Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  “Willy? Willy, are you all right?” The secretary sounded hushed, almost awed.

  “Call.” This command did not sound finished; the man wanted to say, “Call someone,” but he could not summon forth the name. “Call whom?”

  “Goddamn it, call her!” The man’s voice was deep, his enunciation flawless. “Call whom?”

  “The three-alarm lamp scooter.” “Mary Catherine?” “Yes, goddamn it!”

  “That’s all there is,” Mr. Salvador said, switching off the machine. Dr. Radhakrishnan raised his eyebrows and took a deep breath. “Well, based on this kind of evidence, it’s difficult-”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Mr. Salvador said, now sounding a bit annoyed, “it’s hard for you to speculate and you can’t say anything on the record and all that. I understand your position, doctor. But I attempting to engage you in a purely abstract discussion. Perhaps it would have been better if we had met over dinner, rather than in such a formal setting. We could arrange that, if it would help to get you in the right frame of mind.”

  Radhakrishnan felt miserably stupid. “That would be difficult to arrange in Elton,” he said, “unless you are very fond of chili.”

  Mr. Salvador laughed. It sounded forced. But it was nice to make the effort.

  “Speaking very abstractly, then,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said, “if the stroke hit his frontal lobes, he may very well have personality changes, which my therapy could not fix. If that part of his brain was spared, then the cursing probably reflects frustration. Your friend, I would wager, is a successful and powerful man, and you imagine how such a man would feel if he could not even say simple sentences.”

  “Yes, that puts it in a new light.”

  “But I can’t say much more than that without more data.”

  “Understood.” Then, offhandedly, as if asking for directions to the men’s room, Salvador said: “Can you fix the aphasia, then? Assuming your off-the-cuff diagnosis is correct.”

  “Mr. Salvador, I hardly know where to begin.”

  Mr. Salvador took out a cigar, a mahogany baseball bat of a thing, and scalped it with a tiny pocket guillotine. “Begin at the beginning,” he suggested. “Care for a cigar?”

  “To begin with,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said, accepting the cigar, “there are ethical questions that entirely rule our performing an experimental procedure on a human subject. So far we’ve only done this on baboons.”

  “Let us do a little thought experiment in which we set aside, for the time being, the ethical dimension,” Mr. Salvador said. “Then what?”

  “Well, if a doctor were willing to do this, and the patient fully understood what he was getting into, we would first have to build the biochips. In order to do this we would have to take a biopsy a few weeks ahead of time, that is, take an actual sample of the patient’s brain tissue, then genetically reengineer the nerve cells - in and of itself, hardly a trivial operation - and grow them in vitro until we had enough.”

  “You do that here?”

  “We have an arrangement with a biotech firm in Seattle.”

  “Which one, Cytech or Genomics?”

  “Genomics.”

  “What is their role?”

  “They implant the desired chromosome and then culture the cells in vitro.”

  “They grow them in a tank,” Mr. Salvador translated.

  “Yes.”

  “How long does that phase last?”

  “A couple of weeks usually. Cell culture is dodgy. Once we had gotten the cultured cells back from Seattle, we would fabricate the biochips.”

  “How long does that take?” Mr. Salvador was obsessed with time.

  “A few days. Then we would proceed to the implantation.”

  “The actual operation.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “We identify the dead portions of the brain and remove them cryosurgically. It’s rather like a dentist drilling out a cavity, cutting away damaged material until he hits a sound part of the tooth.”

  Mr. Salvador winced exquisitely.

  “When we do this on baboons, we do it in a specially con­structed operating room here that is not sterile. It is not even minimally fit for humans. So in order to do this operation on a human, it would be necessary to build a specially designed operating theater from scratch. The operating room would prob­ably cost more than this entire building in which we are sitting.”

  This last statement was intended to scare Mr. Salvador off, but it seemed only to bore him. “Have you ever got to the point of drawing up plans and specifications for such a facility?”

  “Yes, in a speculative way.” Anyone who knew the first thing about grantsmanship always had that kind of thing lying around, to demonstrate the need for far greater amounts of money.

  “May I take a copy with me?”

  “The plans are on disk. You’ll need a fairly powerful Calyx system just to open them up.”

  “Is that some sort of computer thing? Calyx?”

  “Yes. A parallel operating system.”

  “It is something that one could buy?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Who makes it?”

  “It’s an open system. So there are many such machines on the market - mostly aimed at engineers and scientists.”

  “Who makes the best sort of Calyx machine?”

  “Well, it was invented by Kevin Tice, of course.”

  Mr. Salvador smiled. “Ah, yes. Mr. Tice. Pacific Netware. Marin Country. Superb. I shall see if Mr. Tice can supply us with a nice machine that will run his Calyx operating system.”

  Dr. Radhakrishnan assumed that Mr. Salvador was employing a bit of synecdoche here. But he was not entirely sure. “If you do get access to a Calyx machine, with the proper CAD/CAM software, these disks will run on it.”

  “Then I would be delighted to take a disk with me, with your permission,” Mr. Salvador said. Without further discussing that issue of permission, he continued, “Now, what happens after the operation?”

  “Once the implantation had been performed, if the patient did not die in the process, there would be a period of a few weeks in which we would keep him on antirejection meds and monitor him closely in order to make sure that his body did not reject the implant. Assuming it worked, he would then have to be retrained. The patient tries to move the paralyzed part of his body. If the movement is correct, then we instruct the chip to remember the pathway taken by the signals from the brain into the nerve. If it is incorrect, we instruct the chip to block that path. Gradually, the good paths get reinforced and the bad ones get blocked.”

  “How do you instruct the chip? How do you give it feedback, as it were, once it is implanted inside the patient’s head?”

  “It includes a miniaturized radio receiver. We have a transmitter that simply broadcasts the instructions directly into the patient’s skull.”

  “Fascinating. Utterly fascinating,” Mr. Salvador said, sincerely enough. “And what is the range of this transmission?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Well, how far away from the transmitter can the patient be?”

  Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled the same smile he had used with Jackman. “You misconstrue me,” he said. “We do not use radio transmission because we need to talk to the patient’s biochip from a distance. We use it because this enables us to communicate with the biochip without using an actual wire through the skull into the brain.

  “I see, of course,” Mr. Salvador said dismissively. “But radio is radio, isn’t it?”

  Dr. Radhakrishnan smiled and nodded. He could not find any way to disagree with the statement “radio is radio.”

  8

  Aaron Green faked it for a whole week, throwing his IMIPREM into the trunk of his rented Dynasty every day and hawking his wares up and down the length of Wilshire Boulevard. Then he got up one morning, rummaged through his briefcase, emptied out the pocket where he stuffed people’s business cards, and pulled one out. Plain black ink on w
hite paper: CY OGLE -President - Ogle Data Research, Inc.

  Ogle was the guy. The man who had taken one quick look at his IMIPREM, in the least auspicious circumstances, and recognized its value. A guy as smart as Ogle didn’t need any sales pitch. No fancy presentations.

  Aaron had known ever since their conversation on the plane that he would eventually make this phone call. But he had forced himself to stick to the original plan for a week anyway.

  Enough of that. The card listed offices in Falls Church, Virginia, and Oakland, California. Hardly auspicious. Aaron dialed the number in Oakland, steeling himself for a lengthy round of telephone tag.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice said.

  “Hello?” Aaron said, caught off guard. He had been expecting a secretary.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Excuse me,” Aaron said, “I was trying to reach-”

  “Mr. Green!” the man said, and Aaron recognized him as Cy Ogle himself. “How are you doing down there in Holl-ee-wood? Are you having a fabulous time?”

  Aaron laughed. He had assumed, on the plane, that Ogle must have been drunk. But now he sounded the same. Either Ogle was drunk all the time, or never.

  “I don’t think I’ll be putting my handprints in cement anytime soon.”

  “Had many interesting conversations with those big media moguls?” Aaron decided to test Cy Ogle. “They’re all teflon golems.”

  “And all of your scientific arguments just slide right off their hightech, nonstick surface,” Ogle said without skipping a beat.

  ‘What’s going on?” Aaron asked. “You answering your own telephone now?”

  “Yup.”

  “It’s just that I figured, being president of your own company and all, you’d have a secretary or something.” “I do,” Ogle said. “But she’s a real good secretary, so I’m not going to waste her time having her answer the phone.

  “Well,” Aaron said, “I don’t want to waste your time. You must be busy.”

  “I’m busy pushing on the gas pedal and keeping this old gas-guzzler between the white lines,” Ogle said.

  “Oh. You’re driving?”

  “Yeah. Going to Sacramento to sell the Governor a bill of goods.”

  “Oh. Well as long as you and I were on the same coast-”

  “You thought we should get together about your IMIPREM.”

  “Exactly,” Aaron said. He was pleased that Ogle still remem­bered the acronym.

  “Let me ask you one question,” Ogle said. “Could you make it small?”

  “The IMIPREM? What do you mean?”

  “It’s big now. Bigger than a breadbox, as we used to say. Got a big old power supply built into it, I would guess. Is there any intrinsic reason you couldn’t miniaturize it? Make it portable? Say, Walkman sized, or even smaller, like wristwatch sized?”

  “It would be a major project-”

  “Stop trying to be a business executive,” Ogle said. “I don’t want your opinion of this from a major project point of view. I want you to do what you do best. Now, a V-8 engine can’t be small; it won’t work. But a calculator can be small. Is the IMIPREM a V-8 engine or a calculator?”

  “A calculator.”

  “Done. Now stop worrying about all this business shit. Go to Disneyland.”

  “Huh?”

  “Or the Universal Studios tour. Or something. I won’t be back until tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  “This afternoon, before traffic gets screwed up, go to LAX and take a shuttle up to San Francisco and a car will meet you. Bring everything.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “We got a new project underway, since I last talked to you, that you are going to just love,” Cy Ogle said. “You are just going to love it.”

  Then Ogle hung up the phone.

  Aaron considered showing up in the full set of Mickey Mouse ears, just to prove that he had in fact gone to Disneyland. But he decided at the last minute that this would be just a little bit too off-the-wall. So he opted for a simple, oversized, 100 percent cotton Goofy T-shirt. A T-shirt was more conservative than a set of ears, and Aaron had a feeling that Cyrus Rutherford Ogle would relate better, somehow, to Goofy.

  When he came off the plane in San Francisco, a man was standing by the gate holding a hand-lettered sign that said A. GREEN. The driver seemed to read everything in his face, and ventured into the torrent of deplaning businessmen to take Aaron’s IMIPREM case out of his hand before Aaron had even identified himself.

  The driver was named Mike. He wasn’t a uniformed chauffeur or anything like that, just a normal-looking black kid of eighteen or twenty, wearing a black T-shirt. Quiet, courteous, and efficient.

  After a brief wait by the baggage carousel, Mike led him out to a navy-blue Ford Taurus with an oversized engine and lots of antennas (innocuous but powerful; correct but not ostentatious; comfortable but not decadent) and drove him up the freeway to the Bay Bridge and across to Oakland, surging from lane to lane (decisive but not reckless). They exited shortly after getting into Oakland and then cruised down into a semirenovated downtown area and from there into a not-so-renovated area on the fringe of the waterfront warehouse district.

  A number of the buildings down here were well on their way to being trashed, but as usual in California, there were a few nice ones that stood out, not so much because they’d been perfectly main­tained, but because they had been well-designed to begin with.

  One of the best was a big old Art Deco Cadillac dealership, a glass-walled flatiron of a building set in the angle of two diverging avenues. The ground floor was huge and wide open, with ceilings that looked some twenty-five feet high, completely wrapped in tinted glass. That was the showroom; behind it, farther back into the block, was garage space. Above this ground floor were four or five additional floors of office space. On top of the building, the word CADILLAC was written large in orange neon script, looming over the intersection in letters that must have stood twenty feet high. Beneath that, mounted high on the prow of the building, was a big clock, a full story high, its numbers and hands outlined in more neon. The neon worked but the clock didn’t.

  Most of the big windows were in surprisingly good shape. A few of them had fist-sized holes in them, backed up with sheets of plywood, and the wide, double glass doors that had once beckoned would-be Cadillac buyers into the dealership had been rebuilt in plywood and painted black. The upper floors of the building looked empty. A few yellowed windowshades hung askew. It wasn’t until Mike pulled the Taurus up in front of the black plywood doors, and Aaron saw the street number spray-painted across them in orange, that he realized this address matched the one printed on Cy Ogle’s business card.

  Once Aaron entered the showroom, his eyes adjusted well enough to see that it was mostly empty. No desks, no Cadillacs. He pulled the door shut behind him and latched it using a big, old-fashioned hook and eye.

  The formerly high-gloss floor of the showroom was covered, patchily, with swaths of bleak off-brown indoor-outdoor carpeting, and the occasional half-unrolled length of battered and scarred gray foam rubber. A gridwork of black iron pipes hung down below the ceiling, and a few dozen theatrical spotlights were clamped on to the pipes here and there.

  Other light fixtures were affixed to tall, telescoping poles mounted on tripods. The tops of these devices had big white umbrellas on them to serve as reflectors; the effect was that of a sparse field of gigantic sunflowers. Heavy black electrical cables, bundled together with gray tape, snaked all over the floor.

  It was a stage. And the stage had props, scattered around irration­ally: a couple of heavy, impressive wooden desks. Plastic plants. Several bookshelves loaded with books. But as Aaron found when he looked at one of these, it was fake. There were no books on the shelves. What looked like a line of books seen on edge was a hollow plastic shell. The entire bookshelf weighed all of about twenty pounds.

  There were some muffled clunking noises, and some lights came on at one end of the room. Aaron c
ould only see about half of the showroom floor from here, the rest of it had been blocked off by flimsy partitions.

  Finally he made out the streamlined pear shape of Cyrus Rutherford Ogle, standing next to a gray steel circuit-breaker box bolted to the wall, clunking lights on and off.

  “Goofy,” Ogle said, “my favourite.”

  “Oh. If I’d know, I would have brought you a souvenir.”

  “I get a souvenir every time I meet with one of my clients, haw haw haw,” Ogle said. “Come on back, my offices are back here, such as they are.”

  “Interesting building,” Aaron said.

  “We figured we’d leave the big CADILLAC up on the roof.” Ogle said, “to attract Republicans.”

  Aaron walked toward the back of the showroom, picking his way over cables and rolls of carpet padding.

  “You might wonder why a man who has been described as a cross between Machiavelli and Zeffirelli would hang out in Oakland. Why not Sacramento, where the politicians are, or L.A., where all the media scum hang out?”

  “The question had crossed my mind,” Aaron said.

  “It’s a tug of war. Closer I am to Sacramento, the better it is for the politicians. Closer I am to L.A., the better it is for the creative talent.”

  “You’re close to Sacramento. So I guess the politicians win.”

  “They do not win, but they predominate. See, media people have no scruples. They will go anywhere. Politicians have no scruples either. But they like to act as though they do. And it is beneath their sense of artificial dignity to go all the way to L.A. because they still think that I am just a huckster and it makes them think that they are groveling to the false gods.”

  Ogle turned his back on Aaron and led him through a maze of partitions.

  “So why not set yourself up in Sacramento, if media people will anywhere?” Aaron said, strolling after him, looking around.

  “Media people will go anywhere, but I won’t. I won’t go to Sacramento because it is a dried-up shithole. And San Fran is too damn expensive. So here I am, the best place I could ever be.”

  They were approaching some kind of an elaborate construction, a room within a room. It was a three-dimensional webwork of two-by-fours surrounding and supporting a curved wall. An old-fashioned, lath-and-plaster wall.