Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

“Pardon me?”

“ Glory. The name of this junk is Glory ,” she says. She speaks forthrightly and with great clarity, as though communicating over a noisy two-way radio. “Actually, it's Glory IV,” she continues. Her accent is largely Midwestern, with a trace of Southern twang, and a little bit of Filipino, too. If you saw her on the streets of some Midwestern town you might not notice the traces of Asian ancestry around her eyes. She has dark brown hair, sun-streaked, just long enough to form a secure ponytail, no longer.

“'Scuse me a sec,” she says, pokes her head into the pilot house, and speaks to the pilot in a mixture of Tagalog and English. The pilot nods, looks around, and begins to manipulate the controls. The hotel staff pull the gangway back. “Hey,” Amy says quietly, and underhands a pack of Marlboros across the gap to each one of them. They snatch them out of the air, grin, and thank her. Glory IV begins to back away from the dock.

Amy spends the next few minutes walking around the deck, going through some kind of mental checklist. Randy counts four men in addition to Amy and the pilot—two Caucasians and two Filipinos. All of them are fiddling around with engines or diving gear in a way Randy recognizes, through many cultural and technological barriers, as debugging. Amy walks past Randy a couple of times, but avoids looking him in the eye. She's not a shy person. Her body language is eloquent enough: “I am aware that men are in the habit of looking at whatever women happen to be nearby, in the hopes of deriving enjoyment from their physical beauty, their hair, makeup, fragrance, and clothing. I will ignore this, politely and patiently, until you get over it.” Amy is a long limbed girl in paint-stained jeans, a sleeveless t-shirt, and high-tech sandals, and she lopes easily around the boat. Finally she approaches him, meeting his eyes for just a second and then glancing away as if bored.

“Thanks for giving me the ride,” Randy says.

“It's nothing,” she says.

“I feel embarrassed that I didn't tip the guys at the dock. Can I reimburse you?”

“You can reimburse me with information,” she says without hesitation. Amy reaches up with one hand to rub the back of her neck. Her elbow pokes up in the air. He notices about a month's growth of hair in her armpit, then glimpses the corner of a tattoo poking out from under her shirt. “You're in the information business, right?” She watches his face, hoping that he'll take the cue and laugh, or at least grin. But he's too preoccupied to catch it. She glances away, now with a knowing, sardonic look on her face—you don't understand me, Randy, which is absolutely typical, and I'm fine with that. She reminds Randy of level headed blue-collar lesbians he has known, drywall-hanging urban dykes with cats and cross-country ski racks.

She takes him into an air-conditioned cabin with a lot of windows and a coffee maker. It has fake wood-veneer paneling like a suburban basement, and framed exhibits on the walls—official documents like licenses and registrations, and enlarged black-and-white photographs of people and boats. It smells like coffee, soap, and oil. There is a boom box held down with bungee cords, and a shoebox with a couple of dozen CDs in it, mostly albums by American woman singer-songwriters of the offbeat, misunderstood, highly intelligent but intensely emotional school, getting rich selling music to consumers who understand what it's like not to be understood ( 5). Amy pours two mugs of coffee and sets them down on the cabin's bolted-down table, then fishes in the tight pockets of her jeans, pulls out a waterproof nylon wallet, extracts two business cards, and shoots them across the table, one after the other, to Randy. She seems to enjoy doing this—a small, private smile comes onto her lips and then vanishes the moment Randy sees it. The cards bear the logo of Semper Marine Services and the name America Shaftoe.

“Your name's America?” Randy asks.

Amy looks out the window, bored, afraid he's going to make a big deal out of it. “Yeah,” she says.

“Where'd you grow up?”

She seems to be fascinated by the view out the window: big cargo ships strewn around Manila Bay as far as the eye can see, ships hailing from Athens, Shanghai, Vladivostok, Cape Town, Monrovia. Randy infers that looking at big rusty boats is more interesting than talking to Randy.

“So, would you mind telling me what's going on?” she asks. She turns to face him, lifts the mug to her lips, and finally, looks him straight in the eye.

Randy's a little nonplussed. The question is basically impertinent coming from America Shaftoe. Her company, Semper Marine Services, is a contractor at the very lowest level of Avi's virtual corporation—only one of a dozen boats-and-divers outfits that they could have hired—so this is a bit like being interrogated by one's janitor or taxi driver.

But she's smart and unusual, and, precisely because of all her efforts not to be, she's cute. As an interesting female, and a fellow American, she is pulling rank, demanding to be accorded a higher status. Randy tries to be careful.

“Is there something bothering you?” he asks.

She looks away. She's afraid she's given him the wrong impression. “Not in particular,” she says, “I'm just nosy. I like to hear stories. Divers always sit around and tell each other stories.”

Randy sips his coffee. America continues, “In this business, you never know where your next job is going to come from. Some people have really weird reasons for wanting to get stuff done underwater, which I like to hear.” She concludes, “It's fun!” which is clearly all the motivation she needs.

Randy views all of the above as a fairly professional bullshitting job. He decides to give Amy press-release material only. “All the Filipinos are in Manila. That's where the information needs to go. It is somewhat awkward, getting information to Manila, because it has mountains in back of it and Manila Bay in front. The bay is a nightmare place to run submarine cables—”

She's nodding. Of course she would know this already. Randy hits the fast-forward. “Corregidor's a pretty good place. From Corregidor you can shoot a line-of-sight microwave transmission across the bay to downtown Manila.”

“So you are extending the North Luzon coastal festoon from Subic Bay down to Corregidor,” she says.

“Uh—two things about what you just said,” Randy says, and pauses for a moment to get the answer queued up in his output buffer. “One, you have to be careful about your pronouns—what do you mean when you say 'you'? I work for Epiphyte Corporation, which is designed from the ground up to work, not on its own, but as an element in a virtual corporation, kind of like—”

“I know what an epiphyte is,” she says. “What's two?”

“Okay, good,” Randy says, a little off balance. “Two is that the extension of the North Luzon Festoon is just the first of what we hope will be several linkups. We want to lay a lot of cable, eventually, into Corregidor.”

Some kind of machinery behind Amy's eyes begins to hum. The message is clear enough. There will be work aplenty for Semper Marine, if they handle this first job well.

“In this case, the entity that's doing the work is a joint venture including us, FiliTel, 24 Jam, and a big Nipponese electronics company, among others.”

“What does 24 Jam have to do with it? They're convenience stores.”

“They're the retail outlet—the distribution system—for Epiphyte's product.”

“And that is?”

“Pinoy-grams.” Randy manages to suppress the urge to tell her that the name is trademarked.

“Pinoy-grams?”

“Here's how it works. You are an Overseas Contract Worker. Before you leave home for Saudi or Singapore or Seattle or wherever, you buy or rent a little gizmo from us. It's about the size of a paperback book and encases a thimble-sized video camera, a tiny screen, and a lot of memory chips. The components come from all over the place—they are shipped to the free port at Subic and assembled in a Nipponese plant there. So they cost next to nothing. Anyway, you take this gizmo overseas with you. Whenever you feel like communicating with the folks at home, you turn it on, aim the camera at yourself and record a little video greeting card. It all goes onto the memory chips. It's highly compressed. Then you plug the gizmo into a phone line and let it work its magic.”