routers, shoves out his lower lip and nods, like every other nineties American male who senses that knowing this stuff is now as intrinsic to maleness as changing flat tires was to Dad. 'I hear that's really exciting now,' the woman says in a completely different tone of voice, and begins scooping Randy's stuff together into a big pile so that he can repack it. Suddenly the spell is broken, Randy is a member in good standing of American society again, having cheerfully endured this process of being ritually goosed by the Government. He feels a strong impulse to drive straight to the nearest gun store and spend about ten thousand dollars. Not that he wants to hurt anyone; it's just that any kind of government authority gives him the creeps now. He's probably been hanging out too much with the ridiculously heavily armed Tom Howard. First a hostility to rainforests, now a desire to own an automatic weapon; where is this all going?

Avi is waiting for him, a tall pale figure standing at the velvet rope surrounded by hundreds of Filipinas in a state of emotional riot, brandishing gladiola spears like medieval pikemen. Avi has his hands in the pockets of his floor-skimming coat, and keeps his head turned in Randy's direction but is sort of concentrating on a point about halfway between them, frowning in an owlish way. This is the same frown that Randy's grandmother used to wear when she was teasing apart a tangle of string from her junk drawer. Avi adopts it when he is doing basically the same thing to some new complex of information. He must have read Randy's e-mail message about the gold. It occurs to Randy that he missed a great opportunity for a practical joke: he could have loaded up his bag with a couple of lead bricks and then handed it to Avi and completely blown his mind. Too late. Avi rotates around his vertical axis as Randy comes abreast of him and then breaks into a stride that matches Randy's pace. There is some unarticulated protocol that dictates when Randy and Avi will shake hands, when they will hug, and when they will just act like they've only been separated for a few minutes. A recent exchange of e-mail seems to constitute a virtual reunion that obviates any hand-shaking or hugging. 'You were right about the cheesy dialog,' is the first thing Avi says. 'You're spending too much time with Shaftoe, seeing things his way. This was not an attempt to send you a message, at least not in the way Shaftoe means.'

'What's your interpretation, then?'

'How would you go about establishing a new currency?' Avi asks.

Randy frequently overhears snatches of business-related conversation from people he passes in airports, and it's always about how did the big presentation go, or who's on the short list to replace the departing CFO, or something. He prides himself on what he believes to be the much higher plane, or at least the much more bizarre subject matter, of his interchanges with Avi. They are walking together around the slow arc of SFO's inner ring. A whiff of soy sauce and ginger drifts out of a restaurant and fogs Randy's mind, making him unsure, for a moment, which hemisphere he's in.

'Uh, it's not something I have given much thought to,' he says. 'Is that what we are about now? Are we going to establish a new currency?'

'Well obviously someoneneeds to establish one that doesn't suck,' Avi says.

'Is this some exercise in keeping a straight face?' Randy asks.

'Don't you ever read the newspapers?' Avi grabs Randy by the elbow and drags him over towards a newsstand. Several papers are running front-page stories about crashing Southeast Asian currencies, but this isn't all that new.

'I know currency fluctuations are important to Epiphyte,' Randy says. 'But my god, it's so tedious I just want to run away.

'Well, it's not tedious to her,'Avi says, yanking out three different newspapers that have all decided to run the same wire-service photograph: an adorable Thai moppet standing in a mile-long queue in front of a bank, holding up a single American dollar bill.

'I know it's a big deal for some of our customers,' Randy says, 'I just didn't really think of it as a business opportunity.'

'No, think about it,' Avi says. He counts out a few dollar bills of his own to pay for the newspapers, then swerves towards an exit. They enter a tunnel that leads to a parking garage. 'The sultan feels that-'

'You've been just sort of hanging out with the sultan?'

'Mostly with Pragasu. Will you let me finish? We decided to set up the Crypt, right?'

'Right.'

'What is the Crypt? Do you remember its original stated function?'

'Secure, anonymous, unregulated data storage. A data haven.'

'Yeah. A bit bucket. And we envisioned many applications for this.'

'Boy, did we ever,' Randy says, remembering many long nights around kitchen tables and hotel rooms, writing versions of the business plan that are now as ancient and as lost as the holographs of the Four Gospels.

'One of these was electronic banking. Heck, we even predicted it might be one of the major applications. But whenever a business plan first makes contact with the actual market-the real world-suddenly all kinds of stuff becomes clear. You may have envisioned half a dozen potential markets for your product, but as soon as you open your doors, one just explodes from the pack and becomes so instantly important that good business sense dictates that you abandon the others and concentrate all your efforts.'

'And that's what happened with the e-banking thing,' Randy says.

'Yes. During our meetings at the Sultan's Palace,' Avi says. 'Before those meetings, we envisioned-well you know what we envisioned. What actually happened was that the room was packed with these guys who were