Cryptonomicon

Her father takes a good look at each of the thrusters in turn. "Clear," he responds. A moment later, something begins to thrum inside the ROV, and a stream of bubbles spurts from an orifice on its tail, and then the thrusters begin to spin around. They swivel on the ends of their stubby wings until they are facing downwards, throwing fountains into the air, and the ROV sinks rapidly. The fountains diminish and become slight upwellings in the sea. Seen through the water's rough surface, the ROV is a yellow splatter. It shortens as the vehicle's nose pitches down, then rapidly disappears as the thrusters drive it straight down. "Always kinda takes my breath away to see something that costs so much going off to who knows where," Doug Shaftoe says meditatively.

The water around the boat has begun to emit a kind of dreadful, sickly light, like radiation in a low-budget horror film. "Jeez! The laser?" Randy says.

"Mounted to the bottom of the hull, in a little dome," Doug says. "Punches through even turbid water with ease."

"What kind of bandwidth can you transmit on it?"

"Amy is seeing decent monochrome video on her little screen right now, if that is what you mean. It is all digital. All packetized. So if some of the data doesn't make it through, the image gets a little choppy, but we do not lose visuals altogether."

"Cool."

"Yes, it is cool," Doug Shaftoe allows. "Let us go and watch TV."

They crouch beneath the canopy. Doug turns on a small Sony portable television, a ruggedized waterproof model encased in yellow plastic, and patches its input cable into a spare output jack on the back of Amy's rig. He turns it on and they begin to see a bit of what Amy is seeing. They do not have the benefit of the dark cowl that Amy is using, and so the glare of the sun washes out everything but a straight white line emerging from the dark center of the picture and expanding towards the edge. It is moving.

"I am following the buoy line down," she explains. "Kind of boring."

Randy's calculator watch beeps twice. He checks the time; it is three in the afternoon.

"Randy?" Amy says, in a velvet voice.

"Yes?"

"Could you give me the square root of three thousand eight hundred twenty-three on that thing?"

"Why do you want that?"

"Just do it."

Randy holds his wrist up so that he can see the watch's digital display, takes a pencil out of his pocket, and begins using its eraser to press the tiny little buttons. He hears a metallic snicking noise, but pays it no mind.

Something cool and smooth glides along the underside of his wrist. "Hold still," Amy says. She bites her lip and pulls. The watch falls off, and comes away in her left hand, its vinyl band neatly severed. She's holding the kris in her right, the edge of its blade still decorated with a few of Randy's arm hairs. "Huh. Sixty-one point eight three oh four. I would've guessed higher." She tosses the watch over her shoulder and it disappears into the South China Sea. "Square roots are tricky that way."

"Amy, you're losing the rope!" says her father impatiently, focused entirely on the screen of the TV.

Amy jams the kris back into its sheath, smiles sweetly at Randy, and plugs her face back into the rig. Randy is speechless for a while.

The question of whether or not she is a lesbian is rapidly becoming more than purely academic. He performs a quick mental review of all of the lesbians he has known. Usually they are mid-level, nine-to-five city dwellers with sensible haircuts. In other words, they are just like most of the other people Randy knows. Amy is too flagrantly exotic, too much like a horny film director's idea of what a lesbian would be. So maybe there is some hope here.

"If you're gonna stare at my daughter that way," Doug Shaftoe says, "you'd better start boning up on your ballroom dancing."

"Is he starin' at me? I can never tell when I have my face stuck in this thing," Amy says.

"He was in love with his watch. Now he has no object for his affections," Doug says. "So, hold on to your hats!"

Randy can tell when someone is trying to rattle him. "What is it that offended you so much about my watch? The alarm?"

"The whole package was pretty annoying," Amy says, "but the alarm is what made me psychotic."

"You should have said something. Being a true geek, I actually know how to turn that alarm off."

"Then why didn't you?"

"I don't want to lose track of time."

"Why? Got a cake in the oven?"

"The Dentist's due diligence people will be all over me."

Doug shifts position and screws up his face curiously. "You mentioned that before. What is due diligence?"

"It's like this. Alfred has some money that he wants to invest."

"Who's Alfred?"

"A hypothetical person whose name begins with A."

"I don't understand."

"In the crypto world, when you are explaining a cryptographic protocol, you use hypothetical people. Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, Evan, Fred, Greg, and so on."

"Okay."