Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

The second message, sent a couple of hours later, is called “Guideline 2.”

Two: pick a tech where no one can compete with us. Right now, that=networking. We're kicking the crap out of everyone else in the world when it comes to networking. It's not even funny.

The next day, Avi sent a message called, simply, “More.” Perhaps he had lost track of the number of guidelines he'd issued so far.

Another principle: this time we retain control of the corporation. That means that we keep at least fifty percent of the shares—which means little to no outside investment until we've built up some value.

“You don't have to convince me,” Randy mumbles to himself as he reads this.

This shapes the kinds of businesses we can get into. Forget anything that requires a big initial investment.

Luzon is green-black jungle mountains gouged with rivers that would appear to be avalanches of silt. As the navy-blue ocean verges on its khaki beaches, the water takes on the shocking iridescent hue of a suburban swimming pool. Farther south, the mountains are swidden-scarred—the soil beneath is bright red and so these parts look like fresh lacerations. But most is covered with foliage that looks like the nubby green stuff that model railroaders put over their papier-mâché hills, and in vast stretches of the mountains there are no signs whatsoever that human beings have ever existed. Closer to Manila, some of the slopes are deforested, sprinkled with structures, ribboned with power-line cuts. Rice paddies line the basins. The towns are accretions of shanties, nucleated around large cross-shaped churches with good roofs.

The view gets blurry as they belly down into the pall of sweaty smog above the city. The plane begins to sweat like a giant glass of iced tea. The water streams off in sheets, collects in crevices, whips off the flaps' trailing edges.

Suddenly they are banking over Manila Bay, which is marked with endless streaks of brilliant red—some kind of algal bloom. Oil tankers trail long time-delayed rainbows that flourish in their wakes. Every cove is jammed with long skinny boats with dual outriggers, looking like brightly painted water skaters.

And then they are down on the runway at NAIA, Ninoy Aquino International Airport. Guards and cops of various stripes are ambling around with M-16s or pistol-handled pump shotguns, wearing burnooses fashioned from handkerchiefs clamped to the head with American baseball caps. A man dressed in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ dispensing mercy on a world of sinners. Sulfurous, fulminating tropical air begins to leak in through the jumbo's air vents. Everything moistens and wilts.

He is in Manila. He takes his passport out of his shirt pocket. It says,

RANDALL LAWRENCE WATERHOUSE.

This is how Epiphyte Corporation came into existence:

“I am channeling the bad shit!” Avi said.

The number came through on Randy's pager while he was sitting around a table in a grubhouse along the coast with his girlfriend's crowd. A place where, every day, they laser-printed fresh menus on 100% recycled imitation parchment, where oscilloscope tracings of neon-colored sauces scribbled across the plates, and the entrees were towering, architectonic stacks of rare ingredients carved into gemlike prisms. Randy had spent the entire meal trying to resist the temptation to invite one of Charlene's friends (any one of them, it didn't matter) out on the sidewalk for a fistfight.

He glanced at his pager expecting to see the number of the Three Siblings Computer Center, which was where he worked (technically, still does). The fell digits of Avi's phone number penetrated the core of his being in the same way that 666 would a fundamentalist's.

Fifteen seconds later, Randy was out on the sidewalk, swiping his card through a pay phone like an assassin drawing a single-edged razor blade across the throat of a tubby politician.

“The power is coming down from On High,” Avi continued. “Tonight, it happens to be coming through me—you poor bastard.”

“What do you want me to do?” Randy asked, adopting a cold, almost hostile tone to mask sick excitement.

“Buy a ticket to Manila,” Avi said.

“I have to talk it over with Charlene first,” Randy said.

“You don't even believe that yourself,” Avi said.

“Charlene and I have a long-standing relationsh—”

“It's been ten years. You haven't married her. Fill in the fucking blanks.”

(Seventy-two hours later, he would be in Manila, looking at the One-Note Flute.)

“Everyone in Asia is wondering when the Philippines is finally going to get its shit together,” Avi said, “it's the question of the nineties.”

(The One-Note Flute is the first thing you see when you make it through Passport Control.)

“I flashed on this when I was standing in line at Passport Control at Ninoy Aquino International Airport,” Avi said, compressing that entire name into a single, sharply articulated burst. “You know how they have different lanes?”

“I guess so,” Randy said. A parallelpiped of seared tuna did a barrel roll in his gullet. He felt a perverse craving for a double ice-cream cone. He did not travel as much as Avi, and had only a vague idea of what he meant by lanes.

“You know. One lane for citizens. One for foreigners. Maybe one for diplomats.”

(Now, standing there waiting to have his passport stamped, Randy can see it clearly. For once he doesn't mind the wait. He gets in a lane next to the OCW lane and studies them. They are Epiphyte Corp.'s market. Mostly young women, many of them fashionably dressed, but still with a kind of Catholic boarding-school demureness. Exhausted from long flights, tired of the wait, they slump, then suddenly straighten up and elevate their fine chins, as if an invisible nun were making her way up the line whacking their manicured knuckles with a ruler.)

But seventy-two hours ago he hadn't really understood what Avi meant by lanes, so he just said, “Yeah, I've seen the lane thing.”

“At Manila, they have a whole lane just for returning OCWs!”

“OCWs?”

“Overseas Contract Workers. Filipinos working abroad—because the economy of the Philippines is so lame. As maids and nannies in Saudi. Nurses and anesthesiologists in the States. Singers in Hong Kong, whores in Bangkok.”

“Whores in Bangkok?” Randy had been there, at least, and his mind reeled at the concept of exporting prostitutes to Thailand.

“The Filipino women are more beautiful,” Avi said quietly, “and have a ferocity that makes them more interesting, to the innately masochistic business traveler, than all those grinning Thai bimbos.” Both of them knew that this was complete bullshit; Avi was a family man and had no firsthand experience whereof he spoke. Randy didn't call him on it, though. As long as Avi retained this extemporaneous bullshitting ability there was a better than even chance of all of them making fuck-you money.

(Now that he's here, it is tempting to speculate as to which of the girls in the OCW lane are hustlers. But he can't see that going anywhere but wrong, so he squares his shoulders and marches toward the yellow line.

The government has set up glass display cases in the concourse leading from Passport Control to the security barrier. The cases contain artifacts demonstrating the glories of pre-Magellan Filipino culture. The first one of these contains the pièce de résistance: a rustic hand-carved musical instrument labeled with a long and unreadable name in Tagalog. Underneath that, in smaller letters, is the English translation: ONE—NOTE FLUTE.)

“See? The Philippines is innately hedged,” Avi said. “You know how rare that is? When you find an innately hedged environment, Randy, you lunge into it like a rabid ferret going into a pipe full of raw meat.”