Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

“That's where τ eand τ $enter into it,” Uncle Red says soothingly.

“All of our choices will be mathematically scaled so that they add up to the same total values on both the emotional and financial scales. So if someone clumped everything together in the extreme corner, then, after scaling, it'd be as if they never expressed any preferences at all.”

Randy nears the steamed-up Impala. One of the doors makes a crackling noise as superannuated weatherstripping peels away from steel. Robin Shaftoe emerges, breathes into his cupped hands, and takes a parade-rest position, signifying that he is available to discharge any responsibilities out here on the Cartesian coordinate plane. Randy looks up over the Impala and the retaining wall and the ice-clogged xeriscape above that and into the lobby of Waterhouse House, where Amy Shaftoe has her feet up on a coffee table and is looking through some of the extremely sad Cayuse-related literature that Randy bought for Avi. She looks down and smiles at him and just barely, he thinks, restrains the impulse to reach up and twirl one finger around her ear.

“That's good, Randy!” shouts Uncle Red from the Origin, “now we need to give it some x!” Meaning that the console is not devoid of economic value either. Randy does a right-face and begins to walk into the (+x, +y) quadrant, counting the yellow lines. “Give it about four parking spaces! That's good!” Randy plonks the console down, then pulls a pad of graph paper out of his coat, whips back the first sheet, which contains the (x,y) scatterplot of Uncle Geoff and Auntie Anne, and notes down the coordinates of the console. Sound carries in the Palouse, and from the Origin he can hear Aunt Nina saying to Uncle Red, “How much of our τ ehave we just spent on that console?”

“If we leave everything else down here at y equals zero, a hundred percent after scaling,” Uncle Red says. “Otherwise it depends on how we distribute these things in the y dimension.” Which is of course the correct answer, albeit totally useless.

If these days in Whitman don't make Amy flee from Randy in terror, nothing will, and so he's glad in a sick way that she is seeing this. The subject of his family has not really come up until now. Randy is not given to talking about his family because he feels there is nothing to report: small town, good education, shame and self-esteem doled out in roughly equal quantities and usually where warranted. Nothing spectacular along the lines of grotesque psychopathologies, sexual abuse, massive, shocking trauma, or Satanic rallies in the backyard. So normally when people are talking about their families, Randy just shuts up and listens, feeling that he has nothing to say. His familial anecdotes are so tame, so pedestrian, that it would be presumptuous even to relate them, especially after someone else has just divulged something really shocking or horrific.

But standing there and looking at these vortices he starts to wonder. Some people's insistence that “Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop” seems kind of overly deterministic to Randy; it seems to reflect a kind of lazy or half-witted surrender to bald teleology. Basically, if everyone has a vested interest in believing that they understand everything, or even that people are capable in principle of understanding it (either because believing this dampens their insecurities about the unpredictable world, or makes them feel more intelligent than others, or both) then you have an environment in which dopey, reductionist, simple-minded, pat, glib thinking can circulate, like wheelbarrows filled with inflated currency in the marketplaces of Jakarta.

But things like the ability of some student's dead car to spawn repeating patterns of thimble-sized vortices a hundred yards downwind would seem to argue in favor of a more cautious view of the world, an openness to the full and true weirdness of the Universe, an admission of our limited human faculties. And if you've gotten to this point, then you can argue that growing up in a family devoid of gigantic and obvious primal psychological forces, and living a life touched by many subtle and even forgotten influences rather than one or two biggies (e.g., active participation in the Church of Satan) can lead, far downwind, to consequences that are not entirely devoid of interest. Randy hopes, but very much doubts, that America Shaftoe, sitting up there in the algae-colored light reading about the inadvertent extermination of the Cayuse, sees it this way.

Randy rejoins his aunt at the Origin. Uncle Red has been explaining to her, somewhat condescendingly, that they must pay careful attention to the distribution of items on the economic scale, and for his troubles he has been sent on a long, lonely walk down the +x axis carrying the complete silver tea service. “Why couldn't we just have stayed inside and worked this all out on paper?” Aunt Nina asks.

“It was felt that there was value in physically moving this stuff around, giving people a direct physical analog of the value-assertions that they were making,” Randy says. “Also that it would be useful to appraise this stuff literally in the cold light of day.” As opposed to ten or twelve emotionally fraught people clambering around a packed-to-the-ceiling U-Stor-It locker with flashlights, sniping at each other from behind the armoires.

“Once we've all made our choices, then what? You sit down and figure it out on a spreadsheet, or something?”

“It is much too computationally intensive to be solved that way. Probably a genetic algorithm is called for—certainly there won't be a mathematically exact solution. My father knows a researcher in Geneva who has done work on problems isomorphic to this one, and sent him e-mail last night. With any luck we will be able to ftp some suitable software and get it running on the Tera.”

“The Terror?”

“Tera. As in Teraflops.”

“That does me no good at all. When you say 'as in' you are supposed to give me something more familiar to relate it to.”

“It is one of the ten fastest computers on the planet. Do you see that red brick building just to the right of the end of the -y axis,” Randy says, pointing down the hill, “Just behind the new gym?”

“The one with all the antennas?”

“Yes. The Tera machine is in there. It was made by a company in Seattle.”

“It must have been very expensive.”

“My dad talked them out of it.”

“Yes!” says Uncle Red cheerfully, returning from high-x-value territory. “The man is a legendary donation-raiser.”

“He must have a persuasive side to him that I have not been perceptive enough to notice yet,” Aunt Nina says, wandering curiously towards some large cardboard boxes.

“No,” Randy says, “it's more like he just goes in and flops around on the conference table until they become so embarrassed for his sake that they agree to sign the check.”

“You've seen him do this?” Aunt Nina says skeptically, sizing up a box labeled CONSTITUENTS OF UPSTAIRS LINEN CLOSET.

“Heard about it. High-tech is a small town,” Randy says.

“He's been able to make great capital of his father's work,” Uncle Red says. “'If my father had patented even one of his computer inventions, Palouse College would be bigger than Harvard,' and so on.”

Aunt Nina has got the box open now. It is almost completely filled by a single Qwghlmian blanket, in a dark greyish-brown on dark brownish-grey plaid. The blanket in question is about an inch thick, and, during wintertime family reunions, was infamous as a booby prize of sorts among the Waterhouse grandchildren. The smell of mothballs, mildew, and heavily oiled wool causes Aunt Nina's nose to wrinkle, as it did Aunt Annie's before her. Randy remembers bedding down beneath this blanket once at the age of about nine, and waking up at two in the morning with bronchial spasms, hyperthermia, and vague memories of a nightmare about being buried alive. Aunt Nina slams the box flaps shut, turns around, and looks in the direction of the Impala. Robin Shaftoe is already running towards them. Being not bad at math himself, he was quick to pick up on this whole concept, and knows from experience that the blanket box will have to be trundled deep out into (-x,-y) territory.