He is not stupid, and slowly pieces together that the strange operations of Detachment 2702 are designed to confuse the enemy about Allied plans. Detachment 2702 engages in missions that Bobby finds puzzling.

Shaftoe, involved in the battle of Guadalcanal, suffers from PTSD Enoch Root rescues him from the battle’s aftermath. He also meets a Japanese soldier, Goto Dengo, and they become friendly. Back in World War II, Bobby Shaftoe meets Glory, a Filipino girl, and is smitten. They hire Semper Marine, a company owned by Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe (Bobby’s son) and Douglas’ daughter Amy, to lay underwater cable. They found the Epiphyte Corporation and set up an office in the Intramuros. The encryption Avi insists on is much more powerful than necessary, but Avi believes that computing power will eventually break most encryption systems, and he is paranoid about government interference. The two have had several business failures in the past. They communicate electronically using encrypted messages. Randy Waterhouse, Lawrence’s grandson, and his business partner Avi are meeting in Manila to discuss a new business venture. His mathematical skills soon make him one of the leading code-breakers, and he contributes a great deal to the compendium of code-breaking procedures the Navy is compiling, known casually as the “Cryptonomicon.’ The story then jumps to the 1990s. Waterhouse attempts to do his patriotic duty by joining the Navy, but his unimpressive physical condition and lack of coordination land him first in the band, then in the cryptography school. He writes to Waterhouse, but it is clear from the stilted style of his letter that he is prevented from saying anything about what he’s actually doing due to government secrecy. In the next section, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a mathematical genius attending Princeton, meets mathematicians Alan Turing and Rudolf von Hacklheber. The men working in another section of the installation are code-breakers who have been deciphering messages sent by the Nazis using their Enigma Machine, which they do not realize the Allies have cracked. The novel begins in 1945 Shanghai, where Corporal Bobby Shaftoe is part of a detail that fetches stacks of paper out of a military building and then burns the paper. Stephenson uses many elements of magical realism as well science fiction to craft a dense narrative centered on the themes of codes and code-breaking. Describing events in two different time periods-World War II and what was then the modern era-the novel tells the connected stories of a large cast of characters (many of the characters in the modern-day sections are descended from characters in the earlier time period). Cryptonomicon is a 1999 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson.

Stephenson neal cryptonomicon