Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

And so Chester has decided to favor Randy with those recent Hammerdown selections of which he is most proud. Perversely, almost all of these are from bands that are not even in Seattle at all but in small, prohibitively hip college towns in North Carolina and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. But Randy does find one from an evidently Seattle-based band called Shekondar. Evidently, that is, because on the back of the CD is a blurry photograph of several band members drinking sixteen-ounce lattes in cups bearing the logo of a chain of coffee bars that as far as Randy knows has not yet burst free from the city limits of Seattle to crush everything in its path worldwide in the now wearisomely predictable manner of Seattle-based companies. Now, Shekondar happens to have been the name of an especially foul underworld deity who played an important role in some of the game scenarios that Randy played with Avi and Chester and the gang back in the old days. Randy opens up the case of the CD and notes immediately that the disc has the golden hue of a master, not the traditional silver of a mere copy. Randy puts that golden master into his Walkman and hits the Play button and is treated to some passable post-Cobain-mortem material, genetically engineered to have nothing in common with what is traditionally thought of as the Seattle sound and in that sense absolutely typical of Seattle du jour. He jumps forward through a couple more tracks and then rips the earphones off his head, cursing, as the Walkman attempts to translate a stream of pure digital information, representing something other than music, into sound. This feels a bit like needles of dry ice jabbed into his eardrums.

Randy moves the golden disc to the CD-ROM drive that is built into his laptop, and checks it out. Indeed it does sport a couple of audio tracks (as he's discovered) but almost all of the disc's capacity is given over to computer files. There are several directories, or folders, each named after one of the documents that was in grandfather's trunk. Within each of these directories is a long list of files named PAGE.001.jpeg, PAGE.002.jpeg, and so on. Randy starts opening them up, using the same net-browser software that he uses to read the Cryptonomicon, and discovers that they are all scanned image files. Evidently Chester had a bunch of minions de-staple those documents and feed them page by page through a scanner. At the same time he must have had graphic artists, presumably people he knows through Hammerdown Systems, hastily whipping up this fake Shekondar album cover. It's even got a package insert, photographs of Shekondar in concert. What it really is is a parody of the post-Seattle Scene Seattle scene that aligns perfectly with the faulty notions of same that could be expected in the imagination of a Philippine airport customs inspector, who like everyone else is fantasizing about moving to Seattle. The lead guitarist looks kind of like Chester in a wig.

All of this sneaky stuff is probably gratuitous. It probably would have been okay for Chester to just Fedex the fucking documents straight to the jail. But Chester, sitting in his house by Lake Washington, is working on a set of assumptions about Manila just as faulty as what half of the world believes about Seattle. At least Randy gets a laugh out of it before diving into zeta functions.

A word about libido: it's been something like three weeks for Randy now. He was just beginning to address this situation when a highly intelligent and perceptive Catholic ex-priest was suddenly introduced into the cell next to his and began sleeping six inches away from him. Since then, masturbation per se has been pretty much out of the question. To the extent Randy believes in any god at all, he's been praying for a nocturnal emission. His prostate gland now has the size and consistency of a croquet ball. He feels it all the time, and has begun to think of it as his Hunk of Burning Love. Randy had a spot of prostate trouble once when he was chronically drinking too much coffee, and it made everything between his nipples and his knees hurt. The urologist explained that Little Man 'tate is neurologically wired into just about every other part of your body, and he didn't have to exert any rhetorical skill, or marshall any detailed arguments, in order to make Randy believe that. Randy has believed, ever since, that the ability of men to become moronically obsessed with copulation is in some way a reflection of this wiring diagram; when you are ready to give the external world the benefit of your genetic material, i.e. when the 'tate is fully loaded, even your pinkies and eyelids know about it.

And so it might be expected that Randy would be thinking all the time about America Shaftoe, his sexual target of choice, who (just to make things a lot worse) has probably been spending a lot of time in wetsuits lately. And indeed that is where his thoughts were directed at the moment Enoch Root was dragged in. But since then it has become evident that he needs to exercise some kind of iron mental discipline here and not think about Amy at all. Whilst juggling all of those chainsaws and puppies, he is also walking a sort of intellectual tightrope, with decryption of the Arethusa intercepts at the end of that tightrope, and as long as he keeps his eyes fixed on that goal and just keeps putting one foot in front of the other, he'll get there. Amy-in-a-wetsuit is down below somewhere, no doubt trying to be emotionally supportive, but if he even glances in her direction he's a goner.

What he's reading here is a set of academic papers, dating to the 1930s and early forties, that have been heavily marked up by his grandfather, who went through them none-too-subtly gleaning anything that could be useful on the cryptographic front. That it's none too subtle is a good thing for Randy, whose grasp of pure number theory is just barely adequate here. Chester's minions had to scan not only the fronts of these pages but the backs too, which were originally blank but on which Grandpa wrote many notes. For example there is a paper written by Alan Turing in 1937 in which Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has found some kind of error, or at least, something that Turing didn't go into in sufficient detail, forcing him to cover several pages with annotations. Randy's blood absolutely runs cold at the very idea that he is being so presumptuous as to participate in such a colloquy. When he realizes just how deep over his head he is intellectually, he turns off his computer and goes to bed and sleeps the bootless sleep of the depressed for ten hours. Eventually he convinces himself that most of the junk in these papers probably has no direct relevance to Arethusa and that he just needs to calm down and filter the material carefully.

Two weeks pass. His prayers vis-à-vis the Hunk of Burning Love are answered, giving him at least a couple of days of relief during which he can admit the concept of Amy Shaftoe into his awareness, but only in a really austere and passionless way. Attorney Alejandro shows up occasionally to tell Randy that things are not going very well. Surprising obstacles have arisen. All of the people he was planning to bribe have been preemptively counter-bribed by Someone. These meetings are tedious for Randy, who thinks he has figured everything out. To begin with it's Wing, and not the Dentist, who has caused all of this, and so Attorney Alejandro's working on faulty assumptions.

Enoch, when he called Randy on the plane, said his old NSA buddy was working for one of the Crypt's clients. It seems clear now that this client is Wing. Consequently Wing knows that Randy has Arethusa. Wing believes that the Arethusa intercepts contain information about the location of the Primary. He wants Randy to decrypt those messages so that he'll know where to dig. Hence the whole setup with the laptop.

All of Attorney Alejandro's efforts to spring Randy loose will be unavailing until Wing has the information that he wants—or thinks he does. Then, all of a sudden, the ice will break, and Randy will unexpectedly be cut loose on a technicality. Randy's so sure of this that he finds Attorney Alejandro's visits annoying. He would like to explain all of this so that Attorney Alejandro could knock it off with the wild goose chase, and his increasingly bleak and dull situation reports on same. But then Wing, who presumably surveils these attorney/client conferences, would know that Randy had figured out the whole game, and Randy doesn't want Wing to know that. So he nods through these meetings with his lawyer and then, for good measure, goes back and tries to sound convincingly bewildered and depressed as he gives Enoch Root the update.