bearing the logo of a major Nipponese consumer-electronics company. It is running a video in which a wacky cartoon professor and his adorable canine sidekick cheerfully tick off the three transmission routes of the AIDS virus.
'I have a fingerprint for you,' Randy says.
'Shoot.'
Randy stares at the palm of his hand, on which he has written a string of numbers and letters in ballpoint pen. 'AF 10 06 E9 99 BA 11 07 64 C1 89 E3 40 8C 72 55.'
'Got it,' Avi says. 'That's from Ordo, right?'
'Right. I e-mailed you the key from SFO.'
'The apartment situation is still resolving,' Avi says. 'So I just reserved you a suite at the Manila Hotel.'
'What do you mean, it's still resolving?'
'The Philippines is one of those post-Spanish countries with no clear boundaries between business and personal relationships,' Avi says. 'I don't think you can secure lodgings there without marrying into a family with a major street named after it.'
Randy takes a seat in the departure area. Perky gate attendants in jaunty, improbable hats zero in on Filipinos with too many carry-ons, and subject them to a public ritual of filling out little tags and surrendering their possessions. The Filipinos roll their eyes and stare longingly out the windows. But most of the waiting passengers are Nipponese-some businessmen, mostly vacationers. They are watching an educational video about how to get mugged in foreign countries.
'Huh,' Randy says, looking out the window, 'got another 747 down to Manila.'
'In Asia, no decent airline bothers to dick around anything smaller than a 747,' Avi snaps. 'If someone tries to pack you on board a 737 or god forbid an Airbus, run, don't walk, away from the boarding lounge, and call me on my Sky Pager and I'll send in a chopper to evacuate you.'
Randy laughs.
Avi continues. 'Now, listen. This hotel you're going to is very old, very grand, but it's in the middle of nowhere.'
'Why would they build a grand hotel in the middle of nowhere?'
'It used to be a happening place-it's on the waterfront, right on the edge of Intramuros.'
Randy's high-school Spanish is enough to translate that: Inside the Walls.
'But Intramuros was annihilated by the Nipponese in 1945,' Avi continues. 'Systematically. All of the business hotels and office buildings are in a new neighborhood called Makati, much closer to the airport.'
'So you want to put our office in Intramuros.'
'How'd you guess?' Avi says, sounding a little spooked. He prides himself on unpredictability.
'I'm not an intuitive guy generally,' Randy says, 'but I've been on a plane for thirteen hours and my brain has been turned inside out and hung up to dry.'
Avi rattles off canned justifications: office space is much cheaper in Intramuros. Government ministries are closer. Makati, the gleaming new business district, is too isolated from the real Philippines. Randy pays no attention to it.
'You want to work out of Intramuros because it was systematically annihilated, and because you're obsessed with the Holocaust,' Randy finally says, quietly and without rancor.
'Yeah. So?' Avi says.
Randy stares out the window of the Manila-bound 747, sipping on a fluorescent green Nipponese soft drink made from bee extracts (at least, it has pictures of bees on it) and munching on something that a flight attendant handed him called Japanese Snack. Sky and ocean are the same color, a shade of blue that makes his teeth freeze. The plane is so high that, whether he looks up or down, he sees foreshortened views of boiling cumulonimbus stacks. The clouds erupt from the hot Pacific as if immense warships were exploding all over the place. The speed and power of their growth is alarming, the forms they adopt as bizarre and varied as those of deep-sea organisms, and all of them, he supposes, are as dangerous to an airplane as punji stakes to a barefoot pedestrian. The red- orange meatball painted on the wingtip startles him when he notices it. He feels like he's been thrown into an old war film.
He turns on his laptop. Electronic mail from Avi, encrypted to a fare-thee-well, has been piling up in his in- box. It is a gradual accumulation of tiny files, thrown at him by Avi whenever a thought popped into his head over the last three days; it would be obvious, even if Randy didn't know it, that Avi owns a portable e-mail machine that talks to the Internet by radio. Randy fires up a piece of software that is technically called Novus Ordo Seclorum but that everyone calls Ordo for short. It is a fairly strained pun based on the fact that Ordo's job, as a piece of cryptographic software, is to put a message's bits in a New Order and that it will take Centuries for nosy governments to decrypt it. A scanned image of a Great Pyramid appears in the middle of his screen, and a single eye gradually materializes at its apex.
Ordo can handle this in one of two ways. The obvious way is to decrypt all of the messages and convert them into plaintext files on his hard disk, which he can then read any time he wants. The problem with this (if you are paranoid) is that anyone who gets his hands on Randy's hard disk can then read the files. For all he knows, the customs officials in Manila will decide to ransack his computer for child pornography. Or, fogged by jet lag, he'll leave his laptop in a taxi. So instead he puts Ordo into a streaming mode where it will decrypt the files just long enough for him to read them and then, when he closes the windows, expunge the plaintext from the computer's memory and from its hard drive.
The subject heading of Avi's first message is: 'Guideline 1.'
We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that pop. is about to explode—we can predict that just by looking at age histogram—and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck-you money before we turn forty.
This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for 'fuck-you money.' It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the current value of 'fuck-you money' at a glance.
The second message, sent a couple of hours later, is called 'Guideline 2.'
Two: pick a tech where no one can compete with us. Right now, that=networking. We're kicking the crap out of everyone else in the world when it comes to networking. It's not even funny.
The next day, Avi sent a message called, simply, 'More.' Perhaps he had lost track of the number of guidelines he'd issued so far.
Another principle: this time we retain control of the corporation. That means that we keep at least fifty percent of the shares—which means little to no outside investment until we've built up some value.
'You don't have to convince me,' Randy mumbles to himself as he reads this.
This shapes the kinds of businesses we can get into. Forget anything that requires a big initial investment.
Luzon is green-black jungle mountains gouged with rivers that would appear to be avalanches of silt. As the navy-blue ocean verges on its khaki beaches, the water takes on the shocking iridescent hue of a suburban swimming pool. Farther south, the mountains are swidden-scarred-the soil beneath is bright red and so these parts look like fresh lacerations. But most is covered with foliage that looks like the nubby green stuff that model railroaders put over their papier-mache hills, and in vast stretches of the mountains there are no signs whatsoever that human beings have ever existed. Closer to Manila, some of the slopes are deforested, sprinkled with structures, ribboned with power-line cuts. Rice paddies line the basins. The towns are accretions of shanties, nucleated around large cross-shaped churches with good roofs.
The view gets blurry as they belly down into the pall of sweaty smog above the city. The plane begins to sweat like a giant glass of iced tea. The water streams off in sheets, collects in crevices, whips off the flaps' trailing
