Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Randy's still processing these pieces of news when he receives a visit from none other than the Dentist himself.

“I assume that you think I had you framed,” says Dr. Hubert Kepler.

He and Randy are alone in a room together, but Randy is conscious of many aides, bodyguards, lawyers, and Furies or Harpies or whatever just on the other side of the nearest door. The Dentist seems ever so slightly amused, but Randy gradually collects that he is actually quite serious. The Dentist's upper lip is permanently arched, or shorter than it ought to be, or both, with the result that his glacier-white incisors are always slightly exposed, and depending on how the light is hitting his face he looks either vaguely beaverish or else as if he's none too effectively fighting back a sneering grin. Even a gentle soul like Randy cannot gaze upon such a face without thinking how much better it would look with the application of some knuckles. From the perfection of Hubert Kepler's dentition it is possible to infer that he had a sheltered upbringing (full time bodyguards from the time his adult teeth erupted from the gumline) or that his choice of careers was motivated by a very personal interest in reconstructive oral surgery. “And I know that you're probably not going to believe me. But I'm here to say that I had nothing to do with what happened at the airport.”

The Dentist now stops and gazes at Randy for a while, by no means one of those guys who feels any need to nervously fill in gaps in conversation. And so it is during the ensuing, lengthy pause that Randy figures out that the Dentist isn't grinning at all, that his face is simply in its state of natural repose. Randy shudders a bit just to think of what it must be like to never be able to lose this alternatively beaverish and sneering look. For your lover to gaze on you while you're sleeping and see this. Of course, if the stories are to be believed, Victoria Vigo has her own ways of exacting retribution, and so maybe Hubert Kepler really is suffering the abuse and humiliation that his face seems to be asking for. Randy heaves a little sigh when he thinks of this, sensing some trace of cosmic symmetry revealed.

Kepler is certainly correct in saying that Randy is not inclined to believe a single word he says. The only way for Kepler to gain any credibility is for him to show up in person at this jail and utter the words face-to-face, which given all of the other things that he could be doing, for fun or profit or both, at this moment, gives a lot of weight to what he's saying. It is implicit that if the Dentist wanted to lie, badly and baldly, to Randy, he could send his lawyers around to do it for him, or just send him a fucking telegram, for that matter. So either he's telling the truth, or else he's lying but it's very important to him that Randy should believe in his lies. Randy cannot work out why on earth the Dentist should give a flying fuck whether Randy believes in his lies or not, which pushes him in the direction of thinking that maybe he really is telling the truth.

“Who framed me, then?” Randy asks, kind of rhetorically. He was just in the middle of doing some pretty cool C++ coding when he got yanked out of his cell to have this surprise encounter with the Dentist, and is surprising himself with just how bored and irritated he is. He has reverted, in other words, back into a pure balls-to-the-wall nerdism rivaled only by his early game-coding days back in Seattle. The sheer depth and involution of the current nerdism binge would be hard to convey to anyone. Intellectually, he is juggling half a dozen lit torches, Ming vases, live puppies, and running chainsaws. In this frame of mind he cannot bring himself to give a shit about the fact that this incredibly powerful billionaire has gone to a lot of trouble to come and F2F with him. And so he asks the above question as nothing more than a perfunctory gesture, the subtext being I wish you'd go away but minimal standards of social decency dictate that I should say something. The Dentist, no slouch himself in the social ineptness department, comes right back as if it were an actual request for information. “I can only assume that you have somehow gotten embroiled with someone who has a lot of influence in this country. It appears that someone is trying to send you a—”

“No! Just stop,” Randy says. “Don't say it.” Hubert Kepler is now looking at him quizzically, so Randy continues. “The message theory doesn't hold up.”

Kepler looks genuinely baffled for a few moments, then actually does grin a little bit. “Well, it certainly isn't an attempt to do away with you, because—”

“Obviously,” Randy says.

“Yes. Obviously.”

There is another one of those long pauses; Kepler seems unsure of himself. Randy arches his back and stretches. “The chair in my cell is not what you call ergonomic,” he says. He holds his arms out and wiggles the fingers. “My carpals are going to start acting up again. I can tell.”

Randy is looking at Kepler pretty carefully when he says this, and there's no doubt that genuine astonishment is now spreading across the Dentist's face. The Dentist only has one facial expression (already described) but it changes in intensity; it gets more so and less so depending on his emotions. The Dentist's expression proves he had no idea, until now, that Randy's been allowed to have a computer in his cell. In the trying-to-figure-out-what-the-fuck-is-going-on department, the computer is the single most important datum, and Kepler didn't even know about it until just now. So to whatever extent the Dentist actually gives a shit, he has a lot of thinking to do. He excuses himself pretty soon after.

Not half an hour later, some twenty-five-year-old American guy with a ponytail shows up and has a brief audience with Randy. It turns out that he works for Chester in Seattle and has just now flown across the Pacific on Chester's personal jet and came here straight from the airport. He is completely jazzed, totally in bat-out-of-hell mode, and cannot shut up. The sheer amazingness of his sudden flight across the ocean on a rich guy's private jet has made a really, really deep impression on him and he obviously needs someone to share it with. He has brought a “care package” consisting of some junk food, a few trashy novels, the largest bottle of Pepto-Bismol Randy's ever seen, a CD Walkman, and a cubical stack of CDs. This guy can't get over the battery thing; he was told to bring a lot of extra batteries, and so he did, and sure enough, between the luggage guys at the airport and the customs inspectors, all of the batteries disappeared en route except for one package that he's got in the pocket of his long baggy Seattle-grunge-boy shorts. Seattle's full of guys like this who flipped a coin when they graduated from college (heads Prague, tails Seattle) and just showed up with this expectation that because they were young and smart they'd find a job and begin making money, and then appallingly enough did exactly that. Randy can't figure out what the world must look like to a guy like this. He has a hard time getting rid of the guy, who shares the common assumption (increasingly annoying) that just because Randy's in jail, he doesn't have a life, has nothing better to do than interface with visitors.

When Randy gets back to his cell, he sits crosslegged on his bed with the Walkman and begins dealing out the CDs like cards in a solitaire game. The selection is pretty reasonable: a two-disc set of the Brandenburg Concertos, a collection of Bach organ fugues (nerds have a thing about Bach), some Louis Armstrong, some Wynton Marsalis, and then various selections from Hammerdown Systems, which is a Seattle-based record label in which Chester is a major investor. It is a second-generation Seattle-scene record label; all of its artists are young people who came to Seattle after they graduated from college in search of the legendary Seattle music scene and discovered that it didn't really exist—it was just a couple of dozen guys who sat around playing guitar in one another's basements—and so who were basically forced to choose between going home in ignominy or fabricating the Seattle music scene of their imagination from whole cloth. This led to the establishment of any number of small clubs, and the foundation of many bands, that were not rooted in any kind of authentic reality whatsoever but merely reflected the dreams and aspiration of pan-global young adults who had all flocked to Seattle on the same chimera hunt. This second wave scene came in for a lot of abuse from those of the original two dozen people who had not yet died of drug overdose or suicide. There was something of a backlash; and yet, about thirty-six hours after the backlash reached its maximum intensity, there was an antibacklash backlash from young immigrants who asserted their right to some kind of unique cultural identity as people who had naively come to Seattle and discovered that there was no there there and that they would have to create it themselves. Fueled by that conviction, and by their own youthful libidinous energy, and by a few cultural commentators who found this whole scenario fetchingly post-modern, they started a whole lot of second-generation bands and even a couple of record labels, of which Hammerdown Systems is the only one that didn't either go out of business or get turned into a wholly-owned subsidiary of an L.A. or New York-based major label inside of six months.