Cryptonomicon

Chapter 76 PULSE

As Avi walks back through his house, he utters something biblical-sounding in Hebrew that causes his kids to burst into tears, and his nannies to rise from the kid-mat and begin shoving stuff into bags. Devorah emerges from a back room where she's been sleeping off some morning sickness. She and Avi embrace tenderly in the hallway and Randy begins to feel like a fleck of debris lodged in someone's eye. So he heads straight for an exit, goes out to his car and starts driving. He winds through the hills over the San Andreas Fault to Skyline and then heads south. Ten minutes later, Avi's car howls past him in the left lane, doing ninety or a hundred. Randy barely has time to read the bumper sticker: MEAN PEOPLE SUCK.

Randy's looking for a totally anonymous location where he can patch into the Internet. A hotel doesn't work because a hotel keeps good records of outgoing telephone calls. What he should really do is use this packet radio interface he has for his laptop, but even that requires a place to sit down and work undisturbed for a while. Which gets him thinking in terms of a fast food joint, not to be found in the mid-peninsular wasteland. By the time he has reached the northern skirts of the Valley-Menlo Park and Palo Alto-he has decided fuck it, he'll just go to the scene of the action. Maybe he could be of some use there. So he gets off at the El Monte exit and heads into the business district of Los Altos, a pretty typical mid-twentieth-century American downtown gradually being metabolized by franchises.

A major street intersects, at something other than a ninety-degree angle, a smaller commercial street, defining two (smaller) acute-angle lots and two (larger) obtuse-angle lots. On one side of the major street, the obtuse-angle lot is occupied by a two-storey office building, home of Ordo's offices and Tombstone. The acute-angle lot is occupied by the McDonald's. On the opposite side of the major street, the acute-angle lot is occupied by, weirdly enough, a 24 Jam, the only one Randy has ever seen in the Western Hemisphere. The obtuse-angle lot is occupied by a Park 'n' Lock, where you can park for the old-fashioned purpose of wandering around the business district from store to store.

The parking lot of the McDonald's is full, and so Randy pulls through its drive-through window, chooses n,where nis a random number between one and six, and asks for Value Meal nwith super-size fries. This having been secured, he guns the Acura directly across the big street into the Park 'n' Lock just in time to see its last available space being seized by a minivan bearing the logo of a San Jose television station. Randy is not planning to stray far from his car, so he just blocks in another car. But as he is setting the parking brake, he notices movement inside it, and with a bit of further attention realizes he is watching a man with long hair and a beard methodically ramming shells into a pump shotgun. The man catches sight of Randy in his rearview mirror and turns around with a scrupulously polite pardon-me-sir-but-you-seem-to-have-blocked-me-in look. Randy recognizes him as Mike or Mark, a graphics card hacker who farms ostriches in Gilroy (quirky hobbies being de rigueur in the high-tech world). He moves the Acura, blocking in what looks like an abandoned van from the Starsky and Hutchepoch.

Randy climbs up on the roof of his car with his laptop and his Value Meal n.Until recently he would never have sat on top of his Acura because his considerable mass would dimple the sheet metal. But after Amy rammed it with the truck, Randy became much less anal, and now sees it as a tool to be used until it is just a moraine of rusted shards. He happens to have a twelve-volt adapter for the laptop, so he runs that down into his cigarette lighter socket. Finally, he's settled, and gets a chance to take a good look around.

The parking lot of Novus Ordo Seclorum's office building is filled with cop cars, and BMWs and Mercedes Benzes that Randy assumes belong to lawyers. Avi's Range Rover is parked jauntily on top of some landscaping, and a few TV camera crews have set up, as well. In front of the building's main entrance a lot of people are jammed into the smallest possible space screaming at each other. They are surrounded by ring after concentric ring of cops, media, and law-firm minions-collectively, what Tolkien would call Men-and a few non— or post-human creatures imbued with peculiar physiognomies and vaguely magical powers: Dwarves (steady, productive, surly) and Elves (brilliant in a more ethereal way). Randy, a Dwarf, has begun to realize that his grandfather may have been an Elf. Avi is a Man with a strong Elvish glow about him. Somewhere in the center of this whole thing, presumably, is Gollum.

There is a little window on the screen of Randy's laptop showing a cheesy 1940s-newsreel-style animation of a radio tower, with zigzaggy conceptual radio waves radiating outwards from it over the whole earth, which is shown ludicrously not to scale in this rendering-the diameter of the earth is about equal to the height of the radio tower. That these Jovian info-bolts are visible and moving is a visual cue that his radio adapter has managed to patch itself into the packet radio network. Randy opens a terminal window and types

telnet laundry.org

and in a few seconds bang! he gets a login prompt. Randy now has another look at the animated window, and notes with approval that the info-bolts have been replaced with gouts of question marks. This means that his computer has recognized laundry.org as a S/WAN machine-running the Secure Wide Area Network protocol-which means that every packet going back and forth between Randy's laptop and laundry.org is encrypted. Definitely a good idea when you are about to do something illegal over the radio.

Mike or Mark gets out of his car, cutting a dramatic figure in a long black Western-style coat, a look rather spoiled by the t-shirt he's got on underneath it: black with a fat red question mark in the middle. He hitches the strap of his shotgun up onto his shoulder and leans into his back door to retrieve a large black cowboy hat, which he places on the roof of his car. He thrusts his elbows into the air and gathers his long hair back behind his ears, staring up at the sky, and then clamps the cowboy hat down on his head. Tied loosely around his neck is a black bandanna with a question-mark pattern, which he now pulls up over the bridge of his nose so that just an eye-slit shows between it and the cowboy hat. Randy would be really alarmed if it weren't for the fact that several of his friends, such as John Cantrell, often go around looking this way. Mike or Mark strides across the Park 'n' Lock, tracked carefully by a panning cameraman, and jogs across the street to the 24 Jam.

Randy logs onto laundry.org using ssh-'secure shell'-a way of further encrypting communications between two computers. Laundry.org is an anonymizing service; all packets routed through it to another computer are stripped of identifying information first, so that anyone down the line who intercepts one of those packets has no way of knowing where it originated. Once he's patched into the anonymizer, Randy types

telnet crypt.kk

and hits the return key and then actually, literally, prays. The Crypt is still going through its shakedown period (which, indeed, is the only reason that all of Tombstone's contents have not been moved onto it yet).

In the lot of the 24 Jam, Mike or Mark has joined three other elvishlooking sorts in black cowboy hats and bandannas, whom Randy can identify based on the length and color of their ponytails and beards. There's Stu, a Berkeley grad student who is somehow mixed up in Avi's HEAP project, and Phil, who invented a major programming language a couple of years ago and goes helicopter-skiing in his spare time, and Craig, who knows everything there is to know about encrypted credit-card transactions on the Net and is a devotee of traditional Nipponese archery. Some of these guys are wearing long coats and some aren't. There is a lot of Secret Admirers iconography: t-shirts bearing the number 56, which is a code for Yamamoto, or just pictures of Yamamoto himself, or big fat question marks. They are having an energetic and very happy conversation-though it looks a bit forced- because, to a man, they are carrying long weapons out in plain sight. One of them has a hunting rifle, and each of the others is slinging a rudimentary-looking gun with a banana clip sticking out of the side. Randy thinks, but is not sure, that these are HEAP guns.

This scene, not surprisingly, has caught the attention of the police, who have surrounded these four with squad cars, and who are standing at the ready with rifles and shotguns. It is an oddity of the law in many jurisdictions that, while carrying (say) a concealed one-shot .22 derringer requires a license, openly carrying (e.g.) a big game rifle is perfectly legal. Concealed weapons are outlawed or at least heavily regulated, and unconcealed ones are not. So a lot of Secret Admirers-who tend to be gun nuts-have taken to going around conspicuously armed as a way of pointing out the absurdity of those rules. Their point is this: who gives a shit about concealed weapons anyway, since they are only useful for defending oneself against assaults by petty criminals, which almost never happens? The real reason the Constitution provides for the right to bear arms is defending oneself against oppressive governments, and when it comes to that, your handgun is close to useless. So (according to these guys) if you are going to assert your right to keep and bear arms you should do it openly, by packing something really