Cryptonomicon

Randy paces around his room while his computer soars through number space. The shipping containers on the backs of those trucks bear exactly the same logos as the ones that used to fill the streets of South Seattle when a ship was unloading. To Randy this is oddly satisfying, as if by making this crazy lunge across the Pacific, he has brought some kind of antipodal symmetry to his life. He has gone from the place where things are consumed to where they are produced, from a land where onanism has been enshrined at the highest levels of the society to one where cars have "NO to contraception!" stickers in their windows. It feels bizarrely right. He has not felt this way since Avi and he founded their first doomed business venture twelve years ago.

***

Randy grew up in a college town in eastern Washington State, graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle, and landed a Clerk Typist II job at the library there--specifically the Interlibrary Loan Department--where his job was to process incoming loan requests mailed in from smaller libraries all over the region and, conversely, to mail out requests to other libraries. If nine-year-old Randy Waterhouse had been able to look into the future and see himself in this career, he would have been delighted beyond measure: the primary tool of the Interlibrary Loan Department was the Staple Remover. Young Randy had seen one of these devices in the hands of his fourth-grade teacher and been enthralled by its cunning and deadly appearance, so like the jaws of some futuristic robot dragon. He had, in fact, gone out of his way to staple things incorrectly just so he could prevail on his teacher to unstaple them, giving him another glimpse of the blood-chilling mandibles in action. He had gone so far as to steal a staple remover from an untended desk at church and then incorporate it into an Erector-set robot hunter-killer device with which he terrorized much of the neighborhood; its pit-viper yawn separated many a cheap plastic toy from its parts and accessories before the theft was discovered and Randy made an example of before God and man. Now, in the Interlibrary Loan office, Randy had not just one but several staple removers in his desk drawer and was actually obligated to use them for an hour or two a day.

Since the UW library was well-endowed, its patrons didn't request books from other libraries unless they had been stolen from their own or were, in some way, peculiar. The ILL office (as Randy and his coworkers affectionately called it) had its regulars--people who had a whole lot of peculiar books on their wish lists. These people tended to be either tedious or scary or both. Randy always ended up dealing with the "both" subgroup, because Randy was the only Clerk Typist in the office who was not a lifer. It seemed clear that Randy, with his astronomy degree and his extensive knowledge of computers, would one day move on, whereas his coworkers did not harbor further ambitions. His larger sphere of interests, his somewhat broader concept of normalcy, was useful when certain patrons came into the office.

By the standards of many, Randy was himself a tedious, scary, obsessed character. He was not merely obsessed with science but also with fantasy role-playing games. The only way he could tolerate working at such a stupid job for a couple of years was that his off time was completely occupied with enacting fantasy scenarios of a depth and complexity that exercised all of the cranial circuitry that was so conspicuously going to waste in the ILL office. He was part of a group that would meet every Friday night and play until sometime on Sunday. The other stalwarts in the group were a computer science/music double major named Chester, and a history grad student named Avi.

When a new master's degree candidate named Andrew Loeb walked into the ILL office one day, with a certain glint in his eye, and produced a three-inch-thick stack of precisely typed request forms from his shitty old knapsack, he was recognized immediately as being of a particular type, and shunted in the direction of Randy Waterhouse. It was an instant meeting of minds, though Randy did not fully realize this until the books that Loeb had requested began to arrive on the trolley from the mail room.