Stephenson - Mother Earth

water gets more shallow. Between 1,000 and 3,000 meters, the cable has a single layer of armor wires (steel rods about as thick as a pencil) around it. In less than 1,000 meters of water, it has a second layer of armor around the first. In the final approach to the shoreline, this double-armored cable is contained within a massive shell of articulated cast-iron pipe, which in turn is buried under up to a meter of sand.

The articulated pipe comes in sections half a meter long, which have to be manually fit around the cable and bolted together. Each section of pipe interlocks with the ones on either end of it.

The coupling is designed to bend a certain amount so that the cable can be snaked around any obstructions to its destination: the beach manhole. It will bend only so much, however, so that the cable's minimum radius of curvature will not be violated.

At the sandy beach this manual work was done out in the surf by a team of English freelance divers based out of Hong Kong. At the cobble beach, it was done in a trench by a bikini-underwear-clad Frenchman with a New Zealand passport living in Singapore, working in Hong Kong, with a Singaporean wife of Chinese descent. Drenched with sweat and rain and seawater, he wrestles with the cast-iron pipe sections in a cobblestone ditch, bolting them patiently together. A Chinese man in a suit picks his way across the cobbles toward him, carrying an oversized umbrella emblazoned with the logo of a prominent stock brokerage, followed by a minion. Although this is all happening in China, this is the first Chinese person who has appeared on the beach in a couple of days. He is an executive from the phone company, coming to inspect the work. After a stiff exchange of pleasantries with the other cable layers on the beach, he goes to the brink of the trench and begins bossing around the man with the half-pipes, who, knowing what's good for him, just keeps his mouth shut while maintaining a certain bearing and dignity beside which the executive's suit and umbrella seem pathetic and vain.

To a hacker tourist, the scene is strikingly familiar: it is the ancient hacker-versus-suit drama, enacted for the millionth time but sticking to its traditional structure as strictly as a Noh play or, for that matter, a Dilbert cartoon. Cable layers, like hackers, scorn credentials, etiquette, and nice clothes. Anyone who can do the work is part of the club. Nothing else matters. Suits are a bizarre intrusion from an irrational world. They have undeniable authority, but heaven only knows how they acquired it. This year, the suits are from Hong Kong, which means they are probably smarter than the average suit. Pretty soon the suits will be from Beijing, but Beijing doesn't know how to lay cable either, so if they ever want to get bits in or out of their country, they will have to reach an understanding with these guys.

At Tong Fuk, FLAG is encased in pipe out to a distance of some 300 meters from the beach manhole. When the divers have got all of that pipe bolted on, which will take a week or so, they will make their way down the line with a water jet that works by fluidizing the seabed beneath it, turning it into quicksand. The pipe sinks into the quicksand, which eventually compacts, leaving no trace of the buried pipe.

Beyond 300 meters, the cable must still be buried to protect it from anchors, tickler chains, and otter boards (more about this later). This is the job of the two barges we saw off Tong Fuk. One, the Elbe, was burying FLAG. The other was burying APCN. Elbe did its job in one-third the time, with one-third the crew, perhaps exemplifying the difference between FLAG's freelance-based virtual-corporation business model versus the old club model. The Elbe crew is German, British, Filipino, Singaporean-of-Indian-ancestry, New Zealander, and also includes a South African diver.

In the center of the barge is a tank where the cable is spooled. The thick, heavy armored cable that the Elbe works with is covered with a jacket of tarred jute, which gives it an old-fashioned look that belies its high tech optical-fiber innards. The tar likes to melt and stick the cable together, so each layer of cable in the tank is separated from its neighbors by wooden slats, and buckets of talc are slathered over it. The cable emerges from the open top of the tank and passes through a series of rollers that curve around, looking very much like a miniature roller-coaster track - these are built in such a way as to bend the cable through a particular trajectory without violating its minimum radius of curvature. They feed it into the top of the