Bagg and Dukes are…a little tired of Neal Stephenson, but our two codebreaking huffduff operators soldier on into Stephenson’s large 1999 novel Cryptonomicon. Haiku-composing marines, lots of math via bicycle chains and other analog metaphors, passive-aggressive academic tracts about beards, and Stephenson’s solving of an earlier problem of his: simply write two books but connect them via plot.