Cryptonomicon (115 page)

“Tell me.”

“Invented the chariot—
and introduced the use of silver as a currency
.”

“Oh, Jesus!” Randy clamps his head between his hands and makes moaning noises, only for a little while.

“Now in many other mythologies you can find gods that have parallels with Athena. The Sumerians had Enki, the Norse had Loki. Loki was an inventor-god, but psychologically he had more in common with Ares; he was not only the god of technology but the god of evil too, the closest thing they had to the Devil. Native Americans had tricksters—creatures full of cunning—like Coyote and Raven in their mythologies, but they didn’t have technology yet, and so they hadn’t coupled the Trickster with Crafts to generate this hybrid Technologist-god.”

“Okay,” Randy says, “so obviously where you’re going with this is that there must be some universal pattern of
events that when filtered through the sensory apparatus and the neural rigs of primitive, superstitious people always gives rise to internal mental representations that they identify as gods, heroes, etc.”

“Yes. And these can be recognized across cultures, in the same way that two persons with Root Reps in their mind might ‘recognize’ me by comparing notes.”

“So, Enoch, you want me to believe that these gods—which aren’t really gods, but it’s a nice concise word—all share certain things in common precisely because the external reality that generated them is consistent and universal across cultures.”

“That is right. And in the case of Trickster gods the pattern is that cunning people tend to attain power that uncunning people don’t. And all cultures are fascinated by this. Some of them, like many Native Americans, basically admire it, but never couple it with technological development. Others, like the Norse, hate it and identify it with the Devil.”

“Hence the strange love-hate relationship that Americans have with hackers.”

“That’s right.”

“Hackers are always complaining that journalists cast them as bad guys. But you think that this ambivalence is deeper-seated.”

“In
some
cultures. The Vikings—to judge from their mythology—would instinctively hate hackers. But something different happened with the Greeks. The Greeks liked their geeks. That’s how we get Athena.”

“I’ll buy that—but where does the war-goddess thing come in?”

“Let’s face it, Randy, we’ve all known guys like Ares. The pattern of human behavior that caused the internal mental representation known as Ares to appear in the minds of the ancient Greeks is very much with us today, in the form of terrorists, serial killers, riots, pogroms, and aggressive tinhorn dictators who turn out to be military incompetents. And yet for all their stupidity and incompetence, people like that can conquer and control large chunks of the world if they are not resisted.”

“You must meet my friend Avi.”

“Who is going to fight them off, Randy?”

“I’m afraid you’re going to say
we
are.”

“Sometimes it might be other Ares-worshippers, as when Iran and Iraq went to war and no one cared who won. But if Ares-worshippers aren’t going to end up running the whole world, someone needs to do violence to them. This isn’t very nice, but it’s a fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence. Cunning.
Metis
.”

“Tactical cunning, like Odysseus and the Trojan Horse, or—”

“Both that, and technological cunning. From time to time there is a battle that is out-and-out won by a new technology—like longbows at Crecy. For most of history those battles happen only every few centuries—you have the chariot, the compound bow, gunpowder, ironclad ships, and so on. But something happens around, say, the time that the
Monitor,
which the Northerners believe to be the only ironclad warship on earth, just happens to run into the
Merrimack,
of which the Southerners believe exactly the same thing, and they pound the hell out of each other for hours and hours. That’s as good a point as any to identify as the moment when a spectacular rise in military technology takes off—it’s the elbow in the exponential curve. Now it takes the world’s essentially conservative military establishments a few decades to really comprehend what has happened, but by the time we’re in the thick of the Second World War, it’s accepted by everyone who doesn’t have his head completely up his ass that the war’s going to be won by whichever side has the best technology. So on the German side alone we’ve got rockets, jet aircraft, nerve gas, wire-guided missiles. And on the Allied side we’ve got three vast efforts that put basically every top-level hacker, nerd, and geek to work: the codebreaking thing, which as you know gave rise to the digital computer; the Manhattan Project, which gave us nuclear weapons; and the Radiation Lab, which gave us the modern electronics industry. Do you know why we won the Second World War, Randy?”

“I think you just told me.”

“Because we built better stuff than the Germans?”

“Isn’t that what you said?”

“But why did we build better stuff, Randy?”

“I guess I’m not competent to answer, Enoch, I haven’t studied that period well enough.”

“Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena.”

“And am I supposed to gather that you, or your organization, had something to do with all that?”

“Oh, come now, Randy! Let’s not allow this to degenerate into conspiracy theories.”

“Sorry. I’m tired.”

“So am I. Goodnight.”

And then Enoch goes to sleep. Just like that.

Randy doesn’t.

To the
Cryptonomicon!

Randy is mounting a known-ciphertext attack: the hardest kind. He has the ciphertext (the Arethusa intercepts) and nothing else. He doesn’t even know the algorithm that was used to encrypt them. In modern cryptanalysis, this is unusual; normally the algorithms are public knowledge. That is because algorithms that have been openly discussed and attacked within the academic community tend to be much stronger than ones that have been kept secret. People who rely on keeping their algorithms secret are ruined as soon as that secret gets out. But Arethusa dates from World War II, when people were much less canny about such things.

This would be a hell of a lot easier if Randy knew some of the plaintext that is encrypted within these messages. Of course, if he knew all of the plaintext, he wouldn’t even need to decrypt them; breaking Arethusa in that case would be an academic exercise.

There is a compromise between the two extremes of, on the one hand, not knowing any of the plaintext at all, and, on the other, knowing all of it. In the
Cryptonomicon
that falls under the heading of
cribs
. A crib is an educated guess as to what words or phrases might be present in the message. For example if you were decrypting German messages from World War II, you might guess that the plaintext included
the phrase “
HEIL HITLER
” or “
SIEG HEIL
.” You might pick out a sequence of ten characters at random and say, “Let’s assume that this represented
HEIL HITLER
. If that is the case, then what would it imply about the remainder of the message?”

Randy’s not expecting to find any
HEIL HITLER
s in the Arethusa messages, but there might be other predictable words. He’s been making a list of cribs in his head:
MANILA
, certainly.
WATERHOUSE
, perhaps. And now he’s thinking
GOLD
and
BULLION
. So, in the case of
MANILA
he could pick out any six-character string from the intercepts and say, “What if these characters are the encrypted form of
MANILA
?” and then work from there. If he were working with an intercept only six characters long, then there would be only one such six-character segment to choose from. A seven-character-long message would give him two possibilities: it could be the first six or the last six characters. The upshot is that for a message intercept that is
n
characters long, the number of six-character-long segments is equal to (
n
- 5). In the case of a 105-character-long intercept, he will have 100 different possible locations for the word
MANILA
. Actually, a hundred and one: because it’s of course possible—even likely—that
MANILA
is not in there at all. But each of these 100 guesses has its own set of ramifications vis-à-vis all of the other characters in the message. What those ramifications are, exactly, depends on what assumptions Randy is making about the underlying algorithm.

As far as that goes: the more he thinks about it, the more he believes he has some good stuff to go on—thanks to Enoch, who (in retrospect) has been feeding him some useful clues when not spamming him through the bars with theogonical analysis. Enoch mentioned that when the NSA started attacking what later turned out to be the fake Arethusa intercepts, they were going on the assumption that they were somehow related to another cryptosystem dubbed Azure. And sure enough, Randy learns from the
Cryptonomicon
that Azure was an oddball system used by both the Nipponese and the Germans that employed a mathematical algorithm to generate a different one-time pad every day. This is awfully vague, but it helps Randy rule out a lot. He knows for example that Arethusa isn’t a rotor
system like Enigma. And he knows that if he can find two messages that were sent on the same day, they will probably use the same one-time pad.

What kind of mathematical algorithm was used? The contents of Grandpa’s trunk provide clues. He remembers the photograph of Grandpa with Turing and von Hacklheber at Princeton, where all three of them were evidently fooling around with zeta functions. And in the trunk were several monographs on the same subject. And the
Cryptonomicon
states that zeta functions are even today being used in cryptography, as sequence generators—which is to say, machines for spitting out series of pseudo-random numbers, which is exactly what a one-time pad is. Everything points to that Azure and Arethusa are siblings and that both are just implementations of zeta functions.

The big thing standing in his way right now is that he doesn’t have any textbooks on zeta functions sitting around his jail cell. The contents of Grandpa’s trunk would be an excellent resource—but they are currently stored in a room in Chester’s house. But on the other hand, Chester’s rich, and he wants to help.

Randy calls for a guard and demands to see Attorney Alejandro. Enoch Root goes very still for a few moments, and then shunts directly back into the loping, untroubled sleep of a man who is exactly where he wants to be.

P
EOPLE SMELL ALL KINDS OF WAYS BEFORE THEY HAVE
burned, but only one way afterwards. As the Army boys lead Waterhouse down into the darkness, he sniffs cautiously, hoping he won’t smell that smell.

Mostly it smells like oil, diesel, hot steel, the brimstony tang of burnt rubber and exploded munitions. These smells are overpoweringly strong. He draws in a lungful of reek, blows it out. And that, of course, is when he catches a whiff of barbecue and knows that this concrete-coated island is, among other things, a crematorium.

He is following the Army boys down black-smudged tunnels bored through a variegated matrix of concrete, masonry, and solid rock. The caves were there first, eaten into the stone by rain and waves, then enlarged and rationalized by Spaniards with chisels, jackhammers, blasting powder. Then along came the Americans with bricks, and finally the Nipponese with reinforced concrete.

As they work their way into the maze, they pass down some tunnels that apparently acted like blowtorches: the walls have been scoured clean as if a torrent had been running through it for a million years, silver pools lie on the floor where guns or filing cabinets melted into puddles. Stored heat still radiates from the walls, adding to the heat of the Philippine climate, making all of them sweat even more, if that is possible.

Other corridors, other rooms were nothing more than backwaters in the river of fire. Looking into doorways, Waterhouse can see books that were charred but not consumed, blackened papers spilling from burst cabinets—

“One moment,” he says. His escort spins around just in time to see Waterhouse ducking through a low door into a tiny room, where something has caught his eye.

It’s a heavy wooden cabinet, mostly transmuted into charcoal now, so it looks like the cabinet’s gone but its shadow persists. Someone has already pulled one of its doors off its hinges, allowing black confetti to flood into the room. The cabinet was filled with slips of paper, mostly burned now, but thrusting his hand into the ash-heap (slowly! Most of this place is still hot) Waterhouse pulls out a bundle, nearly intact.

“What kind of money is that?” the Army guy asks.

Waterhouse pulls a bill from the top of the bundle. The top is printed in Japanese characters and bears an engraved picture of Tojo. He flips it over. The back is printed in English: TEN POUNDS.

“Australian currency,” Waterhouse says.

“Don’t look Australian to me,” the Army guy says, glowering at Tojo.

“If the Nips had won…” Waterhouse says, and shrugs. He throws the stack of ten-pound notes onto the ash-heap
of history and carries his single copy out into the corridor. A necklace of lightbulbs has been strung along the ceiling. The light glances off what looks like pools of quicksilver on the floor: the remains of guns, belt buckles, steel cabinets, and doorknobs, melted down into puddles in the holocaust, now congealed.

The fine print on the bill says,
IMPERIAL RESERVE BANK, MANILA
.

“Sir! You okay?” the Army guy says. Waterhouse realizes he’s been thinking for a while.

“Carry on,” he says, and stuffs the bill in his pocket.

He was thinking about whether it was okay to take some of this money with him. It’s okay to take souvenirs, but not to loot. So he can take the money if it’s worthless, but not if it is real money.

Now, someone who was not so inclined to think and ponder everything to the nth degree would immediately see that the money was worthless, because, after all, the Japanese did not take Australia and never will. So that money’s just a souvenir, right?

Probably right. The money is effectively worthless. But if Waterhouse were to find a real Australian ten-pound note and read the fine print, it would also probably bear the imprimatur of a reserve bank somewhere.

Two pieces of paper, each claiming to be worth ten pounds, each very official-looking, each bearing the name of a bank. One of them a worthless souvenir and one legal tender for all debts public and private. What gives?

What it comes down to is that people trust the claims printed on one of those pieces of paper but don’t trust the other. They believe that you could take the real Australian note to a bank in Melbourne, slide it over the counter, and get silver or gold—or
something
at least—in exchange for it.

Trust goes a long way, but at some point, if you’re going to sponsor a stable currency, you must put up or shut up. Somewhere, you have to actually have a shitload of gold in the basement. Around the time of the evacuation from Dunkirk, when the Brits were looking at an imminent invasion of their islands by the Germans, they took all of their gold reserves, loaded them on board some battleships and
passenger liners, and squirted them across the Atlantic to banks in Toronto and Montreal. This would have enabled them to keep their currency afloat even if the Germans had overrun London.

But the Japanese have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Oh, sure, you can get a kind of submission from a conquered people by scaring the shit out of them, but it doesn’t work very well to hold a knife to someone’s throat and say, “I want you to believe that this piece of paper is worth ten pounds sterling.” They might say that they believe it, but they won’t really believe it. They won’t
act
as if they believe it. And if they don’t
act
that way, then there is no currency, workers don’t get paid (you can enslave them, but you still have to pay the slavedrivers), the economy doesn’t work, you can’t extract the natural resources that prompted you to conquer the country in the first place. Basically, if you’re going to run an economy you have to have a currency. When someone walks into a bank with one of your notes you have to be able to give them gold in exchange for it.

The Nipponese are maniacs for planning things out. Waterhouse knows this; he has been reading their decrypted messages twelve, eighteen hours a day for a couple of years now, he knows their minds. He knows, as surely as he knows how to play a D major scale, that the Nipponese must have given thought to this problem of backing their imperial currency—not just for Australia but New Zealand, New Guinea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, Indochina, Korea, Manchuria…

How much gold and silver would you need in order to convince that many human beings that your paper currency was actually worth something? Where would you put it?

The escort takes him down a couple of levels and finally to a surprisingly large room, deep down. If they are in the bowels of the island, then this must be the vermiform appendix or something. It is glob-shaped, walls smooth and ripply in most places, chisel-gnawed where men have seen fit to enlarge it. The walls are still cool and so is the air.

There are long tables in this room, and at least three dozen empty chairs—so Waterhouse nips in tiny whiffs of
air at first, terrified that he will smell dead people. But he doesn’t.

It figures. They’re in the center of the rock. There’s only one way into the room. No way to get a good draft through this place—no blowtorch effect—no burning at all, apparently. This room was bypassed. The air is as thick as cold gravy.

“Found forty dead in this room,” the escort says.

“Dead of what?”

“Asphyxiation.”

“Officers?”

“One Japanese captain. The rest were slaves.”

Before the war started, the term “slave” was, to Lawrence Waterhouse, as obsolete as “cooper” or “chandler.” Now that the Nazis and the Nipponese have revived the practice, he hears it all the time. War’s weird.

His eyes have been adjusting to the dim light ever since they stepped into the chamber. There’s a single 25-watt bulb for the whole cavern and the walls absorb nearly all of the light.

He can see squarish things on the tables, one in front of each chair. When he first came in he assumed that these were sheets of paper—indeed, some of them are. But as his vision gets better he can see that most of them are hollow frames, sprinkled with abstract patterns of round dots.

He fumbles for his flashlight and nails the switch. Mostly all it does is create a fuzzy yellow cone of oily smoke, swirling fatly and lazily in front of him. He steps forward shooing the smoke out of his way, and bends over the table.

It’s an abacus, its beads still frozen in the middle of some calculation. Two feet down the table is another. Then another.

He turns to face the Army guy. “What’s the plural of abacus?”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“Shall we say abaci?”

“Whatever you say, sir.”

“Were any of these abaci touched by any of your men?”

There is a flurry of discussion. The Army guy has to confer with several enlisted men, dispatch gofers to interview people, and make a couple of phone calls. This is a good
sign; there are a lot of men who would just say “no, sir,” or whatever they thought Waterhouse wanted to hear, and then he would never know whether they were telling the truth. This guy seems to understand that it’s important for Waterhouse to get an honest answer.

Waterhouse walks up and down the rows of tables with his hands clasped carefully behind his back, looking at the abaci. Next to most of them is a sheet of paper, or a whole notebook, with a pencil handy. These are all covered with numbers. From place to place, he sees a Chinese character.

“Did any of you see the bodies of these slaves?” he says to an enlisted man.

“Yes, sir. I helped carry ’em out.”

“Did they look like Filipinos?”

“No, sir. They looked like regular Asiatics.”

“Chinese, Korean, something like that?”

“Yes, sir.”

After a few minutes, the answer comes back: no one will admit to having touched an abacus. This chamber was the last part of the fortress to be reached by Americans. The bodies of the slaves were mostly found piled up near the door. The body of the Nipponese officer was on the bottom of the pile. The door had been locked from the inside. It is a metal door, and has a slight outward bulge, as the fire upstairs apparently sucked all the air out of the room in a big hurry.

“Okay,” Waterhouse says, “I am going to go upstairs and report back to Brisbane. I am personally going to take this room apart like an archaeologist. Make sure that nothing is touched. Especially the abaci.”