Interface

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  The door opened and the hunchbacked janitor dragged himself into the room. He fixed his one good eye on Schram, slouched over to him, and gave him a high five.

  “Oscar-winning performance,” the janitor said.

  “You get best supporting actor, Cy,” Schram said.

  “Nah, it’s all special effects,” Ogle said, reaching up to grab the curtain of tortured flesh that ran from his jawbone down to his chest. He pulled on it, and most of it peeled away in a single piece, leaving a few strips and patches of burnt-looking skin adhering to his face and neck. With a few minutes of additional peeling and scrubbing, Ogle managed to get loose from most of the makeup, though a few fragments of it still stuck to him here and there, like bits of tissue paper left over from a bad shave, and the part of his face that hadn’t been covered still had colored greasepaint on it. Ogle didn’t care; he was too busy staring at the monitors.

  He loved it. His eyes were virtually popping out of his head. His mouth was wide open and frozen in an expression of boyish glee, like a farm boy getting his first look at Disney World. His eyes darted back and forth from one screen to the next; he couldn’t decide what to look at.

  “Days. Weeks,” Ogle said. “I’m gonna be looking at this thing for weeks.”

  “Check out the look on that can stacker’s face when you dragged your sorry ass into the room,” Schram said.

  “She’s not a can stacker,” Aaron said, “she’s a coupon snipper.”

  They ran through the whole thing a couple of times. The computer allowed them to run it like a videotape, with fast-forward, rewind, freeze-frame, the whole bit. As they went through it, Schram jotted down notes on a yellow legal pad. Finally they shunted the screens back over to a real-time display of what was happening, right now, in the interview room.

  Nothing was happening. The six faces were a picture of terminal boredom. The good cop and the bad cop had gone away and been replaced by a droning, monotonous voice that was going on and on in some kind of pseudolegal jargon.

  “That’s an actor claiming to be a lawyer for Ogle Data Research,” Ogle explained. “He’s been lecturing them for half an hour while we dicked around with all this stuff.”

  “Let’s see what self-righteous indignation looks like,” Schram said, rising to his feet and heading for the interview room.

  “Ten-four on that,” Ogle said.

  Schram walked into the interview room a moment later and the monitors all went ballistic. Ogle howled like a dog.

  “All the same,” he said, “they all react the same. The hunchback, the shooting, the pornography, and they all reacted differently. But when they’re pissed off, they all look alike. And that’s why self-righteousness is the most powerful force in politics.”

  twenty-seven

  THE FIRST thing he learned how to move was his right thumb. It wasn’t a fluke, either. It was something that William Cozzano worked on constantly from the first moment that he came awake after the implantation.

  Within a day, he was able to make the thumb jerk spasmodically from time to time. By the time they loaded him on the plane and flew him back to Tuscola, two days after the implantation, he was able to jerk it whenever he wanted to.

  Then he learned how to move it both ways, straightening the thumb and then curling it into the palm of his hand. Once he got that down, he repeated it several thousand times, sixteen hours a day, until they gave him sedatives to make him sleep. Eight hours later he would wake up and begin exercising his thumb again.

  For the first few days, neither Mary Catherine nor anyone else could figure out why he was concentrating on the thumb. They had assumed that he would want to work on his speech skills. And he did, from time to time; within a week after the operation, it was possible to watch him playing with muscles in his face. The underside of his jaw throbbed in and out as he moved his tongue around inside his mouth, and his lips began to move, on both sides, jerkily at first and then smoothly. Within five days he had learned to pucker up so that he could give Mary Catherine a kiss when she bent down to offer her cheek.

  But the whole time he was doing these things, his thumb was active. It became a subject of concern among Cozzano’s therapy team—the half-dozen physical therapists, neurologists, and computer people who had moved into some of the unused bedrooms in the Tuscola house to monitor the Governor’s recovery. They had meetings about that thumb, worried about whether the movement was voluntary or involuntary, discussed the idea of taping it down so it wouldn’t get worn out and arthritic over time.

  It all became clear the first time they put a remote control into his hand. By that time, his fingers had developed enough coordination to wrap around the underside of the remote and hold it in place, giving that thumb, now highly coordinated, the freedom to roam around on its top surface, punching buttons. Changing channels. Moving the volume up and down. Activating the VCR to tape certain programs, then playing them back later.

  They decided to give him a test. They arranged a dinner party on a Thursday evening at seven o’clock, knowing that it would interfere with Cozzano’s favorite TV show, a satirical cartoon. He passed that test with flying colors; without any hints or prompting from the therapy team, he used his thumb to program his VCR.

  “He still knows how to do it,” said the head computer person, Peter (Zeldo) Zeldovich. He was awed. “I mean, I wrote half of the Calyx operating system. But I can’t program a VCR.”

  “His memory seems pretty good,” Mary Catherine said. She had driven down from Chicago to attend the dinner, then snuck up to the hallway outside the master bedroom to see Dad rewind the videotape and play back his favorite program.

  The other bedrooms had been turned into a high-tech wonderland. Zeldo filled Mary Catherine’s old bedroom with computers and James’s with communications gear. Mom’s sewing room was full of medical stuff. The two guest bedrooms were set up with bunk beds and mattresses on the floor so that the nurses and therapists could alternate between sleeping and working without leaving the house.

  Everything that Dad did now—every tiny motion of his thumb, every twitch of his lips—had huge informational ramifications that Zeldo could plot and graph on his computer screens. Thousands of connections had now grown into place between Dad’s neurons and the biochip, and hundreds of new ones were still being made every day. All of the impulses passing from his brain outward into his body and back passed through these connections, and could be monitored by the biochip. Even when Dad was sleeping, it amounted to an overwhelming flow of information, like all of the telephone calls being made into or out of Manhattan at a given time.

  There was no way to understand all of it. No way to keep track. The best that Zeldo could do was keep a running tab on what was happening, build up a statistical database, maybe get some sense of which connections were being used for the thumb and which for the left eyebrow. Still, it was fascinating to watch.

  That all of these things worked was no news. The chip had worked in the baboons and it had worked in Mohinder Singh, after all. The real question on their minds was: how much damage had the strokes done to other parts of Cozzano’s mind, for example, memory, personality, cognitive skills?

  The fact that he still wanted to watch the same TV show, still thought it was funny, and still knew how to program his VCR answered several questions. It was good news on all fronts.

  But mostly Cozzano watched the news and public affairs programs about the presidential campaign. They would pin the latest newspapers and magazines up on a reading stand in front of his face and he would pore over them, his eyes flicking back and forth between the coverage on the television and the printed page.

  Only then—after he had got control of the TV channels and had caught up on the newspapers—only then did he start working on speech.

  They set an ambitious schedule for him, worrying that they might stress him out and overwork him, and he left that schedule in the dust. First thing in the morning, the physical therapists came in, at first helping h
im move his limbs, later, when he got the hang of that, running him through exercises. Then the speech therapist came in and got him to put his tongue and lips in certain positions, got him to make certain sounds, and then to string those sounds together into syllables and words. Following an afternoon nap, the physical therapists would come back in and work on the parts of his body that they had missed in the morning. During the evenings he could relax, watch TV, read.

  He exercised his speech during physical therapy and he exercised his body during speech therapy. He also exercised both of them while he was pretending to take his afternoon nap, and then he exercised them all evening long when he was supposed to be taking it easy. He even woke up in the middle of the night and exercised.

  Getting up out of the wheelchair was an ambitious goal that he wouldn’t attempt for a few weeks. In the meantime there were a few things he couldn’t do for himself, such as going to the toilet, taking baths, carrying in wood for the fireplace, and swapping tapes in and out of the VCR. Nurses, aides, and family members had to do these things for him.

  Almost two weeks after the implant, Mary Catherine came down for another visit. She had been doing so much driving that they had gone to the trouble of leasing a car, a brand-new Acura luxury sedan, so that she could make the trip in comfort and safety. The evening she arrived, she had a conversation with Dad.

  “Vee . . . Cee . . . Arrr,” he said.

  “VCR. You want me to do something with the VCR?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. What do you want me to do?”

  Dad aimed the remote shakily toward the TV cabinet and hit the EJECT button. The VCR spat out a tape.

  “You want me to take this out?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want me to put a different tape in?”

  “Yes.”

  The TV cabinet had a shelf along the top with a few dozen videotapes in it, mostly old family tapes or favorite movies. Mary Catherine began running her finger along the line of tapes.

  “New!” Dad blurted.

  “You want a new tape?”

  “Blank.”

  “You want a blank tape.”

  “Yes.”

  Mary Catherine rummaged around in the cabinet until she found a six-pack of fresh blank videocassettes. Dad always bought them half a dozen at a time at Wal-Mart. He always bought everything in vast, bulk quantities, dirt cheap, in huge drafty warehouselike stores out in the middle of the prairie.

  She unwrapped one and stuck it into the machine. “Okay, what should I do with this old one?” she asked, wiggling the tape she had just removed.

  “Label.”

  The fresh videotape had come shipped with a number of blank labels. She peeled a couple of them back and stuck them onto the black shell of the cassette. Then she dug a small felt-tipped marker out of her purse. “What do you want to call this?”

  Dad rolled his eyes as if to indicate that this was not important, he would remember what it was. Mary Catherine grinned and looked him in the eye, pen poised over the tape, challenging him.

  He looked her right back in the eye. “Eee . . . lack . . . sun.”

  “Election.”

  “One,” Dad said. The fingers of his hand trembled and jerked uncertainly. Finally the index finger extended, while the other fingers clenched into a loose, jittering fist.

  “Election One,” Mary Catherine repeated, writing it onto the top and side of the tape. “Does this imply that it’s the first in a series?”

  Dad rolled his eyes again.

  Later, after he had gone to sleep, Mary Catherine curled up on the living room sofa with a bag of microwave popcorn, rewound “Election One,” and watched it.

  It was outtakes from election-related news coverage from the past week or week and a half, ever since Dad’s thumb had gotten nimble enough to control the machine. Most of it had to do with the peculiar, stereotyped behavior patterns of men competing in state primary elections. It made good training for a neurologist. Hours and hours of men walking around under bright lights, moving with the spasmodic gait of candidates. A candidate walked on two legs like a normal man, but every time he sensed that he was in a position that would make a good photograph, he would stop and freeze for a moment as if suffering a petit mal seizure, and turn toward the nearest battery of cameras. No candidate could climb on board a vehicle or enter a building without freezing for a moment and giving the thumbs-up. Handshakes all lasted for hours, and the candidate never looked at the person whose hand he was shaking; he looked toward the audience.

  Super Tuesday, Illinois, and New York were history. California wouldn’t happen for weeks. By this point in the campaign, the nominations were usually settled. But there was nothing settled about them this year. Both parties were running several candidates. The flakes, the paupers, and the weaklings had long since been weeded out. The remaining strong contenders had been beating one another mercilessly. By the time the real campaign began on Labor Day, neither of the two surviving candidates would have any reputation left.

  Maybe the GOP would try to draft Cozzano. But she had to ask herself—Dad had to be asking himself—what was the point of parties anyway? All they did was get in the way. Ogle was right.

  The film crew showed up in Tuscola a few days later. It consisted of a producer, a cameraman, and an audio person who happened to be female. They rented a couple of rooms at the Super 8 Motel on the edge of town, out near I-57, a short drive from the Cozzano residence.

  The producer was named Myron Morris. He came with the personal recommendation of Cyrus Rutherford Ogle, who continued to phone Mary Catherine at work from time to time, just keeping in touch. She had a series of conversations with him: Ogle on a plane or in a car or hotel room somewhere, and Mary Catherine standing in the hallway at the hospital, usually in the neurology ward, where the comings and goings of various paralyzed, epileptic, senile, psychotic, or demented patients provided a useful reality check.

  Ogle had first brought up the idea of a film crew just a few days after the implant. He had gone about this in a typically diplomatic fashion, in a late round of the conversation, after greetings, small talk, chitchat about politics, and a little bit of gentle probing into the Governor’s condition.

  “This is like your baby learning how to walk: it’s only going to happen once,” he pointed out. “And consequently, you’re going to want it on film. It might seem like a weird idea now, but believe me, sooner or later, maybe ten years down the road, you and the Governor are going to wish that you could go back and watch him saying his first words and taking his first steps.”

  “We have a camcorder stashed back in the garage,” Mary Catherine said. “I’ll get it out.”

  “That’s an excellent idea,” Ogle said encouragingly, “and make sure that when you’re finished, you break off the little plastic tab on the videocassette so you can’t record over it by accident.”

  “I’ll do that,” Mary Catherine said, trying to hide the smile in her voice.

  A week later they spoke again. It was the same routine: small talk, chitchat, and all the rest.

  “Did you dig up that long-lost camcorder?” Ogle said knowingly.

  “Yes,” Mary Catherine said.

  “But it doesn’t work.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Old ones never do,” Ogle said. “The first time you put them away in the garage, you lose half the pieces.”

  “There’s a little black box that is supposed to charge up the battery,” Mary Catherine said. “I can’t find it anywhere. Dad knows where it is, but he can’t tell me at this point in his recovery. So maybe I’ll go buy a new one.”

  “Don’t do that,” Ogle said. “There’s too many camcorders floating around the world not being used for you to go spend money on a new one.”

  “I sense that you have a scheme on your mind.”

  “As usual you are right. I know some people. People who are very good working with film and videotape. Who would be glad to com
e in to Tuscola and spend some time videotaping your father’s recovery.”

  “Is that right.”

  “Yes, it is. We could send out a three-person crew as soon as you give the okay.”

  Mary Catherine laughed. “Well, I must say that is an exceedingly generous offer. To think that three people who presumably have jobs and families could come all the way out to Tuscola and donate their time and expertise to making some home movies for the Cozzano family.”

  “Isn’t it a remarkable thing?” Ogle said.

  “You realize that this recovery process is going to stretch out over a period of several weeks. Possibly months.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “Don’t these people have anything better to do during this part of their lives?”

  “Nope. They sure don’t,” Ogle said.

  Mary Catherine let a long pause go by. “What’s going on here?”

  “I’ll tell you,” Ogle said. “Your dad’s gonna get better. I know he is.”

  “I appreciate that confidence.”

  “At that point he’ll be a healthy, strong, middle-aged man with a great deal of popularity, in Illinois and in the rest of the country. And based on his past behavior I have this feeling he’s not ready to retire yet.”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “And I don’t know what he’ll choose to do with the remaining, best years of his life. But would it be fair to say it’s not out of the question that he might continue with his current career in politics?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Well, if he does continue in politics—even if he just wants to run for mayor of Tuscola—I would very much like to serve as his media consultant.”

  “I’m looking at my watch,” Mary Catherine said, “and noting the time. I think you just set a new record.”

  “For what?”

  “For beating around the bush. You’ve been talking to me for a month and this is the first time you’ve come out and said that.”