I'm on page 648.
Over the last many, many pages Kit's been in Germany doing lots of math and hanging out with the glamorous Yashmeen, who, as it turns out, has the ability to move through four-dimensional space.
Kit gets his money cut off by Vibe for keeping secrets and he gets a job with T.W.I.T. to help find the mysterious Shambhala. Along the way there's a cool bit about Gasophilia and the ability to communicate via gas-lines similar to the way an electrical signal can move through a wire. There's also a nifty discussion on the linguistic connections between the sanskrit word Akasa and the words Aether, Chaos, and Gas. Then Kit gets mistaken for a drug addict and meets a guy in an asylum who thinks he's a jelly donut ("Ich bin ein Berliner!").
On the one-hand a gloriously realized pre-Einsteinian pseudo-science, and on the other an equally anachronistic Kennedy joke.
In the final scene of this section, Kit, Yashmeen and Gunther go to a museum that turns out to be a tesseract, a four-dimensional analogy of a cube. When a mysterious voice announces that the museum is closing, they ask "Who are you?" The reply is straight out of Lost: "You know who I am." But of course, I have no idea.
We then cut to Frank who is still wandering around Mexico. There are some random meetings and the usual conversating: "...these folks down here at least still have a chance -- one that the norteamericanos lost long ago. For you-all, it's way too late anymore. You've delivered yourselves into the hands of capitalists and Christers..."
Ain't that the truth.
