The modern world’s hell on haiku writers: “Electrical generator” is, what, eight syllables? You couldn’t even fit that onto the second line!
This ain’t just your regular Friday P.M. Shanghai bank-district money-rush. This is an ultimate settling of accounts before the whole Eastern Hemisphere catches fire.
The millions of promises printed on those slips of bumwad will all be kept or broken in the next ten minutes; actual pieces of silver and gold will move, or they won’t. It is some kind of fiduciary Judgment Day.
the organ had been endowed by the paper mill family and would have sufficed for a church four times the size. It nicely complemented the organist, a retired high school math teacher who felt that certain attributes of the Lord (violence and capriciousness in the Old Testament, majesty and triumph in the New) could be directly conveyed into the souls of the endowed sinners through a kind of frontal sonic impregnation. That he ran the risk of blowing out the stained-glass windows was of no consequence since no one liked them anyway, and the paper mill fumes were gnawing at the interstitial lead.
The basic problem for Lawrence was that he was lazy. He had figured out that everything was much simpler if, like Superman with his X-ray vision, you just stared through the cosmetic distractions and saw the underlying mathematical skeleton. Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart’s content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin.
Over time, this even led to a few social engagements in bars, and restaurants, where Shaftoe learned to recognize four types of seaweed, three types of fish eggs, and several flavors of Nip poetry. Of course he had no idea what the fuck they were saying, but he could count syllables, which, as far as he could tell, is about all there is to Nip poetry appreciation.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Bobby Shaftoe says, “your cheekbones are like a fucking snowplow.”
Living in the States, you never see anything older than about two and a half centuries, and you have to visit the eastern fringe of the country to see that. The business traveler’s world of airports and taxicabs looks the same everywhere. Randy never really believes he’s in a different country until he sees something like Intramuros, and then he has to stand there like an idiot for a long time, ruminating.
Randy used to be fascinated by software, but now he isn’t. It’s hard enough to find human beings who are interesting.
Still, it isn’t all about loading shells and pulling triggers. No large organization can kill Nips in any kind of systematic way without doing a nearly unbelievable amount of typing and filing.
“Get this one a copy of the Cryptonomicon. And a desk—as close to the coffee machine as possible. And why don’t you promote the son of a bitch as long as you’re at it.”
It is everything that Commander Schoen knows about breaking codes, which amounts to everything that the United States of America knows. At any moment it could have been annihilated if a janitor had stepped into the room for a few minutes and tidied the place up. Understanding this, Commander Schoen’s colleagues in the officers’ ranks of Station Hypo have devised strenuous measures to prevent any type of tidying or hygienic operations, of any description, in the entire wing of the building that contains Commander Schoen’s office.
The words stay with him like the clap.
Something bothers him. He has learned that when something bothers him in this particular way it usually leads to his writing a new paper. But first he has to do a lot of hard mental pick-and-shovel work.
He has spent the years since running the Three Siblings’ computer system. He hasn’t made much money, but he hasn’t had much stress either.
Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally. Charlene’s crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn’t being told that they were wrong that offended them, though—it was the underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about anything.
Randy had done what he usually did, which was to withdraw from the conversation. In the Tolkien, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense, Randy is a Dwarf. Tolkien’s Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war-ax for a while to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits (i.e., Charlene’s friends), had actually done a lot for Randy’s peace of mind over the years. He knew perfectly well that if he were stuck in academia these people, and the things they said, would seem momentous to him. But where he came from, nobody had been taking these people seriously for years. So he just withdrew from the conversation and drank his wine and looked out over the Pacific surf and tried not to do anything really obvious like shaking his head and rolling his eyes.
Kivistik was, in short, parlaying his strongly contrarian view of the Information Superhighway into more air time than anyone who hadn’t been accused of blowing up a day care center should get.
Randy had ruined his relationship with Charlene by wanting to have kids. Kids raise issues. Charlene, like all of her friends, couldn’t handle issues. Issues meant disagreement. Voicing disagreement was a form of conflict. Conflict, acted out openly and publicly, was a male mode of social interaction—the foundation for patriarchal society which brought with it the usual litany of dreadful things.
The whores cannot conceive of a man rich enough to stay at the Manila Hotel who voluntarily walks around the city every day, and they have given him up as a maniac. He has passed into the realm of irrational things that you must simply accept, and in the Philippines this is a nearly infinite domain.
Ideas have always come to Randy faster than he could use them. He spent the first thirty years of his life pursuing whatever idea appealed to him at the moment, discarding it when a better one came along.
He smiles frequently, and projects the serene confidence of a man who has memorized a two-thousand-page encyclopedia of business etiquette.
The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung-ho posture says that once you give the order I’m not going to bother you with any of the details—and your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living.
He goes inside, holding the door for a fearsomely brisk young woman in a quasimilitary outfit—who makes it clear that Waterhouse had better not expect to Get Anywhere just because he’s holding the door for her—and then for a tired-looking septuagenarian gent with a white mustache.
adhocracy
“Don’t talk to the Dentist. Ever. Not about anything. Not even tech stuff. Any technical question he asks you is just a stalking horse for some business tactic that is as far beyond your comprehension as Gödel’s Proof would be to Daffy Duck.”
“Hmmmm,” Randy says. He is trying to figure out how to do a poker face,
One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don’t know what the hell you are talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault.
high blast wall running down the middle of it, so that the Jerries
“Goddamn it!” Shaftoe says. “I already said a fucking prayer.” “But are we praying for Private Hott, or for ourselves?” the man says. This is a poser.
The two lieutenants devote a good hour to following the instructions in that manual. The instructions are not that complicated, but Enoch Root keeps noticing syntactical ambiguities and wants to explore their ramifications
He is not wearing a gas mask because (a) there is no Nazi gas attack in progress, and (b) unlike Alan, he does not suffer from hay fever.
Airplane engines are rotary,” Lawrence says. “Consequently they must have an odd number of cylinders.” “How does that follow?” “If the number were even, the cylinders would be directly opposed, a hundred and eighty degrees apart, and it wouldn’t work out mechanically.” “Why not?” “I forgot. It just wouldn’t work out.” Alan raises his eyebrows, clearly not convinced. “Something to do with cranks,” Waterhouse ventures, feeling a little defensive. “I don’t know that I agree,” Alan says. “Just stipulate it—think of it as a boundary condition,” Waterhouse says. But Alan is already hard at work, he suspects, mentally designing a rotary aircraft engine with an even number of cylinders.
Alan climbs back onto his bicycle and they ride into the woods for some distance without any more talking. Actually, they have not been talking so much as mentioning certain ideas and then leaving the other to work through the implications.
he realizes that these guys are not guys nor fellas. They are blokes. Chaps. Mates. They are Brits.
“Avi, why are we here?” Eberhard asks. “That is a very profound question,” Avi says.
Turing and Dr. John von Neumann and Dr. Rudolf von Hacklheber
said that the place was Muslim around the edges and animist
closer look reveals that it is knit like any other sweater. Qwghlmian
Waterhouse says yes to the tea because he suspects that this lady (he has forgotten her name) is not really earning her keep. Clearly disgruntled, she ejects herself from her chair and loses herself in deeper and narrower parts of the building.
The tea takes some time in coming and Lord Woadmire does not seem to be in any particular hurry to win the war either, so Waterhouse makes a circuit of the room, pretending to care about the paintings.
he lights up a cigarette. War is hell, but smoking cigarettes makes it all worthwhile.
His job has been very clearly described to him. It has to be clearly described, because it makes no sense.
Now, the Nips, think of them what you will, at least when those guys declare war on you they mean it.
In general he doesn’t know what to make of the Brits because they appear (in his personal observation) to be the only other people on the face of the earth, besides Americans, who possess a sense of humor. He has heard rumors that some Eastern Europeans can do it, but he hasn’t met any of them, and they don’t have much to yuk it up about at the moment. In any case, he can never quite make out when these Brits are joking.
Shaftoe has found that, for an organization devoted to shooting and blowing up people on a large scale, the military is infuriatingly reticent about passing out weapons.
should be honored to have an Asdic man stay with us.” Asdic
Asdic is simply the British acronym for what Yanks refer to as sonar, but every time the word is mentioned in the presence of Alan, he gets a naughty look on his face and goes on an unstoppable punning tear.
“You will,” Chattan said, “have to work out a modus vivendi.” Once Waterhouse had looked this term up, he agreed heartily.
“So, you know Andrew Loeb,” Cantrell says. It’s clear he’s basically dismayed by this and yet sort of impressed too, as if he’d just learned that Randy had once beaten a man to death with his bare hands and then just never bothered to mention it.
He looks so pathetic that Shaftoe considers offering him some m-m-m-morphine, which induces a mild nausea of its own but holds back the greater nausea of seasickness. Then he comes to his senses, remembers that Lieutenant Monkberg is an officer whose duty it is to send him off to die, and decides that he can just go fuck himself sideways.
The Germans at the second intersection had no idea what was going on. This was obviously the result of some kind of internal Wehrmacht communications fuckup, clearly recognizable as such even across cultural and linguistic boundaries.
“Sergeant Shaftoe? Do you have an opinion?” Root asks, fixing Shaftoe with a sober and serious gaze. Shaftoe says, “This code business is some tricky shit.”
Another long silence. They can hear the rest of Detachment 2702 shouting now, down in the lifeboats, probably having a detailed discussion of their own: if we leave all of the fucking officers behind on a grounded ship, does it qualify as mutiny?
“Interesting,” he says to Colonel Chattan. “Five-five-three is the product of two prime numbers—seven and seventy-nine.” Chattan manages an appreciative smile, but Waterhouse can tell that it’s nothing more than a spectacular display of breeding.
“Good morning, Mr. Waterhouse! When you stand with your mouth open like that, you remind me of one of my patients.” “Good morning, Dr. Kepler.” Randy hears his words from the other end of a mile-long bumwad tube, and immediately reviews them in his own mind to make sure he has not revealed any proprietary corporate information or given Dr. Kepler any reason to file a lawsuit
The Americans have invented a totally new bombing tactic in the middle of a war and implemented it flawlessly. His mind staggers like a drunk in the aisle of a careening train. They saw that they were wrong, they admitted their mistake, they came up with a new idea. The new idea was accepted and embraced all the way up the chain of command. Now they are using it to kill their enemies. No warrior with any concept of honor would have been so craven. So flexible. What a loss of face it must have been for the officers who had trained their men to bomb from high altitudes. What has become of those men? They must have all killed themselves, or perhaps been thrown into prison.
“This whole continent is like fucking Disneyland without the safety precautions,”
The part of your brain that handles sex frequently gets cross-wired into other, seemingly irrelevant areas at this age.
He speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he’s already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along.
He speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he’s already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping that you’ll join in. Which no one ever does, except for Enoch Root.
“Should I put on my chaplain hat, then?” “I’m a fucking Protestant. I can talk to God myself whenever I goddamn well feel like it.”
And what is the highest and best purpose to which we can devote our allotted lifespans?” “Uh . . . enhancing shareholder value?” “Very funny.” Avi is annoyed. He is baring his soul, which he does rarely. Also, he’s in the midst of cataloging another small-h holocaust site, adding it to his archives. It is clear he would appreciate some fucking solemnity here.
The Aztecs can go fuck themselves, Randy! Repeat after me: the Aztecs can go fuck themselves.” “The Aztecs can go fuck themselves,” Randy says cheerfully, drawing a baffled look from an approaching Nipponese tour guide.
the U-boat is like a tunnel bored out of the sea and lined with hardware.
Where has he seen this before? On the Dutch-Hammer, that’s where. Except the lights are on in this U-boat, and it doesn’t appear to be sinking, and it’s full of Germans. The Germans are calm and relaxed. None of them is bleeding or screaming. Damn!
“Under no circumstances,” Beck says, “am I to extract any more information from you.” “What the hell does that mean?” “Probably that you know something I am not authorized to know,” Beck says.
The captain is still nonplussed. Shaftoe is beginning to feel a certain mischievous satisfaction. Playing with officers’ minds isn’t as good as having a brain saturated with highly refined opiates, but it will do in a pinch.
It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads for decoration.
He has always had a weird, sick fascination with women who smoked and drank a lot. Amy does neither, but her complete disregard of modern skin-cancer precautions puts her in the same category: people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy.
They are schematic diagrams for plants sketched out by some impossibly modern designer with a strong eye for geometry but who has never been out in a woods and seen a real plant.
They say that Patton and MacArthur are daring generals; the world watches in anticipation of their next intrepid sortie behind enemy lines. Waterhouse knows that Patton and MacArthur, more than anything else, are intelligent consumers of Ultra/Magic. They use it to figure out where the enemy has concentrated his forces, then loop around them and strike where he is weakest. That’s all.
He walks towards the water carrying one shoe in each hand. He sees others who have tied their shoes together through belt loops, leaving their hands free. But the asymmetry of this offends him,
The sand at the surf line has been washed flat. A small child’s footprints wander across it, splaying like gardenia blossoms on thin shafts. The sand looks like a geometric plane until a sheet of ocean grazes it. Then small imperfections are betrayed by swirls in the water. Those swirls in turn carve the sand. The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks.
In the end, they find a Nipponese outpost by simply following the sound of the explosions. They may not have maps, but the American Fifth Air Force does.
“YOU SURE DON’T FUCK LIKE A SMART GIRL,” SAYS Bobby Shaftoe, his voice suffused with awe.
“Why?” Julieta speaks great English like all the other Finns. Shaftoe sighs in exasperation and buries his face in her black hair. The Gulf of Bothnia whooshes and foams down below them, like a badly tuned radio pulling in strange information. Julieta is given to asking big questions.
Finns excelled at an old-fashioned, personalized, retail style of Russian-killing, but when they started to run low on Finns, they had to call in the Germans, who are more numerous and who have perfected a wholesale Russian-slaughtering operation.
Randy has never gone scuba diving in his life, but he’s seen them doing it on Jacques Cousteau and it seems straightforward enough.
ONCE, WHEN BOBBY SHAFTOE WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, he went to Tennessee to visit Grandma and Grandpa. One boring afternoon he began skimming a letter that the old lady had left lying on an end table. Grandma gave him a stern talking to and then recounted the incident to Grandpa, who recognized his cue and gave him forty whacks. That and a whole series of roughly parallel childhood experiences, plus several years in the Marine Corps, have made him into one polite fellow.
“I understand you are good with numbers,” the lady says. Randy is really racking his brain now. How does this woman know he’s a numbers kind of guy? “I’m good with math,” he finally says. “Isn’t that what I said?” “Nah, mathematicians stay away from actual, specific numbers as much as possible.
You can worry about morality when you’re off duty, but if you are always stewing and fretting over what the other guys are doing in the sack, then what the hell are you going to do when you’re presented with an opportunity to hit a Nip squad with a flamethrower?
fact, Kia is trans-just about every system of human categorization,
In fact, Kia is trans-just about every system of human categorization, and what she isn’t trans- she is post-.
(Filipinos go in for long handshakes, and the first party to initiate termination of a handshake—usually the non-Filipino—is invariably left with a nagging feeling that he is a shithead).
Tension climbed to a palpable level & Bong-Bong was subjected to steadily increasing stream of good-natured heckling and unsolicited driving advice from passenger area, esp. from DMS who viewed lingering unwelcome presence of pig truck in our planned trajectory as personal affront & hence challenge to be overcome w/all due pluck, vigor, can-do spirit, & other qualities known to be possessed in abundance by DMS.
This conspiracy thing is going to be a real pain in the ass if it means backing down from casual fistfights.
Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.
Otto produces a diamond ring literally out of his asshole—he carries valuables around in a polished metal tube shoved up his rectum—and Shaftoe serves as best man, uneasily holding that ring, still hot from Otto.
Mrs. McTeague evidently feels that the rent she collects from her boarders obligates her to find them wives as well as feeding and housing them,
“Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum,” he is saying. “It is Latin. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” “Jew? I thought Jesus was Christian,” said Goto Dengo. The man in the black robe just stares at him. Goto Dengo tries again: “I didn’t know Jews spoke Latin.”
In general, Waterhouse isn’t good at just winging it, but he’s tired and pissed off and horny, and this is a fucking war, and sometimes you have to. He mounts the podium, dives for a round of chalk, and starts hammering equations onto the blackboard like an ack-ack gun. He uses well-tempered tuning as a starting point, takes off from there into the deepest realms of advanced number theory, circles back all of a sudden to the Qwghlmian modal scale, just to keep them on their toes, and then goes screaming straight back into number theory again. In the process, he actually stumbles across some interesting material that he doesn’t think has been covered in the literature yet, and so he diverts from strict bullshitting for a few minutes to explore this thing and actually prove something that he thinks could probably be published in a mathematical journal, if he just gets around to typing it up properly. It reminds him that he’s not half bad at this stuff when he’s recently ejaculated, and that in turn just fuels his resolve to get this Mary-fucking thing worked out.
None of the people who go to this church have ever heard these stops called into action, but Waterhouse puts them to good use now, firing off power chords like salvos from the mighty guns of the battleship Iowa.
He has this whole organ visualized in his head now, and while he is pounding through to the end of the figure, the top of his skull comes off, the filtered red light pours in, he sees the entire machine in his mind, as if in an exploded draftsman’s view. Then it transforms itself into a slightly different machine—an organ that runs on electricity, with ranks of vacuum tubes here, and a grid of relays there. He has the answer, now, to Turing’s question, the question of how to take a pattern of binary data and bury it into the circuitry of a thinking machine so that it can be later disinterred. Waterhouse knows how to make electric memory. He must go write a letter to Alan instantly! “Excuse me,” he says, and runs from the church. On his way out, he brushes past a small young woman who has been standing there gaping at his performance. When he is several blocks away, he realizes two things: that he is walking down the street barefoot, and that the young woman was Mary cCmndhd. He will have to circle back later and get his shoes and maybe fuck her. But first things first!
Randy hadn’t the faintest idea what these people thought of him and what he had done, but he could sense right away that, essentially that was not the issue because even if they thought he had done something evil, they at least had a framework, a sort of procedure manual, for dealing with transgressions. To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy’s fundamental metaphor for just about everything),
“You see, it is all about information flow. Information flows from Tokyo to Rabaul. We don’t know what the information was. But it will, in some way, influence what Rabaul does afterwards. Rabaul is changed, irrevocably, by the arrival of that information, and by comparing Rabaul’s observed behavior before and after that change, we can make inferences.”
“Now, I know that you hate me because you are a Marine.” Officers like it when you pretend to be straight with them. “Yes, sir, I do hate you, sir, but I do not feel that this need be an impediment to our killing some Nips together, sir!”
In any event, what it all came down to was that Grandma, whose grasp of practical matters had only declined (if that was even possible) with advanced age, was not the sort of person you would go to for information about her late husband’s war record. Defeating the Nazis was in the same category as changing a flat tire: an untidy business that men were expected to know how to do.
I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX.” “Well, that’s something,” Avi says. “Normally those two are mutually exclusive.”
I think it’s better to aspire to having Amy than to actually have Charlene.”