Interface

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  “It was not half-bad,” Cozzano said. He was sitting in the backseat of his car, next to Zeldo. His driver and an Illinois State Patrolman were in the front. They were driving down a two-lane blacktop road at eighty miles an hour, accompanied by one of Ogle’s vehicles, a Secret Service car, and a few Highway Patrol cruisers. It had taken them several hours to get to Decatur this morning because they’d taken a circuitous route through Champaign and Springfield. But on the direct route, at this speed, Tuscola was minutes away.

  Zeldo’s brain was practically overloaded by everything that had just happened, but to him the most marvelous thing about the whole night was that they were driving eighty miles an hour—with a state patrolman right there in the car with them.

  He shook his head and tried to concentrate on matters at hand. Cozzano had turned on a little courtesy light that shone a pool of golden light into his lap, and was jotting down some notes. Zeldo watched the Governor’s right hand, gripping the thick barrel of an expensive fountain pen so tightly it looked like it might burst and spray ink all over the car. He wrote in shaky block letters, one at a time, like a first grader. His recovery had far exceeded their wildest hopes, and a person who did not know of his stroke would never notice anything was wrong—except when he tried to write. Cozzano knew this, it infuriated him, and he spent a lot of time practicing his penmanship, trying to erase this last vestige of weakness.

  “We’ve got a lot of data to crank through. We’re going to do a core dump on this whole night,” Zeldo said. “Analyze it every which way. Then we’ll go over the results with you.”

  “Good,” Cozzano said, thinking about something else.

  “I just have one question,” Zeldo said. Cozzano looked up at him expectantly, and Zeldo hesitated for a moment.

  Even after all the time they’d spent together, Cozzano made him nervous. Zeldo always got thick-tongued and self-conscious when he was about to ask the Governor something personal, something he suspected that Cozzano might not appreciate. Like a lot of powerful men—like Zeldo’s boss, Kevin Tice—Cozzano didn’t suffer fools gladly.

  “What was it like?” Zeldo said.

  “What was what like?” Cozzano said.

  “You’re the only person in history who’s ever done this, so I don’t know how to ask. I know it’s a vague question. But someday I’d like to get an implant of my own, you know.”

  “So you’ve said,” Cozzano said.

  “So I’m trying to get some sense of what it’s like to communicate in that way—transmissions from outside, bypassing all the sensory subsystems, going directly into the brain’s neural net.”

  “I’m still not sure if I follow,” Cozzano said.

  Zeldo started to grope. “Normally we get input through our senses. Information comes down the optic nerve, or through the nerves in our skin or whatever. Those nerves are hooked up to parts of the brain that act like filters between ourselves and our environment.”

  Cozzano nodded slightly, more out of politeness than anything else. He was still nonplussed. But one good thing about Cozzano was that he was always game for an intellectual discussion.

  “Ever see an optical illusion?” Zeldo said, trying a new tack.

  “Of course.”

  “An optical illusion is what we computer people would call a hack—an ingenious trick that takes advantage of a defect in our brain, a bug if you will, to make us see something that’s not really there. Normally our brains are too smart for that. Like, when you watch something on television, you understand that it’s not really happening—it’s just an image on a screen.”

  “I think I’m following you now,” Cozzano said.

  “The inputs you were getting from Ogle tonight didn’t pass through any of your normal filters—they went straight into your brain, kind of like an optical illusion does. What’s that like?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean by inputs,” Cozzano said.

  “The signals he was sending you from his chair.”

  Suddenly Cozzano’s face crinkled up in amusement and he chuckled. “Oh, that business,” he said. Then he shook his head indulgently. “I know you guys have a lot of fun with that stuff. It’s all just parlor tricks. Was Cy doing any of that nonsense tonight?”

  “He was doing it more or less constantly,” Zeldo said.

  “Well, then you can tell him to stop wasting his time,” Cozzano said, “because it didn’t have any effect. I didn’t notice a thing. Zeldo, have you ever been in a situation like that? Debating on live television before millions of people?”

  “I can’t say that I have,” Zeldo said.

  “You get into a sort of zone, as the football players like to say. Every minute seems to last an hour. You forget about all the lights and cameras and audience and become totally focused on the event itself, the exchange of ideas, the rhetorical counterplay. I can assure you that if Cy Ogle were to walk onto the set during one of those debates and throw a bucket of ice water over my head, I wouldn’t even notice it. So none of that silly business with the buttons and joysticks has any effect.”

  “Didn’t it stimulate memories and images?”

  Cozzano grinned paternally. “Son, the mind is a complicated bit of business. It is a churning sea of memories and images and everything else. My mind is always filled with competing ideas. If Cy wants to toss in one or two extras, then he’s welcome to do so, but it’s kind of like pissing in the ocean.”

  Cozzano stopped talking and got a distant look in his eyes.

  “What’s going on?” Zeldo said.

  “For example, right now my mind is full of images, an overwhelming flood of memories and ideas—you have any idea how many memories are buried in the mind? Fishing for bluegill on Lake Argyle with my father, the hook caught in his thumb, forcing it through the other side and cutting it off with wirecutters, the severed barb flying dangerously into the air spinning its cut facet gleaming in the sun and I jerking back for fear it would plunge into my eye, squinting protectively, opening my eyes again it is mud, all mud, a universe of mud and the mortar shell has just taken flight, my fingers jammed into my ears, the smell of the explosion penetrating my sinuses making them clench up and bleed, the shell exploding in the trees, a puff of white smoke but the trees are still there and the gunfire still raining down like hailstones on the cellar door on the day that the tornado wrecked our farmhouse and we packed into my aunt’s fruit cellar and I looked up at the stacked mason jars of rhubarb and tomatoes and wondered what would happen to us when the glass shattered and flew through the air like the horizontal sleet of Soldier Field on the day that I caught five for eighty-seven yards and put such a hit on Cornelius Hayes that he took five minutes to get up. God, I can see my entire life! Stop the car! Stop the car!”

  Then William A. Cozzano froze up entirely, except for his eyes which were jittering back and forth in their sockets, irises opening and closing sporadically, focus changing in and out as they tried to lock on to things that weren’t actually there.

  They pulled onto the shoulder, opened the back doors of the car, and laid Cozzano out full-length on the backseat. But then he sprang back up, slid out the open door into the roadside ditch, and began to march into a field of eight-foot-high corn, bellowing in Italian. At first it was just inchoate noise, but then it settled down into a passable rendition of an aria from Verdi, baritone stuff, a bad-guy role. The state patrolmen did not know what to do, whether or not they should try to restrain him, so they did what cops do when they feel uncertain: they shone lights on him. He had thoughtfully removed his suit jacket and so his white shirt, neatly trisected by suspenders, stood out brilliantly among the cornstalks. He was walking across the field, leaving trampled stalks in his wake, followed at a respectful distance by a couple of the patrolmen. His course zigged and zagged, but he seemed to be settling on one particular direction. He was headed for the only landmark in the vicinity: a tall narrow tower that rose from the field several hundred feet from the road, with blinking red ligh
ts.

  “The red lights,” one of the patrolmen said. “He’s attracted by the lights!”

  But Zeldo just shook his head. Right now his brain was almost as overloaded as Cozzano’s, and it was all he could do to force an explanatory word out: “Microwaves.”

  Cozzano finally collapsed a stone’s throw from the microwave relay tower. The patrolmen rushed inward, converged on him, hoisted him into the air, and began to hustle him back.

  By the time they got him back to the car he was thrashing around again, but the spittle and blood around his mouth told Zeldo that he’d had a seizure and probably bitten his tongue. “Let’s get out of here!” Zeldo said.

  Zeldo had already folded down the rear seat of Cozzano’s sport/utility vehicle and opened the tailgate. They threw him in back like a heavy roll of carpet. “Go! Go!” Zeldo shouted, and the driver pulled off the shoulder and down the road, all four tires burning rubber.

  Cozzano relaxed and, apropos of nothing, quoted a lengthy passage, verbatim, from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades. Then he was silent for a while.

  Then he said, “Why the hell is the tailgate open? You want us to end up like Bianca Ramirez?”

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak wanted to sleep but his thoughts would not let him. He lay on his mattress having an imaginary discussion inside of his head, moving his lips and gesturing with his hands in the air as he debated politics with William A. Cozzano and Tip McLane. The more he went over the discussion in his head, the clearer his thoughts became, and he kept finding new ways to explain them. Finally he decided that he would write them down.

  The light over the kitchen table hurt his eyes. He held one hand over his face as a visor and tripped around the kitchen looking for something to write with. Eventually he located the stub of a pencil on top of the fridge. Back next to his mattress was his weight bench and underneath that was a box full of weights and dumbell parts. In the bottom of that, under all the weights, was an old spiral notebook with half the pages missing, which he had used to record his progress when he was sticking to his weight-lifting program. He turned it to a fresh page and tossed it onto the kitchen table; directly under the light, the white page was very bright and made him squint. He grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat down to collect his thoughts.

  He took the address from the videotape, as Aaron Green had told him to do.

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak

  R.R. 6 Box 895

  Davenport, Iowa

  Aaron Green

  Ogle Data Research

  Pentagon Towers

  Arlington, Virginia

  Dear Mr. Green:

  I am writing this letter to you to express my additional thoughts and opinions, which you said you wanted to hear all about. Maybe you have already forgotten about me since I am just a nobody who lives in a trailer. But we have seen each other face-to-face once, and maybe we will again. This is about the Debate that was tonight in Decatur, Illinois, not so very far from where I live.

  It is real interesting that one hundred years ago people were thinking the same things they are now about the Wall Street financial kingpins running the country. How ironic that still nothing has changed. I wonder why that is. Maybe it is because all of the politicians run on money, money, money.

  McLane is power-grubbing scum and you can see it in his face and in how he acts, like a stiff. That is because if he acts natural and tells the truth he will probably offend someone who is feeding him money.

  But Cozzano is an honest man and he tells it straight. He is the only honest man up there because he is the only one who is not running for anything. To me, the favorite part of the debate was when he invited McLane to step outside. I felt good when I heard Cozzano speak those words of righteousness, like out of the Bible, and I truly wanted to see his fist smashing into McLane’s face.

  I bet that you got some good reactions off my wristwatch at that moment. I bet the readings all went off the scale. Now you probably think that I am some kind of a violent person.

  But in my heart that is not the real truth. When I lay in bed I felt ashamed to think that I had felt such violent thoughts. Even if Tip McLane is a shithead it would not be OK to punch him out because that is not the basis of our democratic system. So I think that I would not vote for Cozzano after tonight’s debate, no matter what your computer system said about me. Please make a note of it.

  You will be hearing again from me soon, I am sure.

  Sincerely, Floyd Wayne Vishniak

  thirty-nine

  DR. MARY Catherine Cozzano finished her neurology residency during the last week of June. She spent a couple of days in Chicago celebrating with her fellow graduates, but during the past four years they had forgotten how to goof off, and it took a positive effort to have fun. Then she moved back into her old bedroom in Tuscola. She wasn’t crazy about moving back home at the age of thirty, but she needed a quiet place in which to study for the board exams. She didn’t have a job lined up yet, and probably wouldn’t, at least until things settled down, which would not be until Election Day.

  Besides, the house was still partly occupied by technical personnel from the Radhakrishnan Institute, their computers were all over the place, and so she could almost convince herself that she was actually living in an advanced neurological research center. She spent an hour or two each day going over the records of Dad’s recovery, learning about the therapy and how it worked. As Dad had gotten the basic rehab out of the way—learning to walk, learning to talk—his staff of therapists had withered away to a handful who helped him with things like writing. In the same way, the high-tech people had dwindled, going back to the Radhakrishnan Institute and leaving high-bandwidth communications links in their place, so that they could monitor the biochip from the other side of the country. Zeldo had told her at the beginning of June that he too would be leaving soon, but he was still here, sleeping on the floor of James’s old bedroom, which had become a weird mixture of James’s adolescent decor (ILLINI pennants and Michael Jordan posters) with appallingly pricey, high-powered computer gear. When Mary Catherine asked Zeldo why he was still here, he broke eye contact and muttered some hacker aphorism about how hard it was to chase down the last few bugs.

  She wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that her father was now right-handed.

  On the night of the State of the Union address, the blood clot had shot up Dad’s aortal arch, the giant superhighway that carried almost all of the heart’s output. It had spun off into two separate fragments. One had gone up each of the carotid arteries, left and right. The one on the right had caused paralysis on the left side of his body, and the one on the left had nailed that hemisphere’s speech centers, causing aphasia.

  Then, a couple of months later, in the den, the second stroke had caused more damage to the left side of his brain, causing paralysis on the right side of his body.

  Dad’s soul could make the decision to move, and his brain could issue the order to his arm or leg, but the order never got there because the links had been severed by the stroke. Dr. Radhakrishnan had implanted two chips, one on each side of the brain. Their function was to replace those broken links so that the orders to move could get out to his body again. Now that the chips had been trained to convey messages to the correct body parts, Dad’s paralysis was gone.

  But aphasia was a different thing. It wasn’t just paralysis of the tongue. It went deeper than that. And you couldn’t simulate it with baboons. It was uncanny that this therapy had worked so well the first time out. Dad sounded like Dad, and said the things that Dad would say, but sometimes when he was talking, she suddenly became disoriented, stopped listening to him, and began to wonder where his words were coming from, whether they were passing through the biochip. Dad could tell when Mary Catherine was doing this; he called it “going neurologist” and it drove him crazy.

  She felt flaccid and out of shape after four years of residency. Every morning she would rise at five and go for a run. Any later in the day, and it would g
et so warm and sticky that she couldn’t really get a good workout. Besides, she had done much worse things to her sleep schedule during residency and so she didn’t mind getting up early to do something she felt good about.

  Her usual route took her down the street to the city park, where she would take a couple of laps around the softball diamond and do some stretching on the infield. Then she would head out of town, crossing U.S. 45 and the Illinois Central, and run along one of the farm roads, measuring her distance by counting the crossroads, which came at one-mile intervals. Central Illinois in July was stiflingly humid, and as often as not she found herself running through fog and mist. The early morning sunlight, shining in low, threw a clammy metallic haze over the landscape.

  On the morning of the Fourth of July, a shape materialized in front of Mary Catherine as she jogged down the country road. At first she thought it was a car coming toward her in the wrong lane, but then she realized that it was not moving. She thought it must be a car that had broken down. As she got closer she could see a dark shape standing next to the car, motionless, waiting. She unzipped her belt pack and reached into it, making sure that the stun gun was in there.

  It was a small car, low to the ground. A sporty little Mercedes. A big hand-lettered sign was leaning against the rear bumper, printed on a square of poster board. It said, MARY CATHERINE—DON’T MAKE A SOUND!

  The figure leaning against the car was Mel Meyer. As Mary Catherine approached, Mel straightened up and turned to face her, holding one finger up to his lips, shushing her.