Interface

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  “I detect from your tone of voice that you think this is all basically superficial crap,” Mel said.

  Mary Catherine just turned toward him and smiled a little bit.

  “I like video games too,” Mel said, “but let’s talk seriously for a moment here.”

  “Dad’s mixed dominant, which is good,” Mary Catherine said.

  “Meaning?”

  “He does some things with his right hand and others with his left. Neither side of the brain predominates. People like that recover better from strokes.”

  Mel raised his eyebrows. “That’s good news.”

  “Recovery from this kind of insult is extremely hard to predict. Most people hardly get better at all. Some recover quite well. We may see changes over the course of the next couple of weeks that will tell us which way he’s going to go.”

  “A couple of weeks,” Mel said. He was clearly relieved to have a specific number, a time frame to deal with. “You got it.”

  “Guess what?” Mel said to the Cozzanos the morning after the stroke. It was six A.M. None of them had slept except for the Governor, who was under the influence of various drugs. James Cozzano had arrived shortly after midnight, driving his Miata in from South Bend, Indiana, where he was a graduate student in the political science department. He and Mary Catherine had spent the whole night sitting around in the Executive Mansion, which was nice, but not exactly home. Mary Catherine had tried to sleep in bed and been unable to. She had put on her clothes, sat down in a chair to talk to James, and fallen dead asleep for four hours. James just watched TV. Mel had spent the same time elsewhere, on the telephone, waking people up.

  Now they were all together in the same room. The Governor’s eyes were open, but he wasn’t saying much. When he tried to talk, the wrong words came out, and he got angry.

  “What?” Mary Catherine finally said.

  Mel looked William A. Cozzano in the eye. “You’re running for president.”

  Cozzano rolled his eyes. “You swebber putter,” he said.

  Mary Catherine gave Mel a wary, knowing look, and waited for an explanation.

  James got flustered. “Are you crazy? This is no time for him to be launching a campaign. Why haven’t I heard about this?”

  His father was watching him out of the corner of his eye. “Don’t squelch,” he said, “it’s a million fudd. Goddamn it!”

  “I spent the whole night putting together a campaign committee,” Mel said.

  “You lie,” Cozzano said.

  “Okay,” Mel admitted, “I put together a campaign committee a long time ago, just in case you changed your mind and decided to run. All I did last night was wake them up and piss them off.”

  “What’s the scam here?” Mary Catherine said.

  Mel sucked his teeth and looked at Mary Catherine indulgently. “You know, ‘scam’ is just a Yiddishized pronunciation of ‘scheme’—a much nobler word meaning ‘plan.’ So let’s not be invidious. Let’s call it a plan instead.”

  “Mel,” Mary Catherine said, “what’s the scam?”

  Cozzano and Mel looked soberly at each other and then cracked up.

  “If you turn on that TV in a couple of hours,” Mel said, “you will see the Governor’s press secretary releasing a statement, which I wrote on my laptop in the lobby of this hospital and faxed to him an hour ago. In a nutshell, what it says is this: in the light of the extremely serious and, in the Governor’s view, irresponsible statements made by the President last night, the Governor has decided to take another look at the idea of running for president—because clearly the country has gone adrift and needs new leadership. So he has cleared his appointment calendar for the next two weeks and is going to closet himself in Tuscola, with his advisers, and formulate a plan to throw his hat into the ring.”

  “So all the media will go to Tuscola,” James said.

  “I would guess so,” Mel said.

  “But Dad’s not in Tuscola.”

  Mel shrugged as if this were a minor annoyance. “Sipes says he’s transportable. We’ll use the chopper. More private and presidential as hell.”

  Cozzano chuckled. “Good backing,” he said. “We’ll go to the buckyball.”

  “What’s the point?” James said. He actually shouted it. Suddenly he had become upset. “Dad’s had a stroke. Can’t you see that? He’s sick. How long do you think you can hide it?”

  “A couple of weeks,” Mel said.

  “Why bother?” James said. “Is there any reason for all this subterfuge? Or are you just doing it for the thrill of playing the game?”

  “People my age get their thrills by having good bowel movements, not by playing games,” Mel said. “I’m doing it because we don’t yet know the full extent of the damage. We don’t know how much Willy is going to recover in the next couple of weeks.”

  “But sooner or later . . .”

  “Sooner or later, we’ll have to come out and say he’s had a stroke,” Mel said, “and then the presidential bid is stillborn. But it’s better to have a nice little planned stroke at home, while trying to lead the country, than a big ugly surprising one while you’re picking your nose in the statehouse, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” James said, shrugging. “Is it?”

  Mel swiveled his head around to look directly at James. His face bore an expression of surprise. He was able to mask his emotions before they developed into disappointment or contempt.

  Everyone had always assumed that James would one day develop from a bright boy into a wise man, but it hadn’t happened yet. Like many sons of great and powerful men, he was still trapped in a larval stage. If he hadn’t been the son of the Governor, he probably would have developed into one of those small-town letter-of-the-law types that Mel found so tiresome.

  But he was the son of the Governor. Mel accepted that. He didn’t say what was on his mind: James, don’t be a sap.

  “James,” Mary Catherine said, speaking so quietly that she could barely be heard across the room, “don’t be a sap.”

  James turned and gave Mary Catherine the helpless, angry look of a little brother who has just had his cowlick pulled by his big sister.

  Mel and the Governor locked eyes across the bedspread.

  “Hut one!” Cozzano said.

  seven

  GANGADHAR V.R.J.V.V. Radhakrishnan, M.D., Ph.D., had not cracked a skull in seventy-nine days and he was not happy about it. Even the shaven-headed thugs stamping out license plates ten miles down the road at the New Mexico State Men’s Reformatory would get rusty without their daily quota of practice on the license-plate stamping machine. For a neurosurgeon, eleven weeks without pressing the madly vibrating blade of the bone saw against a freshly peeled human skull was intolerable.

  In order to crack a skull he had to get to a decent hospital. In order to reach a decent hospital from here, he had to use the Elton State University airplane. But every time he needed it, the football coach had taken it out on a recruiting trip to L.A. or Houston. This was in direct violation of Dr. Radhakrishnan’s contract with Elton State, which stated that he would have access to the airplane as needed.

  The only person who could help him was Dr. Artaxerxes Jackman, the president of Elton State University, and Jackman had to be approached in the right way. Jackman had a Ph.D. in education and higher administration. It was almost criminal fraud to call him a doctor, but, in the academic sense, a doctor he was. Dr. Radhakrishnan had not spent most of his life in his native India without figuring out that important positions are quite often filled by undeserving swine, who must be deferred to in any case.

  His own father was a case in point. Forty years ago, about the time Gangadhar had been born, Jagdish Radhakrishnan had been a rising young idealist in the Nehru administration. That very idealism had led to an appointment on the Railway Corruption Enquiry Committee of 1953. Jagdish had carried out his responsibilities zealously, refusing to pull his punches even when it became evident that he was getting close to
many a high-ranking official. He found himself summarily transferred to a low post in the Sheet Mica Price Controller’s Organisation, where he had languished ever since, living only for the achievements of his two sons: Arun, the golden boy, the firstborn son, now a member of Parliament, and to a lesser extent, Gangadhar.

  Gangadhar V.R.J.V.V. Radhakrishnan knew that the faculty of Elton State University was, in the academic world, roughly equivalent to the Sheet Mica Price Controller’s Organisation, and that if he ever wanted to get out of this place he would have to show more discretion—more savvy—less boneheaded idealism than his father had back in the 1950s. For half a year he had been trying, diplomatically and politely, to get in for a face-to-face with Dr. Jackman, but their meeting kept getting postponed.

  Before he even veered into the parking lot of the Coover Biotechnology Pavilion, blood balloons began to detonate on the windshield of his full-sized, one-ton, six-wheel-drive Chevy pickup truck. He kept driving even though he could no longer see through the windshield. If he was lucky, he might run over an animal rights activist and then claim it was an accident. The truck was not in a mood to slow down; it was heavily laden with fifty-pound sacks of Purina Monkey Chow. He had just paid for the monkey chow himself, with his own money, down at the grain elevator—the closest thing there was to a skyscraper in Elton, a white tubular obelisk sticking up above the railroad tracks on the edge of town. He had talked to the grinning windburned Nazis, given them his money, endured their snickering at his accent and their remarks about his heavy winter coat.

  “So what do you do with this stuff? Fry it up or just eat it cold?” one of them had said, as they were piling the monkey chow into his truck.

  “I feed it to brain-damaged lower primates,” Dr. Radhakrishnan had said. “Would you like a sample?”

  The one thing they valued him for—that gave him potential status as a human being in their eyes—was his monster truck: 454 cubic inches of V-8 power, double wheels on the rear axle, a thick black roll bar brandishing great mesh-covered Stalag 17 searchlights that could pick out a shrew on a rock in a midnight windstorm across two miles of chaparral. He had traded in a BMW for this coarse and ungainly machine halfway through his first winter here, almost two years ago, when he found out that the ultimate driving machine simply did not go in a six-foot snowdrift.

  The double-edged windshield wipers smeared blood across the windshield in gory arcs, giving him a partial view of the loading dock. It wasn’t real blood, of course. After the first few attacks, they had decided it was politically incorrect to use the real stuff and they had switched to Karo syrup with red dye in it. In the cold February air, it congealed on contact. Dr. Radhakrishnan preferred the real blood; it was easier to wash off.

  A dozen of his grad students and lab techs were waiting for him around back at the loading dock. Dr. Radhakrishnan pulled up to it and left the motor running. They jumped into the back like a commando team and formed a human chain, passing the fifty-pound sacks of monkey chow up across the dock and into the freight elevator. Radhakrishnan had a total of fifteen grad students: four Japanese, two Chinese, three Korean, one Indonesian, three Indian, one Pakistani, and one American. They had learned to work together well at times such as this, even the American.

  He pulled his empty truck around into the parking lot. Dr. Radhakrishnan had a reserved parking space near the entrance. Right now half a dozen activists were occupying it with their bodies, staging a die-in. Most of them were just doing it in their Levi’s and Timberland’s, but the star of the show was a person in a gorilla suit with a big steel colander over his head with a pair of jumper cables clamped onto it. The gorilla spazzed out and died grandly as Dr. Radhakrishnan’s blood-soaked four-by-four cruised past in low gear, a shattered balloon fluttering from the radio antenna, and parked in an unreserved spot farther from the door.

  They thought they were going to force Dr. Radhakrishnan to change his ways by making him feel bad. They thought that the way to make him feel bad was to make him feel unliked. They were desperately wrong on both counts.

  He shoved a magnetically coded ID card into a slot, punched in a secret code, and the door opened for him. This new facility had been built securely, because they knew that the animal rights people would try to find a way in. They didn’t have a chance; they were like raccoons trying to break into a missile silo.

  The top floor belonged to Radhakrishnan and his crew. He had to punch in more numbers to get out of the elevator lobby. Then he smelled home. It had the sharp disinfectant smell of a doctor’s office with a low undertone of barnyard.

  A baboon was sitting in a stainless steel chair in the Procedure Room, wrists and ankles loosely taped in place. The baboon was anesthetized and did not need to be restrained; otherwise, the tape wouldn’t have held him. All it did was fix him in a convenient position.

  The entire top of the baboon’s skull had been removed to expose the brain. Park and Toyoda were under the hood, as it were, working on the baboon’s electrical system. Toyoda had his hands in there, maneuvering a narrow probe with a miniature video camera on the end of it. The output of the video camera was splashed up on a big-screen Trinitron. Nearly inaudible high-pitched ticking and whistling sounds emerged from the headphones of his Walkman; he was listening to some particularly noxious form of American music.

  Park held a retractor with one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. Both of them ignored the baboon and kept their eyes on the TV set. It was providing live coverage of the interior spaces of the baboon’s brain: a murky universe of gray mush with the occasional branching network of blood vessels.

  “A little bit left,” Park suggested. The camera swung in that direction and suddenly there was something different, something with hard, straight edges, embedded in the brain tissue. It did not seem to have been dropped into a hole, though; it seemed as though the brain had grown around it, like a tree growing around a fence post. The object was a neutral, milky white, with a serial number stamped into the top. Any layman coming in off the street would have identified the substance as teflon. It was just translucent enough that one could make out, inside the teflon shell, a sort of squared-off sunburst pattern, like the rising sun flag of the Imperial Japanese Navy, etched in silver against a neutral gray background. At the center of that sunburst was a tiny square region that contained several hundred thousand microscopic transistors.

  But neither Park nor Toyoda nor Dr. Radhakrishnan looked at that part of it. They were all looking at the interface—the boundary between the sharp edge of the teflon casing and the brain tissue, with its infinite, organic watershed system of capillaries. It looked good: no swelling, no necrosis, no gap between the baboon and the microchip.

  “A keeper,” Toyoda said, grinning, pronouncing this newly acquired bit of American slang with great precision.

  “Bingo,” Park said.

  “Which baboon is this?” Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

  “Number twenty-three,” Toyoda said. “We implanted three weeks ago.”

  “How long has he been off the antirejection meds?”

  “One week.”

  “Looks like he’ll do well,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said. “I suppose we should go ahead and give him a name.”

  “Okay,” Park said as he slurped uncertainly at his lukewarm java. “What do you want to call him?”

  “Let’s call him Mr. President,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

  Two men were waiting for Dr. Radhakrishnan in front of his office. It was unusual, this early in the morning; Dr. Radhakrishnan’s secretary wouldn’t even be here for another half hour. One of the men was Dr. Artaxerxes Jackman, of all people, looking somewhat grumpy and astonished. The other man was a stranger, a man in his forties with sandy blond hair. He was wearing the best suit that Dr. Radhakrishnan had ever seen west of the Mississippi, a charcoal-gray number with widely spaced stripes, sort of a City of London number. Both men stood up as Dr. Radhakrishnan entered the room.

  “Dr. Radhakrishnan,” Jackma
n said, “no one was here so we just figured we’d set up and wait for you. I want you to meet Mr. Salvador here.”

  “Dr. Radhakrishnan, it’s a pleasure and an honor,” Salvador said, extending his hand. He wore no jewelry except for cuff links; when he extended his arm, just the right amount of cuff—plain, basic white—protruded from the sleeve of his jacket. He did not go in for the crushing American style of handshake. His accent was definitely not American either, but beyond that, it was as untraceable as a ransom note.

  “You are up bright and early,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said, ushering Mr. Salvador into his office. Jackman had already departed, slowly and reluctantly, casting glances over his shoulder.

  “No earlier than you, Dr. Radhakrishnan, and certainly no brighter,” Mr. Salvador said. “Jet lag would not allow me to sleep later and so I thought I would get an early start.”

  Dr. Radhakrishnan handed him some coffee. Salvador held the mug out in front of him for a moment, examining it like a freshly excavated amphora, as though he had never seen coffee served in anything other than a cup with a saucer. “Comanches,” Salvador said, reading the mug.

  “That is the name of the football team associated with this institution,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

  “Ah, yes, football,” Salvador said, his memory jogged. He was showing all the signs of a man who had just flown in from some other hemisphere and who was trying to get cued into the local culture. “That’s right, this must be high football territory. The pilot told me that we are on mountain time here. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. Two hours behind New York, one ahead of L.A.”

  “I didn’t know that such a time zone existed until this morning.”