Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  John Cozzano and DeWayne Coover had had a number of dealings during and after the war and had never really hit it off. Some people liked to believe that there was some kind of rivalry Between the two men, but this was a completely off-the-wall idea. Coover’s success dwarfed that of the Cozzano family. He was in an entirely different league.

  “I got a call from one of Coover’s lawyers,” Mel said. “It was on an unrelated thing. A leukemia thing.”

  After Christina died of leukemia, Cozzano had founded a charitable organization to research the disease and assist victims. DeWayne Coover, who had a penchant for big medical research projects, had been a major contributor. So it was not unusual for Cozzano’s people to talk to Coover’s people.

  “So I’m talking to the guy, and it’s about some kind of trivial question relating to taxes. It comes into my head to wonder why this guy, who is a senior partner in a big-time L.A. firm, is talking to me about this issue, when it’s so tiny that our secretaries could almost handle it. And then he says to me, ‘So, how’s the Governor doing these days?’ Just like that.”

  Cozzano laughed and shook his head. It was incredible how word got around.

  “Well, to make a long story short, he’s been dumping bucks into researching problems like yours. And he’s definitely putting out feelers.”

  “Get more phone books,” Cozzano said.

  “More information about it? I knew you’d say that.”

  Cozzano raised his right hand to his head, shaped like a pistol, and brought his thumb down like a hammer.

  “Right,” Mel said, “a bullet to the head is the most experimental therapy of all.”

  11

  The next time Dr. Radhakrishnan heard from Mr. Salvador was ten days later, when two packages arrived in his office, courtesy of GODS, Global Omnipresent Delivery Systems. One of them was a small box. The other was a long tube. Dr. Radhakrishnan paused before opening them to marvel at their pure, geometric perfection. In India, as in most of the United States, mail was a dusty, battered, imperfect thing. Mail came wrapped up in pro­tective layers of inexpensive, fibrous brown paper, tied together with fuzzy twine that looked like spun granola; the contents burst through the wrapping at the corners, skid marks trailed along every side, and the shapes of the packages and envelopes always came just a bit short of the geometric ideal. Addresses were scrawled on it in magic marker and ballpoint pen, antique-looking stamps, fresh from the engraver, stuck to it, annotations made by various postal workers along the way.

  That was not how Mr. Salvador mailed things. When Mr. Salvador mailed something, he went through GODS. The biggest name in the express-mail business. Mr. Salvador’s mail was not made of any paper-based substance. No fibers in there. Nothing brown. The wrapping was some kind of unbreakable plastic sheeting with a slick teflonesque feel to it, white and seamless as the robe of Christ. Both of the packages were festooned with brilliantly colored, glossy, self-stick, plasticized GODS labels. None of the labels, nor any other parts of the packages, had ever been sullied by human handwriting. Everything was computer-printed. Every one of the labels had some kind of bar code on it. Some of the labels contained address-related information. Some contained lengthy strings of mysterious digits. Some pertained to insurance and other legalistic matters, and others, like medals on an officer’s chest seemed to be purely honorific in nature.

  The color scheme consisted of three hues; every check box, every logo, every stern warning and legal disclaimer on every label was in one of these three hues. The hues all went together perfectly and they looked great, whether they were on the packages themselves or on the neatly pressed NASA-style coverall worn by the fetching young woman who had delivered the packages, obtaining Dr. Radhakrishnan’s signature on a flat-screened notebook computer that beeped and squealed as it beamed his digitized scrawl back to the remote computer inside the glossy, tri-hued GODS delivery van. The woman was cheery, confident, professional, apparently taking a little time off from, her normal job as a trial lawyer, aerobics instructor, or nuclear physicist to do some life-enriching delivery work. Dr. Radhakrishnan, the world’s greatest neurosurgeon, had felt small, dirty, and ignorant before her. But before he could ask her for a date, she was out the door, having more important things to do.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan opened the box first. There was no tape; the magic white wrapping stuck to itself. As he pulled it apart, stickers and labels tore in half, and he got an intuition that, perhaps, part of the thrill of receiving such mail was that you got to dramatize your own importance by tearing it apart. It was like ravishing an expensive, salon-fresh call girl.

  Inside the wrapping was a featureless hard plastic box, white and unmarked, that had to be opened using some trick that Dr. Radhakrishnan could not figure out right away. When the box had been penetrated, the entire contents turned out to have been sealed in plastic wrap, like a glass in a motel room. Dr. Radhakrishnan knew that in the context of American culture, to seal something up in plastic was to honor it.

  The contents turned out to be a short stack of unmarked 3.5-inch floppy disks. He remembered that he and Mr. Salvador had had a discussion about the Calyx operating system, so, on a hunch, he popped one of the disks into the Pacific Netware workstation on his desk.

  The systems were compatible. There were a few files stored on the disk, all in a standard format used for color images. They all sounded like medical scans of one type or another. Dr. Radhakrishnan opened some of them up and checked them out; these files were all pictures of the same man’s brain. The man had suffered a stroke that had, to judge from the position of the two affected areas, probably interfered with his speech and caused some paralysis on the left side. Interestingly enough, the affected parts of the brain were isodense, which is to say that they had the same density as the healthy parts of the brain surrounding them. This indicated that these pictures had been taken within a few days of the stroke.

  It did not take much imagination on Dr. Radhakrishnan’s part to realize that he was looking at the brain of Mr. Salvador’s friend. Mr. Salvador was implicitly asking him a question: is this the type of damage that you can fix?

  And the answer was yes. In theory. But the facility that would be required to do the work did not exist and wouldn’t exist for years, even with preposterously optimistic assumptions about grants and funding. Oh, you could build one anytime you wanted, if you had the money. But who had that kind of money?

  Dr. Radhakrishnan eventually outsmarted the latching system on the tube. Rolled up inside was a thick stack of poster-sized sheets of paper.

  In his cluttered lab it took some doing just to find a table large enough to unroll them. Finally he chased Toyoda out of the coffee room, where he had been watching MTV, and cleared off the counter, wiped up a few spills with a napkin, and unrolled the pages across the wood-grained Formica. Unrolled, the stack of sheets was nearly half an inch thick. They were all the same size, and all covered with precise, colorful drawings.

  Flipping quickly through the stack he saw floor plans, elevations, detailed renderings of individual rooms. The top sheet was an elevation. It portrayed a modern, hightech structure perched on a piney bluff overlooking the sea. There was a modest parking lot, a satellite dish on the roof, lots of windows, an outdoor cafeteria, even a bicycle path. Looked like a nice place to work.

  The second sheet was an elevation of an entirely different building. This one was in an urban setting. It had an austere sandstone color with a few darkly tinted windows set up above street level. It was also hightech, but at the same time it was strikingly Indian: he could see the classic motifs of Hindu architecture, updated and streamlined. The materials were unusual: reinforced concrete where it counted, of course, but sandstone and marble on the outside, even some traditional inlay work.

  The third sheet showed the same building from a higher angle, revealing a central, glassed-in atrium lined with offices and a bloom with lush flowering tropical plants. Behind it, a neighborhood of low, blocky concrete st
ructures stretched toward a somewhat more built-up district a few blocks away, centered on a huge circular roadway lined with shops and offices.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan was shocked to recognize the ring road: it was Connaught Circus, the solar plexus of his home city of New Delhi. Once he figured that out, everything snapped into focus, he understood which direction he was looking in, recognized the shapes of the Volga Hotel and the glassfront of the big British Airways office on the Circus, the entrances to the underground bazaar.

  He knew exactly where this building was. It had been drawn in on the site of the Ashok Cinema, a memorable, if decrepit structure, where Papa had taken him to movies as a child. Right in between Connaught Circus and the India Gate, close to the seat of government, embassies, everything.

  If this building - whatever it was - was really under construction, or even being contemplated, it was news to him. He should have heard about it by now, because fancy new hightech structures did not spring up every day there. Dr. Radhakrishnan did not know what this building was, but he could recognize hightech architecture when he saw it. It seemed that someone had ambitious plans to create a sort of silicon ashram.

  Maybe this was some sort of an investment opportunity. Or maybe they were trying to attract researchers to this new complex, But it had to be a far-off fantasy on someone’s part because if ground had been broken in Delhi - if this plan had even been whispered - Dr. Radhakrishnan would have heard about it. He was not the most well connected Delhian by a long shot, but he knew people and he stayed in touch.

  He continued paging through the stack, trying to glean some clues. The drawings alternated between the two buildings: the one on the bluff above the sea and the one in Delhi. Space was set aside for offices, R&D, laboratories, operating rooms, and even a few private bedrooms, complete with all of the equipment you would expect to see in a state-of-the-art intensive-care ward. Evidently these buildings were for biomedical research of the most advanced sort.

  The building in Delhi included one operating theater that was especially large and complicated. Dr. Radhakrishnan found a detailed plan of the room and went over it carefully, growing more and more certain as he did so that he had seen this before: it was an exact reproduction of the specialized operating room that he had described to Mr. Salvador. The one that Mr. Salvador had taken with him on those disks. The plans for Radhakrishnan’s ultimate operating theater had simply been dropped whole into the blueprints for a new building. But it wasn’t a hack job. The systems had all been integrated into their surroundings. The plumbing lines, the electrical wiring, the gas lines, all went somewhere. Subtle modifications had been made without changing the essential features. In fact, the room had been improved in several ways. Engineers had been at work on this. Very good engineers.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan was beginning to experience a prickly, hot feeling centered on the back of his neck, as though he were the victim of a joke of psychological experiment. He shuffled quickly through the stack, trying to get clues, looking for a point of reference. But he couldn’t find anything that explained whether this was reality or fantasy, who had these plans drawn up, or why.

  Until he got to the last sheet, which showed an elevation of the front entrance of the building in Delhi. The doorway was sur­rounded by a massive masonry frame. The material had a rich red hue, the color of Indian sandstone. The name of the building was carved into flat square stone next to the door, a Rosetta stone in English and Hindi:

  DR. RADHAKRISHNAN V.R.J.V.V. GANGADHAR

  INSTITUTE OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH - DELHI BRANCH

  He read it over several times, as though this were the first time he had ever seen his own name written down.

  He sifted back through the stack, looking for elevations of the building above the ocean. Finally he dug up an elevation showing it from ground level, with a concrete marker set into the ground by the entrance to the parking lot:

  ROBERT J. COOVER BUILDING

  DR. RADHAKRISHNAN V.R.J.V.V. GANGADHAR

  INSTITUTE OF BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH - CALIFORNIA BRANCH

  Finally, a clue here. Robert J. Coover was a very rich man. A billionaire. The building in which Dr. Radhakrishnan was standing was the Coover Biotech Pavilion; Coover had had it thrown together a couple of years ago when he decided that biotechnology was the wave of the future.

  It made sense, in a way. This Elton State thing had just been a fishing expedition, a stratagem to attract promising talent. Now that Dr. Radhakrishnan’s project with the baboons had succeeded so brilliantly, Coover understood that it was time to pull away and get serious about forging ahead. And Dr. Radhakrishnan was ready to do some forging.

  It was 9:30 a.m., one of the few times of day when he and his brother in Delhi might be awake simultaneously. In Delhi, the opposite side of the world from Elton, it was 10:00 p.m. and Arun would probably be watching the news on his television set.

  Dialing India was always an adventure. He got through eventually and reached his brother at his home in one of the pleasant colonies on the outskirts of the metropolis, where government officials lived with their air conditioners. As he had anticipated, the English language version of the news was running in the background. The sound quality on the phone was very bad and Arun had to run over and turn the television down in order for them to get through the obligatory several minutes of family-related small talk.

  “Me? Oh, I’m fine, everything is going well enough,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said. “I heard some - some rumors about a new development in the city and I wanted to ask you if you knew anything about them.”

  “What sort of rumors?”

  “Has anything been happening lately with the Ashok Cinema?”

  A silence. Then, “Ha!” Arun sounded satisfied, vindicated. “So news of this heinous crime has even reached Elton, New Mexico!”

  “Only the most tenuous reports, I can assure you.” Dr. Radhakrishnan did not want to put his brother off by explaining to him that if a hydrogen bomb were dropped in the middle of Connaught Circus, it probably wouldn’t show up in the American media unless American journalists were killed.

  “I knew it would come out eventually. Little brother, it is corruption and CIA intrigues. Pure and simple. That’s the only explanation.”

  “Are they planning to do something to the theater?”

  Arun laughed bitterly. “Let me catch you up on events. The Ashok Theatre does not exist anymore, as of yesterday!”

  “No!”

  “I kid you not.”

  “I knew it was decrepit but-”

  “It is more decrepit now. They have smashed it to the ground.

  Within twenty-four hours the site was picked clean by a million harijans. The came from every quarter of the city, like piranhas, descended on the rubble before the dust had settled, and carried away every piece of the building. Why, my secretary says that today they had earth-moving equipment there, digging a basement!”

  “But… who is ‘they’ in this case?”

  “Guess.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Maclntrye Engineering. The right hand of the CIA!”

  Like many Indian politicians of a certain age, Arun liked to find the CIA everywhere. Gangadhar, having spent some time in the States and gotten an idea of the way that large American institutions actually operated, had his doubts. He had come to realize that MacIntyre Engineering would be a far more fearsome multi-national corporation if it had nothing whatsoever to do with the United States Government.

  “Since when are you such a cinema bluff anyway?” Gangadhar asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why is this such a heinous crime? The Ashok Theatre was a dump. It was high time for it to be torn down anyway.”

  Arun sighed at his brother’s naivete. “It is not so much what they did as the way they did it,” he said.

  “How was that?”

  “They swaggered. They came into town like pirates. Little brother, it was like the old days, when the Brits or the Yank
s would charge in and do as they pleased.”

  “But Arun, we are a sovereign country. How could they-”

  “A sovereign country run by men.” Arun sighed. “Corruptible men.”

  “They bribed their way in?”

  “Gangadhar, do you have any idea how long it would normally take to obtain all the permits to raze a theater and begin con­struction of a new structure?”

  “Weeks?”

  “Months. Years, Maclntyre did it in days. They only got here a week ago. The telephone lines were smoking, Gangadhar, so many of their people were phoning in from the States, calling all the right officials, sending round limousines to take them out to lunch. I have never seen anything like it.”

  Someone was rapping on the frame of Dr. Radhakrishnan’s door. He looked up to see yet another delivery person from GODS carrying a package. This one was the size of an orange crate.

  “Just a moment, I have to sign for something,” he said. He beckoned the courier into his office, signed his name on the notebook computer with a nonchalant flourish, and waved him out. He withdrew a penknife from his desk drawer and began to cut the fiberglass tape that held the top of the box in place. It was a thick-walled styrofoam sarcophagus.

  “Do you have any idea what sort of structure they intend to build?” Dr. Radhakrishnan continued.

  “If they had gone through the normal channels, I would, but the ink is hardly dry on the blueprints, the workers themselves probably don’t even know what they are building. The pace of the construction is frantic. They have actually purchased a local cement factory for their own private use! Gangadhar, everyone says that America had gone downhill, but you would never believe it if you could come here and see this. The only parallel I can think of is the Manhattan Project.”