The Big U

by Neal Stephenson

  “No.”

  “Ah, well.” The strange guy put the shaving cream on the shelf in front of Casimir, muttered something incomprehensible, laughed, and walked out of the bathroom.

  Casimir dried the food bowl under an automatic hand dryer by the door. As he was on his third push of the button, a couple from one of the showers walked nude into the room, getting ten feet from cover before they saw Casimir.

  The woman screamed, clapping her hands over her face. “Oh Jeez, Kevin, there’s a guy in here!” Kevin was too mellowed by sex and beer to do anything but smile wanly. Casimir walked out without saying anything, breathed deeply of the cool, dry air of the hallway, and returned to his room, where he filled Spike’s water bowl with spring water from a bottle.

  As soon as Casimir had heard about Neutrino, the official organization of physics majors, he had crashed a meeting and got himself elected President and Treasurer. Casimir was like that, meek most of the time with occasional bursts of effectiveness. He walked into the meeting, which so far consisted of six people, and said, “Who’s the president?”

  The others, being physics majors and therefore accustomed to odd behavior of all sorts, had answered. “He graduated,” said one.

  “No, when he graduated, he stopped being our president. When the guy who was our president graduated, we instantaneously ceased to have one,” another countered.

  “I agree,” a third added, “but the proper term is ‘was graduated.’”

  “That’s pedantic.”

  “That’s correct. Where’s the dictionary?”

  “Who cares? Why do you want to know?” the first asked. As the other two consulted a dictionary, a fourth member held a calculator in his hand, gnawing absently on the charger cord, and the other two members argued loudly about an invisible diagram they were drawing with their fingers on a blank wall.

  “I want to be president of this thing,” Casimir said. “Any objections?”

  “Oh, that’s okay. We thought you were from the administration or something.”

  Casimir’s motivation for all this was that after the Sharon incident, it was impossible for him to escape from his useless courses. The grimness of what had happened, and the hopelessness of his situation, had left him quiet and listless for a couple of weeks to the point where I was beginning to feel alarmed. One night, then, from two to four in the morning, Casimir’s neighbor had watched Rocky on cable and the sleeping Casimir had subconsciously listened in on the soundtrack. He awoke in the morning with a sense of mission, of destiny, a desire to go out and beat the fuckers at their own game. Neutrino provided a suitable power base, and since his classes only consumed about six hours a week he had all the time in the world.

  Previous to Casimir’s administration most of the money allotted to Neutrino had been dispersed among petty activities such as dinners, trips to nuclear reactors, insipid educational gadgets and the like. Casimir’s plan was to spend all the money on a single project that would exercise the minds of the members and, in the end, produce something useful. Once he had convinced the pliable membership of Neutrino that this was a good idea, his suggestion for the actual project was not long in coming: construction of a mass driver.

  The mass driver was a magnetic device for throwing things. It consisted of a long straight rail, a “bucket” that slid along the rail on a magnetic cushion and powerful electromagnets that kicked the bucket down the rail. When the bucket slammed to a halt at the rail’s end, whatever was in it kept on going—theoretically, very, very fast. Recently this simple machine had become a pet project of Professor Sharon, who had advocated it as a lunar mining tool. Casimir argued that the idea was important and interesting in and of itself, and that Sharon’s connection to it lent it sentimental value. As a tribute to Sharon, a fun project and a toy that would be a blast to play with when finished, the mass driver was irresistible to Neutrino. Which was just as well, because nothing was going to stop Casimir from building this son of a bitch.

  Casimir had been drawing up a budget for it on this particular evening, because budget time for the Student Government was coming up soon. Not long after the exterminator’s visit, Casimir got stuck. Many of the supplies he needed were standard components that were easy for him to get, but certain items, such as custom-wound electromagnets, were hard to budget for. This was the sort of fabrication that had to be done at the Science Shop, and that meant dealing with Virgil Gabrielsen. After nailing down as much as he could, Casimir gathered his things and set out on the half-hour elevator ride to the bottom of the Burrows.

  In the interests of efficiency, security, ease of design and healthy interplay among the departments, the designers of the Campustructure had put all the science departments together in a single bloc. It was known as the Burrows because it was mostly below street level, and because of the allegedly Morlockian qualities of its inhabitants. At the top of the Burrows were the departmental libraries and conference rooms. Below were professors’ offices and departmental headquarters, followed by classrooms, labs, stockrooms and at the very bottom, forty feet below ground level, the enormous CC—Computing Center—and the Science Shop. Any researcher wanting glass blown, metal shaped, equipment fixed, circuits designed or machines assembled, had to come down and beg for succor at the feet of the stony-hearted Science Shop staff. This meant trying to track down Lute, the hyperactive Norwegian technician, rumored to have the power of teleportation, who held smart people in disdain because of their helplessness in practical matters, or Zap, the electronics specialist, a motorcycle gang sergeant-at-arms who spent his working hours boring out engine blocks for his brothers and threatening professors with bizarre and deadly tortures. Zap was the cheapest technician the Science Shop steering committee had been able to find, Lute had been retained at high salary after dire threats from all faculty members and Virgil, to the immense relief of all, had been hired three years earlier as a part-time student helper and had turned the place around.

  Science Shop was at the end of a dark unmarked hallway that smelled of machine oil and neoprene, half blocked by junked and broken equipment. When Casimir arrived he relaxed instantly in the softly lit, wildly varied squalor of the place, and soon found Virgil sipping an ale and twiddling painstakingly with wires and pulleys on an automatic plotter.

  They went into his small office and Virgil provided himself and Casimir with more ale. “What’s the latest on Sharon?” he asked.

  “The same. No word,” Casimir said, pushing the toes of his tennis shoes around in the sawdust and metal filings on the floor. “Not quite in a coma, definitely not all there. Whatever he lost from oxygen starvation isn’t coming back.”

  “And they haven’t caught anyone.”

  “Well, E14 is the Performing Arts Floor. They used to have a room with a piano in it. The E13S people didn’t like it because the Performing Artists were always tap dancing.”

  “We know how sensitive those poor boys are to noise.”

  “A couple of days before the piano crash, the piano was stolen from E14. Two of the tap-dancers had their doors ignited the same night. A couple of days later, E13S had a burning-furniture-throwing contest, and it just happens that at the same time a piano crashed through Sharon’s ceiling. Circumstantial evidence only.”

  Virgil clasped his hands over his flat belly and looked at the ceiling. “Though a pattern of socio-heterodox behaviors has been exhibited by individuals associated with E13S, we find it preferable to keep them within the system and counsel them constructively rather than turn them over to damaging outside legal interference which would hinder resocialization. The Megaversity is a free community of individuals seeking to grow together toward a more harmonious and enlightened future, and introduction of external coercion merely stifles academic freedom and—”

  “How did you know that?” asked Casimir, amazed. “That’s word for word what they said the other day.”

  Virgil shrugged. “Official policy statement. They used it two years ago, in the barbell
incident. E13 dropped a two-hundred-pound barbell through the roof of the Cafeteria’s main kitchen area. It crashed into a pressure vat and caused a tuna-nacho casserole explosion that wounded fifteen. And the pressure is so high in those vats, you know, that Dr. Forksplit, the Dean of Dining Services, who was standing nearby, had a nacho tortilla chip shard driven all the way through his skull. He recovered, but they’ve called him Wombat ever since. The people who handle this in the Administration don’t understand how deranged these students are. Now, Krupp and his people would like to pour molten lead down their throats, but they can’t do anything about it—the decisions are made by a committee of tenured faculty.”

  Casimir resisted an impulse to scream, got up and paced around talking through clenched teeth. “This shit really, really pisses me off. It’s incredible. Law doesn’t exist here, you can do what you please.”

  “Well,” said Virgil, still blasé, “I disagree. There’s always law. Law is just the opinion of the guy with the biggest gun. Since outside law rarely matters in the Plex, we make our own law, using whatever power—whatever guns—we have. We’ve been very successful in the Science Shop.”

  “Oh, yeah? I suppose this was something to do with what you said the other day about some unofficial work here for me.”

  “That’s a perfect example. The researchers of American Megaversity need your services. It’s illegal, but the scientific faculty have more power than the rule-enforcers, so we make our own law regarding technical work. You keep track of what you do, and I pay you through the vitality fund.

  “The what?”

  “The fund made up of donations from various professors and firms who have a vested interest in keeping the Science Shop running smoothly. Hell, it’s all just grant money. In the egalitarian system we had before, nobody got anything done.”

  “Look.” Casimir shook his head and sat back down. “I don’t want even to hear all this. You know, all I’ve ever wanted to be is a normal student. They won’t let me take decent classes, okay, so I work on the mass driver. Now I come here to get your help and you start talking about local law and free enterprise. I just want some estimates from you on getting these electromagnets wound for the mass driver. Okay? Forget free enterprise.” Casimir dropped a page of diagrams and specifications on Virgil’s desk.

  Virgil looked it over. “Well, it depends,” he finally said. “If we pretend you’re just a normal student, then I will charge you, oh, about ten thousand dollars for this stuff and have it done by the time you graduate. Now, unofficially, I could log it in as something much simpler and charge you less. But you can’t put that into a formal budget proposal. Very unofficially, I might do it for a small bribe, like some help from you around the Shop. But that’s really abnormal to put in a budget. Looks like you’re stuck.”

  “It wouldn’t really take you three years.”

  “It would take me.” Virgil waved at the door. “Zap could do it in a week. Want to ask him? He’s not hard to wake up.”

  Casimir brooded momentarily. “Well, look. I don’t really care how it gets done. But it’s necessary to have something on paper, you know?”

  Virgil shook his head, smiling. “Casimir. You don’t think anyone pays any attention to those budgets, do you?”

  “Aw, shit. This is too weird for me.”

  “It’s not weird, you’re just not used to it yet. Here is what we’ll do. We work out a friendly gentlemen’s agreement by which I make the magnets for you, probably over Christmas vacation, in exchange for a little of your expert help around the Science Shop. When I’m done with the magnets I put them in an old box and mark it, say, ‘SPARE PARTS, 1932 AUTOMATIC BOMBSIGHT PROTOTYPE. I dump it in the storeroom. When budget time comes around you say, ‘Oh, gee, it happens I’ve designed this thing to use existing parts, I know just where they are.’ Ridiculous, but no one knows that, and those who understand won’t want to meddle in any arrangement of mine.”

  “Okay!” Casimir threw up his hands. “Okay. Fine. I’ll do it. Just tell me what to do and don’t let me see any of this illegal stuff.”

  “It’s not illegal, I said it was legal. Hang on a sec while I Xerox these pages.”

  Virgil opened the door and was met by a clamor of voices from several advanced academic figures. Casimir looked around the room: a firetrap stuffed with books and papers and every imaginable variety of electronic junk. A Geiger counter hung out the window into a deep air shaft, clicking every second or two. In one corner a 1940’s radio was hooked up to a technical power supply and wired into the guts of a torn-open telephone so that Virgil could make hands-off phone calls. An old backless TV in another corner enabled Virgil to monitor the shop outside. Electronic parts, hunks of wire, junk-food wrappers and scraps of paper littered the floor. And in three separate places sat those little plastic trays Casimir saw everywhere, overflowing with tiny seeds—rat poison.

  “Damn!” spat Casimir as Virgil reentered. “There’s enough of that poison in this room alone to kill every rat in this city. What’s their problem with that stuff anyway?”

  Virgil snorted. Everyone knew the rat poison was ubiquitous; the wastebaskets might go a month without emptying, but when it came to rat poison the B-men were fearsomely diligent, seeming to pass through walls and locked doors like Shaolin priests to scatter the poison-saturated kernels. “It’s cultural,” he explained. “They hate rats. You should read some Scythian mythology. In Crotobaltislavonia it’s a capital crime to harbor them. That’s why they had a revolution! The old regime stopped handing out free rat poison.”

  “I’m serious,” said Casimir. “I’ve got an illegal kitten in my room, and if they keep breaking in to spread poison, they’ll find it or let it out or poison it.”

  “Or eat it. Seriously, you should have mentioned it, Casimir. Let me help you out.”

  Casimir rested his face in his hand. “I suppose you also have an arrangement with the B-men.”

  “No, no, much too complicated. I do almost all my work at the computer terminal, Casimir. You can accomplish anything there. See, a few years ago a student had a boa constrictor in his room that got poisoned by the B-men, and even though it was illegal he sued the university for damages and won. There are still a lot of residents with pets whom the administration doesn’t want to antagonize, because of connections or whatever. Some students are even allergic to the poison. So, they keep a list of rooms which are not to be given any poison. All I have to do is put your room on it.”

  Casimir was staring intently at Virgil. “Wait a minute. How did you get that kind of access? Aren’t there locks? Access checks?”

  “There are some annoyances involved.”

  “I suppose with photographic memory you could do a lot on the computer.”

  “Helps to have the Operator memorized too.”

  “Oh, fuck! No!”

  Casimir, I am sure, was just as surprised as I had been. The Operator was an immense computer program consisting entirely of numbers—machine code. Without it, the machine was a useless lump. With the Operator installed, it was a tool of nearly infinite power and flexibility. It was to the computer as memory, instinct and intelligence are to the human brain.

  Virgil handed Casimir a canister of paper computer tape. The label read, “1843 SURINAM CENSUS DATA VOLUME 5. FIREWOOD USAGE ESTIMATES AND PROJECTIONS.”

  “Ignore that,” said Virgil. “It’s a program in machine code. It’ll put your room on the no-poison list, and your cat will be safe, unless the B-men forget or decide to ignore the rule, which is a possibility.”

  Casimir barely looked at the tape and stared distantly at Virgil. “What have you been doing with this knowledge?” he whispered. “You could get back at E13S.”

  Virgil smiled. “Tempting. But when you can do what I can, you don’t go for petty revenge. All I do, really, is fight the Worm, which is really my only passion these days. It’s why I stay around instead of getting a decent job. It’s a sabotage program. It’s probably the greatest intellec
tual achievement of the nineteen-eighties, and it’s the only thing I’ve ever found that is so indescribably difficult and complex and beautiful that I haven’t gotten bored with it.”

  “Why would anyone do such a thing? It must be costing the Megaversity millions.”

  “I don’t know,” said Virgil, “but it’s great to have a challenge.”

  Sarah and I were in her room with my toolbox. Outside, the Terrorists were trying to get in. I sat on her bed, as she had commanded, silent and neutral.

  “When did they start calling themselves the Terrorists,” she asked during a lull.

  “Who knows? Maybe Wild and Crazy Guys was too old-fashioned.”

  “Maybe the hijacking of the NATO tank yesterday gave them the idea. That got lots of coverage. Shit, here they are again.”

  Cheerfully screaming, another Airhead was dragged down the hall to be given her upside-down cold shower. The original Terrorist plan had been to drag the Airheads to the bathroom by their hair, as in olden times, but after a few tries they were convinced that this really was painful, so now they were holding on to the feet.

  “Terrorists, Terrorists, we’re a mean, sonofabitch,” came a hoarse chant as a new group gathered in front of Sarah’s door. “Come on, Sarah,” their leader shouted in a heavy New York accent. He was trying to sound fatherly and patient, but instead sounded anxious and not very bright. “It’ll be a lot better for you if you just come out now. We’re tickling Mitzi right now and she’s going to tell us where the master key is, and once we get that we’ll come in and you’ll get ad-dition-al pun-ish-ment.”

  “God,” Sarah whispered to me, “these dorks think I’m just playing hard-to-get. Hope they enjoy it.”

  “Give the word and I’ll shoo them off,” I said again.

  “Wouldn’t help. I have to deal with this myself. Don’t be so mach.”

  “Sorry. Sometimes it works to be macho, you know.”

  Their previous effort to flash her out of her room had failed. “Flashing” was the technique of squirting lighter fluid under a door and throwing in a match. It wasn’t as dangerous as it sounded, but it invariably smoked the victim out. Powdering was a milder form of this: an envelope was filled with powder, its mouth slid under the door, and the envelope stomped on, exploding a cloud of powder into the room. Three days earlier this had been done to Sarah by some Airheads. A regular vacuum cleaner just blew the powder out again, so we brought my wet/dry vacuum up and filled it with water and had better results, though she and her room still smelled like babies. She had purchased a heavy rubber weatherstrip from the Mall’s hardware store and we had just finished installing it when the flashing attempt had taken place. From listening to the Terrorists on the other side of the door, I had now become as primitive as they had—it was no longer a negotiable situation—and was itching to knock heads.