'Perish the thought! Damn me, I'd almost forgotten about that old thing. Wrote it a quarter-century ago. Consider the times! The King was losing his mind – his Ministers being lynched in Parliament – his own drawbridge-keepers locking him out of his own arsenals. His foes intercepting letters abroad, written by that French Papist wife of his, begging foreign powers to invade us. Hugh Peters had come back from Salem to whip those Puritans into a frenzy – no great difficulty, given that the King, simply out – out – of money, had seized all of the merchants' gold in the Tower. Scottish Covenanters down as far as Newcastle, Catholics rebelling in Ulster, sudden panics in London – gentlemen on the street whipping out their rapiers for little or no reason. Things no better elsewhere – Europe twenty-five years into the Thirty Years' War, wolves eating children along the road in Besançon, for Christ's sake – Spain and Portugal dividing into two separate kingdoms, the Dutch taking advantage of it to steal Malacca from the Portuguese – of course I wrote the Cryptonomicon ! And of course people bought it! But if it was the Omega – a way of hiding information, of making the light into darkness – then the Universal Character is the Alpha – an opening. A dawn. A candle in the darkness. Am I being disgusting?'