Cryptonomicon

disconnected the keyboard and mouse because, without a monitor, only bad information could be fed into the system. Now it is just a faintly hissing off-white obelisk with no human interface other than a cyclopean green LED staring out over a dark landscape of empty pizza boxes.

But there is a thick coaxial cable connecting it to the Internet. Randy's computer talks to it for a few moments, negotiating the terms of a Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP connection, and then Randy's little laptop is part of the Internet, too; he can send data to Los Altos, and the lonely computer there, which is named Tombstone, will route it in the general direction of any of several tens of millions of other Internet machines.

Tombstone, or tombstone.epiphyte.com as it is known to the Internet, has an inglorious existence as a mail drop and a cache for files. It does nothing that a thousand online services couldn't do for them more easily and cheaply. But Avi, with his genius for imagining the most horrific conceivable worst-case scenarios, demanded that they have their own machine, and that Randy and the others go through its kernel code one line at a time to verify that there were no security holes. In every book store window in the Bay Area, piled in heaps, were thousands of copies of three different books about how a famous cracker had established total control over a couple of well- known online services. Consequently, Epiphyte Corp. could not possibly use such an online service for its secret files while with a straight face saying that it was exerting due diligence on its shareholders' behalf. Thus tombstone.epiphyte.com.

Randy logs on and checks his mail: forty-seven messages, including one that came two days ago from Avi ([email protected]) that is labeled:

epiphyteBizPlan.5.4.ordo. Epiphyte Business Plan, 5th edition, 4th draft, in a file format that can only be read by [Novus] Ordo [Seclorum], which is wholly owned by the company of the same name, but whose hard parts were written, as it happens, by John Cantrell.

He tells the computer to begin downloading that file-it's going to take a while. In the meantime, he scrolls through the list of other messages, checking the names of their senders, subject headings, and sizes, trying to figure out, first of all, how many of these can simply be thrown away unread.

Two messages jump out because they are from an address that ends with aol.com, the cyberspace neighborhood of parents and children but never of students, hackers, or people who actually work in high-tech. Both of these are from Randy's lawyer, who is trying to get Randy's financial affairs disentangled from Charlene's with as little rancor as possible. Randy feels his blood pressure spiking, millions of capillaries in the brain bulging ominously. But they are very short files, and the subject headings seem innocuous, so he calms down and decides not to worry about them now.

Five messages originate from computers with extremely familiar names-systems that are part of the campus computer network he used to run. The messages come from system administrators who took over the reins when Randy left, guys who long ago asked him all the easy questions, such as What's the best place to order pizza?and Where did you hide the staples?and have now gotten to the point of e-mailing him chunks of arcane code that he wrote years ago with questions like, Was this an error, or something incredibly clever I haven't figured out yet?Randy declines to answer those messages just now.

There are about a dozen messages from friends, some of them just passing along Net humor that he's already seen a hundred times. Another dozen from other members of Epiphyte Corp., mostly concerning the details of their itineraries as they all converge on Kinakuta for tomorrow's meeting.

That leaves a dozen or so other messages which belong in a special category that did not exist until a week ago, when a new issue of TURING Magazinecame out, containing an article about the Kinakuta data haven project, and a cover photo of Randy on a boat in the Philippines. Avi had gone to some lengths to plant this article so that he would have something to wave in the faces of the other participants in tomorrow's meeting. TURINGis such a visual magazine that it cannot be viewed without the protection of welding goggles, and so they insisted on a picture. A photographer was dispatched to the Crypt, which was found visually wanting. A tizzy ensued. The photographer was diverted to Manila Bay where he captured Randy standing on a boat deck next to a big reel of orange cable, a volcano rising from the smog in the back ground. The magazine won't even be on newsstands for another month, but the article is on the Web as of a week ago, where it instantly became a subject of discussion on the Secret Admirers mailing list, which is where all of the cool guys like John Cantrell hang out to discuss the very latest hashing algorithms and pseudo-random-number generators. Because Randy happened to be in the picture, they have mistakenly fastened upon him as being more of a prime mover than he really is. This has spawned a new category of messages in Randy's mailbox: unsolicited advice and criticism from crypto freaks worldwide. At the moment there are fourteen such messages in his in-box, eight of them from a person, or persons, identifying himself, or themselves, as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

It would be tempting to ignore these, but the problem is that a solid majority of people on the Secret Admirers mailing list are about ten times as smart as Randy. You can check the list anytime you want and find a mathematics professor in Russia slugging it out with another mathematics professor in India, kilobyte for kilobyte, over some stupefyingly arcane detail in prime number theory, while an eighteen-year-old, tube-fed math prodigy in Cambridge jumps in every few days with an even more stupefying explanation of why they are both wrong.

So when people like this send him mail, Randy tries to at least skim it. He is a little leery of the ones who identify themselves as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, or with the number 56 (which is a code meaning Yamamoto). But just because they are political-verging-on-flaky doesn't mean they don't know their math.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: data haven

Do you have public key somewhere posted? I would like to exchange mail with you but I don't want Paul Comstock to read it:) My public key if you care to respond is

—BEGIN ORDO PUBLIC KEY BLOCK— (lines and lines of gibberish)

—END ORDO PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-

Your concept of data haven is good but has important limits. What if Philippine government shuts down your cable? Or if the good Sultan changes his mind, decides to nationalize your computers, read all the disks? What is needed is not ONE data haven but a NETWORK of data havens-more robust, just like Internet is more robust than single machine.

Signed,

The Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto who signs his messages thus:

—BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK— (lines and lines of gibberish)

—END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK-

Randy closes that one without responding. Avi doesn't want them talking to Secret Admirers for fear that they will later be accused of stealing someone's ideas, so the reply to all of these e-mails is a form letter that Avi paid some intellectual property lawyer about ten thousand dollars to draft.

He reads another message simply because of the return address:

From: [email protected]

On a UNIX machine, 'root' is the name of the most godlike of all users, the one who can read, erase, or edit any file, who can run any program, who can sign up new users and terminate existing ones. So receiving a message from someone who has the account name 'root' is like getting a letter from someone who has the title 'President' or 'General' on his letterhead. Randy's been root on a few different systems, some of which were worth tens of millions of dollars, and professional courtesy demands he at least read this message.

I read about your project.

Why are you doing it?

followed by an Ordo signature block.

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. And yet the 'root' address either means that this person is in charge of a large computer installation, or (much more likely) has a Finux box on his desk at home. Even a home Finux user has got to be several cuts above your average Internet-surfing dilettante. Randy opens up a terminal window and types

whois eruditorum.org

and a second later gets back a block of text from the InterNIC: