Chapter 26 WHY

Epiphyte Corp.'s business plan is about an inch thick, neither fat nor skinny as these things go. The interior pages are slickly and groovily desktop-published out of Avi's laptop. The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores. An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross.

The actual content of the business plan hews to a logical structure straight out of the Principia Mathematica.Lesser entrepreneurs purchase business-plan-writing software: packages of boilerplate text and spread sheets, craftily linked together so that you need only go through and fill in a few blanks. Avi and Beryl have written enough business plans between the two of them that they can smash them out from brute memory. Avi's business plans tend to go something like this:

MISSION: At [name of company] it is our conviction that [to do the stuff we want to do] and to increase shareholder value are not merely complementary activities-they are inextricably linked.

PURPOSE: To increase shareholder value by [doing stuff]

EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING (printed on a separate page, in red letters on a yellow background): Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly-up and only returned her ninety-nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril-you are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.

Still reading? Great. Now that we've scared off the lightweights, let's get down to business.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: We will raise [some money], then [do some stuff] and increase shareholder value. Want details? Read on.

INTRODUCTION: [This trend], which everyone knows about, and [that trend], which is so incredibly arcane that you probably didn't know about it until just now, and [this other trend over here] which might seem, at first blush, to be completely unrelated, when all taken together, lead us to the (proprietary, secret, heavily patented, trademarked, and NDAed) insight that we could increase shareholder value by [doing stuff]. We will need $ [a large number] and after [not too long] we will be able to realize an increase in value to $ [an even larger number], unless [hell freezes over in midsummer].

DETAILS:

Phase 1: After taking vows of celibacy and abstinence and forgoing all of our material possessions for homespun robes, we (viz, appended resumes) will move into a modest complex of scavenged refrigerator boxes in the central Gobi Desert, where real estate is so cheap that we are actually being paid to occupy it, thereby enhancing shareholder value even before we have actually done anything. On a daily ration consisting of a handful of uncooked rice and a ladleful of water, we will [begin to do stuff].

Phase 2, 3, 4, . . . , n-1: We will [do more stuff, steadily enhancing shareholder value in the process] unless [the earth is struck by an asteroid a thousand miles in diameter, in which case certain assumptions will have to be readjusted; refer to Spreadsheets 397-413].

Phase n: before the ink on our Nobel Prize certificates is dry, we will confiscate the property of our competitors, including anyone foolish enough to have invested in their pathetic companies. We will sell all of these people into slavery. All proceeds will be redistributed among our shareholders, who will hardly notice, since Spreadsheet 265 demonstrates that, by this time, the company will be larger than the British Empire at its zenith.

SPREADSHEETS: [Pages and pages of numbers in tiny print, conveniently summarized by graphs that all seem to be exponential curves screaming heavenward, albeit with enough pseudo-random noise in them to lend plausibility].

RESUMES: Just recall the opening reel of The Magnificent Sevenand you won't have to bother with this part; you should crawl to us on hands and knees and beg us for the privilege of paying our salaries.

To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master calendar, motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living document. Its spreadsheets are palimpsests, linked to the company's bank accounts and financial records so that they automatically adjust whenever money flows in or out. Beryl handles that stuff. Avi handles the words-the underlying, abstract plan, and the concrete details, that inform those spreadsheets-interpreting the numbers. Avi's part of the plan mutates too, from week to week, as he gets new input from articles in the Asian Wall Street Journal,conversations with government officials in flyblown Shenzhen karaoke bars, remote-sensing data pouring in from satellites, and obscure technical journals analyzing the latest advances in optical fiber technology. Avi's brain also digests the ideas of Randy and the other members of the group and incorporates them into the plan. Every quarter, they take a snapshot of the business plan in its current state, trowel some Maybelline onto it, and ship out new copies to investors.

Plan Number Five is about to be mailed simultaneous with the company's first anniversary. An early draft had been sent to each of them a couple of weeks ago in an encrypted e-mail message, which Randy hadn't bothered to read, assuming he knew its contents. But little cues that he's picked up in the last few days tell him that he'd better find out what the damn thing actually says.

He fires up his laptop, plugs it into a telephone jack, opens up his communications software, and dials a number in California. This last turns out to be easy, because this is a modern hotel and Kinakuta has a modern phone system. If it hadn't been easy, it probably would have been impossible.

In a small, stuffy, perpetually dark, hot-plastic-scented wiring closet, in a cubicled office suite leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Incorporated, sandwiched between an escrow company and a discount travel agent in the most banal imaginable disco-era office building in Los Altos, California, a modem wakes up and spews noise down a wire. The noise eventually travels under the Pacific as a pattern of scintillations in a filament of glass so transparent that if the ocean itself were made out of the same stuff, you'd be able to see Hawaii from California. Eventually the information reaches Randy's computer, which spews noise back. The modem in Los Altos is one of half a dozen that are all connected to the back of the same computer, an entirely typical looking tower PC of a generic brand, which has been running, night and day, for about eight months now. They turned its monitor off about seven months ago because it was just wasting electricity. Then John Cantrell (who is on the board of Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Inc., and made arrangements to put it in the company's closet) borrowed the monitor because one of the coders who was working on the latest upgrade of Ordo needed a second screen. Later, Randy disconnected the keyboard and mouse because, without a monitor, only bad information could be fed into the system. Now it is just a faintly hissing off-white obelisk with no human interface other than a cyclopean green LED staring out over a dark landscape of empty pizza boxes.

But there is a thick coaxial cable connecting it to the Internet. Randy's computer talks to it for a few moments, negotiating the terms of a Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP connection, and then Randy's little laptop is part of the Internet, too; he can send data to Los Altos, and the lonely computer there, which is named Tombstone, will route it in the general direction of any of several tens of millions of other Internet machines.

Tombstone, or tombstone.epiphyte.com as it is known to the Internet, has an inglorious existence as a mail drop and a cache for files. It does nothing that a thousand online services couldn't do for them more easily and cheaply. But Avi, with his genius for imagining the most horrific conceivable worst-case scenarios, demanded that they have their own machine, and that Randy and the others go through its kernel code one line at a time to verify that there were no security holes. In every book store window in the Bay Area, piled in heaps, were thousands of copies of three different books about how a famous cracker had established total control over a couple of well-known online services. Consequently, Epiphyte Corp. could not possibly use such an online service for its secret files while with a straight face saying that it was exerting due diligence on its shareholders' behalf. Thus tombstone.epiphyte.com.

Randy logs on and checks his mail: forty-seven messages, including one that came two days ago from Avi (avi@epiphyte.com) that is labeled:

epiphyteBizPlan.5.4.ordo. Epiphyte Business Plan, 5th edition, 4th draft, in a file format that can only be read by [Novus] Ordo [Seclorum], which is wholly owned by the company of the same name, but whose hard parts were written, as it happens, by John Cantrell.

He tells the computer to begin downloading that file-it's going to take a while. In the meantime, he scrolls through the list of other messages, checking the names of their senders, subject headings, and sizes, trying to figure out, first of all, how many of these can simply be thrown away unread.

Two messages jump out because they are from an address that ends with aol.com, the cyberspace neighborhood of parents and children but never of students, hackers, or people who actually work in high-tech. Both of these are from Randy's lawyer, who is trying to get Randy's financial affairs disentangled from Charlene's with as little rancor as possible. Randy feels his blood pressure spiking, millions of capillaries in the brain bulging ominously. But they are very short files, and the subject headings seem innocuous, so he calms down and decides not to worry about them now.

Five messages originate from computers with extremely familiar names-systems that are part of the campus computer network he used to run. The messages come from system administrators who took over the reins when Randy left, guys who long ago asked him all the easy questions, such as What's the best place to order pizza?and Where did you hide the staples?and have now gotten to the point of e-mailing him chunks of arcane code that he wrote years ago with questions like, Was this an error, or something incredibly clever I haven't figured out yet?Randy declines to answer those messages just now.

There are about a dozen messages from friends, some of them just passing along Net humor that he's already seen a hundred times. Another dozen from other members of Epiphyte Corp., mostly concerning the details of their itineraries as they all converge on Kinakuta for tomorrow's meeting.

That leaves a dozen or so other messages which belong in a special category that did not exist until a week ago, when a new issue of TURING Magazinecame out, containing an article about the Kinakuta data haven project, and a cover photo of Randy on a boat in the Philippines. Avi had gone to some lengths to plant this article so that he would have something to wave in the faces of the other participants in tomorrow's meeting. TURINGis such a visual magazine that it cannot be viewed without the protection of welding goggles, and so they insisted on a picture. A photographer was dispatched to the Crypt, which was found visually wanting. A tizzy ensued. The photographer was diverted to Manila Bay where he captured Randy standing on a boat deck next to a big reel of orange cable, a volcano rising from the smog in the back ground. The magazine won't even be on newsstands for another month, but the article is on the Web as of a week ago, where it instantly became a subject of discussion on the Secret Admirers mailing list, which is where all of the cool guys like John Cantrell hang out to discuss the very latest hashing algorithms and pseudo-random-number generators. Because Randy happened to be in the picture, they have mistakenly fastened upon him as being more of a prime mover than he really is. This has spawned a new category of messages in Randy's mailbox: unsolicited advice and criticism from crypto freaks worldwide. At the moment there are fourteen such messages in his in-box, eight of them from a person, or persons, identifying himself, or themselves, as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

It would be tempting to ignore these, but the problem is that a solid majority of people on the Secret Admirers mailing list are about ten times as smart as Randy. You can check the list anytime you want and find a mathematics professor in Russia slugging it out with another mathematics professor in India, kilobyte for kilobyte, over some stupefyingly arcane detail in prime number theory, while an eighteen-year-old, tube-fed math prodigy in Cambridge jumps in every few days with an even more stupefying explanation of why they are both wrong.

So when people like this send him mail, Randy tries to at least skim it. He is a little leery of the ones who identify themselves as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, or with the number 56 (which is a code meaning Yamamoto). But just because they are political-verging-on-flaky doesn't mean they don't know their math.

To: randy@tombstone.epiphyte.com

From: 56@laundry.org

Subject: data haven

Do you have public key somewhere posted? I would like to exchange mail with you but I don't want Paul Comstock to read it:) My public key if you care to respond is

—BEGIN ORDO PUBLIC KEY BLOCK— (lines and lines of gibberish)

—END ORDO PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-

Your concept of data haven is good but has important limits. What if Philippine government shuts down your cable? Or if the good Sultan changes his mind, decides to nationalize your computers, read all the disks? What is needed is not ONE data haven but a NETWORK of data havens-more robust, just like Internet is more robust than single machine.

Signed,

The Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto who signs his messages thus:

—BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK— (lines and lines of gibberish)

—END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK-

Randy closes that one without responding. Avi doesn't want them talking to Secret Admirers for fear that they will later be accused of stealing someone's ideas, so the reply to all of these e-mails is a form letter that Avi paid some intellectual property lawyer about ten thousand dollars to draft.

He reads another message simply because of the return address:

From: root@pallas.eruditorum.org

On a UNIX machine, "root" is the name of the most godlike of all users, the one who can read, erase, or edit any file, who can run any program, who can sign up new users and terminate existing ones. So receiving a message from someone who has the account name "root" is like getting a letter from someone who has the title "President" or "General" on his letterhead. Randy's been root on a few different systems, some of which were worth tens of millions of dollars, and professional courtesy demands he at least read this message.

I read about your project.

Why are you doing it?

followed by an Ordo signature block.

One has to assume this is an attempt to launch some sort of philosophical debate. Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be-or to be indistinguishable from-self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time. And yet the "root" address either means that this person is in charge of a large computer installation, or (much more likely) has a Finux box on his desk at home. Even a home Finux user has got to be several cuts above your average Internet-surfing dilettante. Randy opens up a terminal window and types

whois eruditorum.org

and a second later gets back a block of text from the InterNIC:

eruditorum.org (Societas Eruditorum)

followed by a mailing address: a P.O. Box in Leipzig, Germany.

After that a few contact numbers are listed. All of them have the Seattle area code. But the three-digit exchanges, after the area code, look familiar to Randy, and he recognizes them as gateways into a forwarding service, popular among the highly mobile, that will bounce your voice mail, faxes, etc. to wherever you happen to be at the moment. Avi, for example, uses it all the time.

Scrolling down, Randy finds:

Record last updated on 18-Nov-98.

Record created on 1-Mar-90.

The "90" jumps out. That's a prehistoric date by Internet standards. It means that Societas Eruditorum was way ahead of the game. Especially for a group based in Leipzig, which was part of East Germany until about then.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS.SF.LAUNDRY.ORG

followed by the dotted quad for laundry.org, which is a packet anonymizer used by many Secret Admirers to render their communications untraceable.

It all adds up to nothing, yet Randy can't get away with assuming that this message came from a bored sixteen-year-old. He should probably make some token response. But he's afraid that it'll turn out to be a come-on for some kind of business proposition: probably some mangy high-tech company that's looking for capital.

In the latest version of the business plan, there is probably some explanation of why Epiphyte(2) is building the Crypt. Randy can simply cut and paste it into an e-mail reply to root@pallas.eruditorum.org. It'll be something vaporous and shareholder-pleasing, and therefore kind of alienating. With any luck it will discourage this person from pestering him anymore. Randy double-clicks on Ordo's eyeball/pyramid icon, and it opens up a little text window on the screen, where he is invited to type commands. Ordo's also got a lovely graphical user interface, but Randy scorns it. No menus or buttons for him. He types

>decrypt epiphyteBizPlan.5.4.ordo

The computer responds

verify your identity: enter the pass phrase or 'bio' to opt for biometric verification.

Before Ordo will decrypt the file, it needs to have the private key: all 4096 bits of it. The key is stored on Randy's hard disk. But bad guys can break into hotel rooms and read the contents of hard disks, so the key itself has been encrypted. In order to decrypt it, Ordo needs the key to the key, which (in Cantrell's one concession to user-friendliness) is a pass phrase: a string of words, easier to remember than 4096 binary digits. But it has to be a long phrase or else it's too easy to break.

The last time Randy changed his pass phrase, he was reading another World War II memoir. He types:

>with hoarse shouts of "banzai!" the drunken Nips swarmed out of their trenches, their swords and bayonets flashing in the beams of our searchlights

and hits the "return" key. Ordo responds:

incorrect pass phrase

reenter the pass phrase or "bio" to use biometric verification.

Randy curses and tries it a few more times, with slight changes in punctuation. Nothing works.

In desperation and out of curiosity, he tries:

bio

and the software responds:

unable to locate biometric configuration file. Talk to Cantrell :-/

Which is of course not a normal part of the software. Ordo does not come with biometric verification, nor do its error messages refer to John Cantrell, or anyone else, by name. Cantrell has apparently written a plug-in module, a little add-on, and distributed it to his friends in Epiphyte(2).

"Fine," Randy says, picks up his phone, and dials John Cantrell's room number. This being a brand-new, modern hotel, he gets a voice mail box in which John has actually bothered to record an informative greeting.

"This is John Cantrell of Novus Ordo Seclorum and Epiphyte Corporations. For those of you who have reached me using my universal phone number and consequently have no idea where I am: I am in the Hotel Foote Mansion in the Sultanate of Kinakuta-please consult a quality atlas. It is four o'clock in the afternoon, Thursday March twenty-first. I'm probably down in the Bomb and Grapnel."

The Bomb and Grapnel is the pirate-themed hotel bar, which is not as cheesy as it sounds. It is decorated with (among other museum-grade memorabilia) several brass cannons that seem authentic. John Cantrell is seated at a corner table, looking as at home here as a man in a black cowboy hat possibly can. His laptop is open on the table next to a rum drink that has been served up in a soup tureen. A two-foot-long straw connects it to Cantrell's mouth. He sucks and types. Watching incredulously is a cadre of tough-looking Chinese businessmen sitting at the bar; when they see Randy coming in, carrying his own laptop, they buzz up. Now there's two of them!

Cantrell looks up and grins-something he cannot do without looking fiendish. He and Randy shake hands triumphantly. Even though they've only been riding around on 747s, they feel like Stanley and Livingstone.

"Nice tan," Cantrell says puckishly, all but twirling his mustache. Randy's caught off guard, starts and stops talking twice, finally shakes his head in defeat. Both men laugh.

"I got the tan on boats," Randy says, "not by the hotel pool. The last couple of weeks, I've been putting out fires all over the place."

"Nothing that'll impact shareholder value, I hope," Cantrell deadpans.

Randy says, "You're looking encouragingly pale."

"Everything's fine on my end," Cantrell says. "It's like I predicted-lots of Secret Admirers want to work on a real data haven."

Randy orders a Guinness and says, "You also predicted that a lot of those people would turn out to be squirrelly and undisciplined."

"Didn't hire those," Cantrell says. "And with Eb to handle the weird stuff, we've been able to roll right over the few speed bumps we've encountered."

"Have you seen the Crypt?"

Cantrell raises an eyebrow and shoots him a flawless imitation of a paranoid glance. "It's like that NORAD command bunker in Colorado Springs," he says.

"Yeah!" Randy laughs. "Cheyenne Mountain."

"It's too big," Cantrell announces. He knows Randy is thinking the same thing.

So Randy decides to play devil's advocate. "But the sultan does everything big. There are big paintings of him in the big airport."

Cantrell shakes his head. "The Information Ministry is a serious project. The sultan didn't just make it up. His technocrats conceived it."

"I'm told Avi did a little bit of deft turkey-baster work ..."

"Whatever. But the people behind it, like Mohammed Pragasu, are all Stanford B-School types. Oxford and Sorbonne graduates. It's been engineered to the doorstops by Germans. That cave is not a monument to the sultan."

"No, it's not a vanity project," Randy agrees, thinking of the chilly machine room that Tom Howard is building a thousand feet below the cloud forest.

"So there must be some rationalexplanation for how big it is."

"Maybe it's in the business plan?" ventures Randy.

Cantrell shrugs; he hasn't read it either. "The last one I read cover-to-cover was Plan One. A year ago," admits Randy.

"That was a good business plan," Cantrell says.[11]

Randy changes the subject. "I forgot my pass phrase. Need to do that biometric thing with you."

"It's too noisy here," Cantrell says, "it works by listening to your voice, doing Fourier shit, remembering a few key numbers. We'll do it in my room later."

Feeling some need to explain why he hasn't been keeping up with his e-mail, Randy says, "I have been totally obsessed, interfacing with these AVCLA people in Manila."

"Yup. How's that going?"

"Look. My job's pretty simple," Randy says. "There's that big Nipponese cable from Taiwan down to Luzon. A router at each end. Then there's the network of short-run, interisland cables that the AVCLA people are laying in the Philippines. Each cable segment begins and ends at a router, as you know. My job is to program the routers, make sure the data will always have a clear path from Taiwan to Kinakuta."

Cantrell glances away, worried that he's about to get bored. Randy practically lunges across the table, because he knows it's not boring. "John! You are a major credit card company!"

"Okay." Cantrell meets his gaze, slightly unnerved.

"You are storing your data in the Kinakuta data haven. You need to download a terabyte of crucial data. You begin the process-your encrypted bytes are screaming up through the Philippines at a gigabyte per second, to Taiwan, from there across to the States." Randy pauses and swigs Guinness, building the drama. "Then a ferry capsizes off Cebu."

"So?"

"So, in the space of ten minutes, a hundred thousand Filipinos all pick up their telephones simultaneously."

Cantrell actually whacks his forehead. "Oh, my god!"

"Now you understand! I've been configuring this network so that no matter what happens, the data continues to flow to that credit-card company. Maybe at a reduced speed-but it flows."

"Well, I can see how that would keep you busy."

"And that's why all I'm really up to speed on is these routers. And incidentally they're good routers, but they just don't have enough capacity to feed a Crypt of that size, or justify it economically."

"The gist of Avi and Beryl's explanation," Cantrell says, "is that Epiphyte is no longer the sole carrier into the Crypt."

"But we're laying the cable here from Palawan-"

"The sultan's minions have been out drumming up business," Cantrell says. "Avi and Beryl are being vague, but from comparing notes with Tom, and reading tea leaves, methinks there's one, maybe two other cables coming into Kinakuta."

"Wow!" Randy says. It's all he can think of. "Wow!" He drinks about half of his Guinness. "It makes sense. If they're doing it once with us, they can do it again, with other carriers.

"They used us as leverage to bring in others," Cantrell says.

"Well . . . the question is, then, is the cable through the Philippines still needed? Or wanted?"

"Yup," Cantrell says.

"It is?"

"No. I mean, yup, that's the question, all right."

Randy considers it. "Actually, this could be good news for yourphase of the operation. More pipes into the Crypt means more business in the long run.

Cantrell raises his eyebrows, a little worried about Randy's feelings. Randy leans back in his chair and says, "We've had debates before about whether it makes sense for Epiphyte to be screwing around with cables and routers in the Philippines."

Cantrell says, "The business plan has always maintained that it would make economic sense to be running a cable through the Philippines even if there weren't a Crypt at the end of it."