Cryptonomicon (112 page)

T
HE APPEARANCE OF ROOT
@
ERUDITORUM.ORG IN
the cell right next to Randy’s is like the crowning plot twist in this Punch-and-Judy show that has been performed for his benefit ever since his plane landed at NAIA. As with any puppet show, he knows that there must be a lot of people hidden just outside the range of his senses, in furious motion, trying to make it all happen. For all he knows, some significant fraction of the Philippine gross national product is being devoted to keeping up these pretenses for his benefit.

There is a meal waiting on the floor of Randy’s cell, and a rat on top of the meal. Randy usually reacts pretty badly
to the sight of rats; they rupture the containment system that his upbringing and his education built around the part of his mind where the collective-unconscious stuff dwells, and send him straight into Hieronymus Bosch territory. But in these circumstances it doesn’t bother him any more than seeing one at the zoo would. The rat has a surprisingly attractive buckskin-colored pelt and a tail about as thick as a pencil that has evidently run afoul of a farmer’s wife with a carving knife, and woggles stiffly in the air like the blunt antenna of a cellphone. Randy is hungry, but he doesn’t want to eat anything that a rat has left footprints on, so he just watches it.

His body feels like it slept for a long time. He turns on his computer and types in a command called “date.” The nails of his left hand look funny, as if they all got bruised. Focusing on them he sees a club drawn in blue ballpoint pen ink on the nail of the index finger, a diamond on the forefinger, a heart on the ring finger, a spade on the pinky. Enoch Root told him that in Pontifex, as in bridge, each card in the deck has a numerical value: clubs 1-13, diamonds 14-26, hearts 27-39, spades 40-52. Randy drew the symbols on his nails so he wouldn’t forget.

Anyway, “date” tells him that he apparently slept all of yesterday afternoon and evening, all night, and about half of today. So this rat is actually eating his lunch.

Randy’s computer runs Finux, so when it boots up it gives him a black screen with big fat white letters scrolling up it one line at a time, a real circa-1975 type of user interface. Also presumably the easiest possible thing to read through Van Eck phreaking. Randy types in “startx” and the screen goes black for a moment and then turns a particular shade of indigo that Randy happens to like, and beige windows appear on it with much smaller and crisper black letters. So now he is running the X Windows System, or X as people like Randy call it, which provides all of the graphical junk that people expect in a user interface: menus, buttons, scroll bars, and so on. As with anything else under UNIX (of which Finux is a variant), there are a million options that only young, lonely, or obsessed people have the time and patience to explore. Randy has been all three at
various times of his life and knows a lot about these options. For example, the background of his screen happens to be a uniform indigo at the moment, but it could be an image. Theoretically you could use a movie, so that all of your windows and menus and so on would float around on top of, say,
Citizen Kane
running in an endless loop. You can, in fact, take any piece of software and make it into your screen background, and it will purr along happily, doing whatever it does, and not even know that it’s being used as window-dressing. This has given Randy some ideas on how to approach the Van Eck thing.

In its current state, this computer is just as vulnerable to Van Eck phreaking as it was before Randy started up X. Before it was white letters on a black background. Now it’s black on beige. The letters are a little smaller and they live in windows, but it makes no difference: the electronics inside his computer still have to make these transitions between zero and one, i.e. between high intensity (white or beige) and minimal (black) as they trace out these patterns of dots on the screen.

Randy fundamentally does not know what the fuck is going on in his life right now, and probably hasn’t for a long time, even back in the days when he thought that he
did
know. But his working hypothesis is that the people who set this whole situation up (prime candidates: the Dentist and his cohorts in the Bolobolo syndicate) know that he has some cool information on his hard drive. How should they know this? Well, Pontifex—the Wizard—Enoch Root—whatever the fuck he’s called—when he phoned Randy on the plane, knew that Randy had Arethusa, so God knows who else might know. Someone set up the fake drug bust at NAIA so that they could nab his laptop and yank the hard drive and make a copy of its contents. Then they found out that it was all doubly encrypted. That is, the Arethusa intercepts are encrypted to begin with in a pretty good World War II cryptosystem, which anyone should be able to break nowadays, but on top of that they are furthermore encrypted in a state-of-the-art modern system that no one can break. If they know what’s good for them, they won’t even try to break it. The only way for them to get the
information is to get Randy to decrypt it for them, which he can do by biometrically identifying himself to his laptop (by talking to it) or by typing in a pass-phrase that only he knows. They are hoping that Randy will decrypt the Arethusa intercept files and, like a moron, display their contents on the screen. The moment that stuff appears on the screen, the game is over. The Dentist’s (or whoever’s) surveillance guys can feed the intercepts to some kind of a cryptanalytic supercomputer that will break them open in no time.

That doesn’t mean that Randy dare not open those files—just that he daren’t display them on the screen. This distinction is crucial. Ordo can read the encrypted files from the hard drive. It can write them into the computer’s memory. It can decrypt them, and write the results into another region of the computer’s memory, and leave that data there indefinitely, and the Van Eck phreakers will never be the wiser. But as soon as Randy tells the computer to show him that information in a window on the screen, the Arethusa intercepts will belong to the Van Eck phreakers; and whoever they are, they can probably break them faster than Randy can.

The fun and interesting thing is that Randy doesn’t have to actually see those intercepts in order to work on them. As long as they are sitting in the computer’s memory, he can subject them to every cryptanalystic technique in the whole
Cryptonomicon
.

He starts tapping out some lines in a language called Perl. Perl’s a scripting language; useful for controlling your computer’s functions and automating repetitive tasks. A UNIX machine like this one is rooted in a filesystem that contains tens of thousands of different files, mostly in straight ASCII text format. There are many different programs for opening these files, displaying them on the screen, and editing them. Randy intends to write a Perl script that will roam through the filesystem choosing files at random, opening each file in a randomly sized and located window, paging through it for a while, and then closing it again. If you run the script fast enough, the windows will pop open all over the place in a kind of rectangularized fireworks-burst that will go on
forever. If this script is used as the screen background, in place of solid indigo, then this will go on underneath the one window on the screen where Randy’s actually working. The people monitoring his work will go crazy trying to track all of this. Especially if Randy writes a script that will cause the real window to change its shape and location at random every few seconds.

It would be really stupid to open the Arethusa intercepts in a window—he’s not going to do that. But he can use this technique to conceal whatever else he’s doing in the way of decryption work. It occurs to him, however, when he gets a few lines into writing this Perl script, that if he pulls a stunt like that so early in his incarceration, the people surveilling him will know right away that he is on to them. And maybe it’s better if he lets them believe, for a while, that he suspects nothing. So he saves his Perl script and stops working on it for now. If he writes it in short bursts, opening it once or twice a day to type in a few lines and then closing it, it’s unlikely that the surveillors will be able to follow what he is up to, even if they happen to be hackers. Just to be an asshole, he modifies his X Windows options in such a way that none of the windows on the screen will have a title bar at the top. That way the surveillance people won’t be able to tell what file he is working on at any given moment, which will make it a lot harder for them to string a long series of observations together into a coherent picture of what’s in his Perl script.

Too, he opens up the old message from [email protected] giving the Pontifex Transform, expressed as a few lines of Perl code. The steps that looked so unwieldy when carried out by a computer seem straightforward—easy, even—now that he construes them as manipulations of a deck of cards.

“Randy.”

“Hmmm?” Randy looks up from the screen and is startled to find that he is in a jail in the Philippines.

“Dinner is served.”

It is Enoch Root, looking at him through the bars. He points at the floor of Randy’s cell where a new tray of food has just been slid in. “Actually, it was served an hour ago—you might want to have at it before the rats come.”

“Thank you,” Randy says. Making sure all the windows on his screen have been closed, he goes over and lifts his dinner up from the spatter of old rat-turds on the floor. It is rice and lechon, a simple and traditional pork dish. Enoch Root finished eating a long time ago—he sits on his bed, next to Randy, and plays an unusual game of solitaire, pausing occasionally to mark down a letter. Randy watches the manipulation of the deck carefully, growingly certain that it is the same set of operations he was just reading about in the old e-mail message.

“So what are you in for?” Randy asks.

Enoch Root finishes counting through the deck, glances at a seven of spades, closes his eyes for a few moments, and marks down a W on his napkin. Then he says, “Disorderly conduct. Trespassing. Incitement to riot. I’m probably guilty of the first two.”

“Tell me about it.”

“First tell me what you’re in for.”

“Heroin was found in my bag at the airport. I stand accused of being the world’s stupidest drug smuggler.”

“Is someone angry at you?”

“That would make for a much longer story,” Randy says, “but I think you have the drift.”

“Well, in my case, it’s like this. I have been working at a mission hospital up in the mountain.”

“You’re a priest?”

“Not anymore. I’m a lay worker.”

“Where’s your hospital?”

“South of here. Out in the boondocks,” Enoch Root says. “The people there cultivate pineapple, coffee, coconut, bananas, and a few other cash crops. But their land is being torn apart by treasure hunters.”

Funny
that Enoch Root should suddenly be on the subject of buried treasure. And yet he has been so tight-lipped. Randy guesses he’s intended to play stupid. He takes a stab at it: “Is there supposed to be some treasure down there?”

“The old-timers say that many Nipponese trucks went down a particular road during the last few weeks before MacArthur’s return. Past a certain point it was not possible
to know where they went, because the road was blocked, and minefields set up to discourage the curious.”

“Or kill them,” Randy says.

Enoch Root takes this in stride. “That road gives way to a rather vast area in which gold might hypothetically have been hidden. Hundreds of square miles. Much of it is jungle. Much has difficult topography. Lots of volcanoes, some extinct, some vomiting up mudflows from time to time. But some is flat enough to grow tropical crops, and in those places, people have settled during the decades since the war, and put together the rudiments of an economy.”

“Who owns the land?”

“You’ve gotten to know the Philippines well,” Enoch Root says. “You go immediately to the central question.”

“Around here, asking who owns the land is like complaining about the weather in the Midwest,” Randy muses.

Enoch Root nods. “I could spend a long time answering your question. The answer is that patterns of ownership changed just after the war, and then changed again under Marcos, and yet again in the last few years. So we have several epochs, if you will. First epoch: before the war. Land owned by certain families.”

“Of course.”

“Of course. Second epoch: the war. A vast area sealed off by the Nipponese. Some of the families who owned the land prospered under the occupation. Others went bankrupt. Third epoch: postwar. The bankrupt families went away. The prosperous ones expanded their holdings. As did the church and the government.”

“Why?”

“The government made part of the land—the jungle—into a national park. And after the eruptions, the church established the mission where I work.”

“Eruptions?”

“In the early 1950s, just to make things interesting—you know, things are never interesting enough in the Philippines—the volcanoes acted up. A few lahars came through the area, wiped out some villages, redirected some rivers, displaced many people. The church set up the hospital to help those people.”

“A hospital doesn’t take up very much land,” Randy observes.

“We also have farms. We are trying to help the locals become more self-reliant.” Enoch Root acts like he basically does not want to talk about this. “At any rate, things then settled down into a pattern that more or less endured until the Marcos era, when various people were forced to sell some of their holdings to Ferdinand and Imelda and various of their cousins, nephews, cronies, and bootlicks.”