Neal Stephenson - Reamde

He knew what it was.

It was the same sort of thing that Csongor had used to detect Wallace’s lie and route him to Peter’s place. And having seen it work perfectly once, Ivanov supposed it could not fail to work again.

“Thanks,” Zula said, “and my next question—”

Typing. “It’s one of a large block of addresses allocated to an ISP in Shyamen.”

“Come again?”

Corvallis spelled it, and she wrote it on Sokolov’s flesh: X-I-A-M-E-N.

This triggered furious but comically silent activity among Ivanov and his minions.

“You can google it yourself,” Corvallis said, and Zula—who was, in spite of everything, still being watched intently by Sokolov—resisted the temptation to say No, I can’t. “Formerly called Amoy,” he continued, in a singsongy voice to indicate that he had googled it. “A port city in southeastern China, at the mouth of the Nine Dragons River, just across the strait from Taiwan. Two and a half million people. Twenty-fifth largest port in the world, up from thirtieth. Blah, blah, blah. Pretty generic, for a Chinese city.”

“Thanks!”

“Sorry I couldn’t get more specific.”

“Gives me something to work on.”

“Anything else I can help you with?”

Yes . “No.”

“Have a good one!” And he was gone.

The word “Bye” was hardly past Zula’s lips when Sokolov had pulled the phone from her hand. He knew how to work it and pulled up its web browser and googled Xiamen.

She had been vaguely aware for a while of some gratifying smells in the room: flowers and coffee.

Ivanov, smiling, approached her with a vast bouquet of stargazer lilies cradled in his arms. They still bore the plastic wrap and barcode from the grocery store up the hill. “For you,” he announced, bestowing them on her. “For because I made you cry. Least I could do.”

“That is very sweet of you,” she said, trying through all her exhaustion to sell it.

“Latte?” he asked. For the T-shirted man was at his side with a cardboard tray crowded with cups from Starbucks world HQ, whose colossal green mermaid loomed over Georgetown like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

“Love one,” she said, and she didn’t have to lie about that.

Since the visitors were now all busy, she carried the flowers into the kitchen area and laid them on a cutting board so that she could cut the ends off the stems and put them in water. Idiotic. But it, like so many of her nice-Iowa-girl impulses, was like a brainstem reflex. It wasn’t the flowers’ fault that they’d been purchased by gangsters. The latte was enormously pleasurable, and she popped the lid off and threw it away so that she could sink her lips into the warm foam and gulp from it. Peter owned no vases, but she found an earthenware water pitcher that would support the flowers and filled it with water. Then she set about the messy business of tearing away the plastic wrappers and the rubber bands that held the flowers’ stems together.

Seeing large movement while she was doing this, she glanced up to see two of the men carrying a long, heavy, plastic-wrapped bundle out of the adjoining apartment.

She was on the floor before she was fully conscious of being light-headed.

WORLD OF WARCRAFT had been the toweringly dominant competitor in Corporation 9592’s industry for what seemed like forever, until you checked the dates and realized that it was only a few years old. Richard and Nolan had passed through several phases in their attitude toward it:

1. Abashed denial that they could ever even dream of competing with such an entrenched power as WoW

2. Certainty, growing into cockiness, that they could knock it off its perch in a coup de main

3. Crushing realization that it was impossible and that they were doomed to abject failure

4. Cautious optimism that maybe life wasn’t going to totally suck forever

5. Finally getting their shit together and coming up with a plan

Somewhere between Phases 4 and 5, Richard holed up at the Schloss during Mud Month—the weeks following the end of the ski season—and wrote out some ideas that had been brewing in his mind since the deepest and most lugubrious weeks of Phase 3. Reading them, Corvallis had identified this as an “inflection point,” which was another of those terms that meant nothing to Richard but that was—to judge from the vigorous shifts in body language it elicited in meetings—of infinite significance to math geeks. As far as Richard could make out, it denoted the hardly-obvious-at-the-time moment when, seen later in retrospect, everything had changed.

For a while the memo had rattled around the office like a dried-out whiteboard pen. Then Richard, with a bit of jargonic assistance from Corvallis, had given it an arresting title: Medieval Armed Combat as Universal Metaphor and All-Purpose Protocol Inter face Schema (MACUMAPPIS).

Since Medieval Armed Combat was the oxygen they breathed, even mentioning it seemed gratuitous, so this got shortened to UMAPPIS and then, since the “metaphor” thing made some of the business­people itchy, it became APPIS, which they liked enough to trademark. And since APPIS was one letter away from APIS, which was the Latin word for bee, they then went on to create and trademark some bee- and hive-related logo art. As Corvallis patiently told Richard, it was all a kind of high-tech in-joke. In that world, API stood for “application programming interface,” which meant the software control panels that tech geeks slapped onto their technologies in order to make it possible for other tech geeks to write programs that made use of them. All of which was one or two layers of abstraction beyond the point where Richard could give a shit. “All I am trying to say with this memo,” he told Corvallis, “is that anyone who feels like it ought to be able to grab hold of our game by the technological short hairs and make it solve problems for them.” And Corvallis assured him that this was precisely synonymous with having an API and that everything else was just marketing.

The problems Richard had in mind were not game- or even entertainment-related ones. Corporation 9592 had already covered as many of those bases as their most imaginative people could think of, and then they had paid lawyers to pore over the stuff that they’d thought of and extrapolate whole abstract categories of things that might be thought of later. And wherever they went, they found that the competition had been there five years earlier and patented everything that was patentable and, in one sense or another, pissed on everything that wasn’t. Which explained a lot about Phase 3.

The epiphany—if this wasn’t too fine a word for some crazy-ass shit that had popped up in Richard’s brain—had occurred in a brewpub at Sea-Tac. Richard had been marooned there for a couple of hours after his flight to Spokane had been delayed by a collision between a baggage truck and the plane: a strangely common occurrence at that airport, and one of those folksy touches that helped to preserve its small-town feel. Sitting there quaffing his pint and gazing at the shoeless and beltless travelers penguin-shuffling through the metal detectors, he had been struck by the sheer boringness of the work being performed by the screeners of the Transportation Security Administration: staring at those bags moving through the x-ray machines, trying to remain alert for that once-in-every-ten-years moment when someone would actually try to send a gun through.

Thus far, a commonplace observation. He had done a bit of research on it later and learned that the more sophisticated airports had hired psychologists to tackle the problem and devised some clever tricks. For example, they would digitally insert fake images of guns into the video feed from an x-ray machine, frequently enough that the screeners would see false-color silhouettes of revolvers and semiautomatics and IEDs glide across their visual fields several times a day, instead of once every ten years. That, according to the research, was enough to prevent their pattern-recognition neurons from being reclaimed and repurposed by brain processes that were more fruitful, or at least more entertaining.