Interface

by Neal Stephenson

“It is not unusual for them to pass away while they are under our care.”

  “Yes,” Lady Wilburdon said, “but this poor gentleman passed away after you performed the operation, did he not?”

  “Ha, ha!” Dr. Radhakrishnan said. “You are astonishingly per­ceptive.” No point in denying it, now. “How could you possibly have known that?” Maybe this woman had deeper connections than he had supposed.

  “I am not an anatomical expert,” Lady Wilburdon said, “but as I cast my eye over the gentleman, I see that you have sawed off the top of his head and extracted a large gray sort of thing that I take to be his brain.”

  “Of course, you are right.”

  “And I have taken the liberty of assuming that the distinguished director of this institute would not bother personally to perform a detailed autopsy on a patient who had expired of causes that were merely incidental.”

  “Infection,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said. “His surgical wounds became infected with a nosocomial microbe, which is to say, a bug that he picked up in the hospital.”

  “I am familiar with the terminology,” Lady Wilburdon said, and exchanged an amused look with her female companion.

  Finally Mr. Salvador had recovered sufficiently to weigh in.

  “Infections are always a terrible problem in brain surgery,” he said.

  “That is why we operate out of these buildings,” Dr. Radhakrishnan lied. “Because they are not hospitals per se, the chance of nosocomial infections is greatly reduced.”

  “But we still must perform all of the surgical procedures at AIIMS,” Mr. Salvador said.

  “And this is where he picked up the fatal organism,” Dr. Radhakrishnan concluded. He and Mr. Salvador exchanged a triumphal look, trying to shore each other up.

  “Then I shall be extremely careful to wash up,” Lady Wilburdon said, looking at her bloody hand, “now that I too have been infected with this very deadly pathogen.”

  “Yes. We should all probably do that,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said, “before we spread the infection to Mr. Singh or any of the other patients.” This phase of the lying process was known as backfilling.

  The backfilling process continued as Dr. Radhakrishnan and Lady Wilburdon scrubbed themselves in the sink that had been set up at one end of the building. Mr. Salvador and the lady’s com­panion, Miss Chapman, washed their hands too, for good measure, to ensure that the fatal infection did not spread through the ward. Lady Wilburdon obviously knew a thing or two about washing up and threw herself into the process at a frighteningly vigorous pitch, running a stiff plastic brush back and forth under her fingernails with the speed of an automatic paint shaker, spraying a fountain of pink suds into the air. She scrubbed herself all the way to elbows, like a surgeon.

  “You must forgive us for handling your visit so awkwardly and discourteously,” Mr. Salvador ventured, “as this is the first time that anyone has ever come to visit any of our patients.” “Ooh, how terribly sad,” said Miss Chapman. “I shall relay news of this situation to the Lady Wilburdon Organisation for the Visitation of Destitute Invalids here in Delhi,” Lady Wilburdon said. “Arrangements can be made-” “Oh, we really couldn’t ask-”

  “Emotional factors are terribly important. Loneliness can kill just as surely as nosocomial infections.”

  “No,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said. He had to draw the line some­where. “You are very generous. But I must rule it out on medical grounds. Later, when we have the permanent facility constructed, perhaps we can arrange for routine visitation.”

  Mr. Salvador cringed visibly. Lady Wilburdon got just a bit sniffy. “Well,” she said, “I count myself fortunate that I was able to come in and have a lovely visit before this very strict policy was imposed.”

  “As you will understand, we did not have to impose a policy until now.”

  Mr. Salvador was trying to patch it all up. “But if you can provide me with a forwarding address in England, I will keep you apprised of our progress.”

  “England?” Lady Wilburdon said. “Oh, no. We shall be here in India for another month at least.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s delightful news. Delightful.” “Of course, we will be all over the subcontinent, but sooner or later we always come back to Delhi.”

  “Then I shall look forward to dinner with you on at least one occasion,” Mr. Salvador said weakly.

  “When does the next fellow, Mr. Singh, have his operation?” “We have it scheduled for Wednesday.”

  “Four days from now,” Miss Chapman said. She took an oversized appointment calendar, a desktop model, from her tote bag, and opened it up. “Mr. Singh has his brainwork done,” she mumbled to herself, penciling it in.

  Meanwhile, Lady Wilburdon was reading over her companion’s shoulder. “Tomorrow we leave for Calcutta, to inspect the Lady Wilburdon Institute for the Rehabilitation of Syphilitic Lepers.” Both men drew sharp breaths.

  “Can they be rehabilitated?” Mr. Salvador said. He seemed astonished, verging on slightly amused.

  “Syphilitic lepers are easy,” Lady Wilburdon said, “compared to spoiled boys.”

  Mr. Salvador turned red and shut up, leaving Dr. Radhakrishnan all alone to terminate the conversation. “Feel free to phone when you return to Delhi,” he said. “Telephone?”

  “Yes. No visitation, remember.”

  “But Mr. Singh will be having his operation in the new facility, will he not?”

  “Oh. Yes, that’s right. It should be ready by then.” “So he will recover in the new facility as well.” Dr. Radhakrishnan could only nod.

  “See you in a few days,” Miss Chapman said, snapping her appointment book shut and beaming at them cheerily. The two women bustled out and climbed into a waiting car.

  Mr. Salvador spun on his heel, went straight across to Building 1, and pulled a bottle of gin out of his desk. He and Dr. Radhakrishnan sat down across from each other, wordlessly, and began to drink it, straight, from paper cups. After a minute or two, Zeldo came over and joined them. This was a little troubling in and of itself, because Zeldo was some kind of a puritanical health freak. Drinking straight gin from a paper cup was not his style at all.

  “What was that?” Dr. Radhakrishnan finally said, when he and Mr. Salvador, or Bucky, or B.M. as he was called by his school chums, both had a few ounces of ethanol pumping through their systems.

  Mr. Salvador threw up his hands. “What could I possibly say to you verbally that would add to the impression you have already received?”

  “She knows you.”

  Mr. Salvador sighed. “My father was Argentine, of German and Italian ancestry. My mother was British. One of our homes was in England and that is where I went to school. Once or twice a year, she would come seeping through the place to inspect it. She would sit in the back of a classroom for a few minutes and watch. Made all the teachers nervous as hell. Students too. She even made the custodians nervous.”

  “You had dealings with her then?”

  “None. Never. How she could possibly remember my name is a complete mystery to me. She must have a photographic memory. She is a freak of nature,” he finally concluded, belaboring the obvious.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan said nothing. He had the feeling that Mr. Salvador lied to him quite a bit. But this seemed a particularly obvious lie. Mr. Salvador had been extremely upset. Lady Wilburdon was more than the titular head of his old school; she must have some power over him. And the idea of someone actually having power over the all-powerful Mr. Salvador was certainly interesting.

  “What killed Mr. Easyrider is still mysterious,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said, “but I have high hopes for Mr. Scatflinger.”

  “I don’t,” Zeldo said. It was the first time he had spoken since he had taken to drinking.

  “Why not? Everything’s going perfectly with him.”

  “Once we get his chip trained,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said, “presumably he will become a bit more versatile.”

  “We can’t train his chip. His chip is dead,” Zeldo said. />
  “If it were really dead, he wouldn’t even be able to say wubba wubba.”

  “It crashed. It’s stuck. We ran afoul of that bug I was trying to warn you about.”

  “So what’s it doing?”

  “It got caught in an infinite loop.”

  “An infinite loop?” Dr. Radhakrishnan was flabbergasted. Infinity was a mathematical concept, very easy for a bithead like Zeldo to bandy about, but not something that biologist usually had to deal with.

  “Yes.”

  “Meaning?” Mr. Salvador said.

  “Meaning that he will keep saying wubba wubba until he dies,” Zeldo said.

  “Hmm. That’s not going to make much of a favorable impression on Lady Wilburdon,” Mr. Salvador said.

  “We can send him back,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said. “Send him off to the hinterlands. He can found his own religious sect.”

  16

  It was a creepy and surreal morning when they implanted the biochips in the mind of Mohinder Singh. Dr. Radhakrishnan got up early, as he always did on the morning of an operation. He went downstairs, eschewing room service, and watched the sun come up over Delhi from the cafe of the Imperial Hotel. The air pollution was especially bad this morning. Some kind of dire temperature inversion had clamped itself down over the city like a bell jar, trap­ping and concentrating the cocktail of dust, automobile exhaust, coal smoke, woodsmoke, manure smoke, and the ammoniated gasses that rose up from the stewn excreta of millions of people and animals. This being winter, the air was relatively humid, or as humid as it was ever likely to get. The humidity condensed around the countless nuclei provided by all of that air pollution, so that when the sun rose, it had to force its way up through a thick cloacal fog, and turned a furious red color, the color of Elvis’s face in his last moments on earth. When it finally burst free of the horizon, the sun simply disappeared and became a mere bright tendency in the burnt-orange sediment of the eastern sky.

  Dr. Gangadhar V.R.J.V.V. Radhakrishnan sipped tea and ran over the whole project one more time, wondering if they had overlooked anything.

  Mr. Salvador had been spending even more time than usual on the telephone recently. This was totally irrelevant to today’s operation, but Dr. Radhakrishnan remained curious about the American side of this project. Old Bucky had to spend a certain amount of time every day at the Barracks. The phone would ring, he would answer it, and he would talk. For hours. And Dr. Radhakrishnan would stroll back and forth through the Barracks, tending to his own work, and occasionally cock an ear in old Bucky’s direction, hoping to overhear something.

  Most of what he overheard, he already knew; Mr. Salvador was just relaying information about the project to others. But on one occasion, wandering around near Mr. Salvador’s desk, Dr. Radhakrishnan heard him involved in a very intense, and very loud, conversation about something called Super Tuesday.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan was sure he had seen this phrase somewhere before, but he did not have the foggiest idea what it meant. Some kind of American thing. He kept meaning to ask Zeldo if he knew, but kept forgetting.

  After a while, Zeldo came down, murmured a sleepy hello to him, occupied another table nearby, and began to read the Times of India.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan had far too much on his mind to concern himself with politics, and rarely looked at the Times. But when Zeldo moved on to one of the interior pages, opening the paper and holding it up in the air, Dr. Radhakrishnan could clearly see a headline, down low on the first page:

  U.S. CANDIDATES VIE IN “SUPER TUESDAY” ELECTIONS

  “What is Super Tuesday?” he said.

  Zeldo spoke to him through the paper. “It’s today,” he said. “A bunch of the states have their primaries on the same day.”

  “Primaries?”

  “Yeah. You know. To select the presidential candidates.”

  Dr. Radhakrishnan didn’t want to hear anything more about it. He knew it would cloud his mind. He sat there drinking his tea. Then it was time to go to work.

  It all went smoothly there in the magnificent central operating theater of the Radhakrishnan Institute. He had never seen the place, except in his dreams, or in the computer simulations, until he walked in to begin the operation. The room was circular, huge, high-ceilinged, a cathedral of technology. The floors were white and mirror-smooth. The walls were white painted concrete. All the light was recessed halogen fixtures, painfully bright, and unnaturally pure in coloration compared to the tainted, smoky-yellow illumination provided by old-fashioned bulbs. It felt just the way it should: as though every technological system on earth converged on this one spot, on the operating table that stood in the middle of the room.

  “Jeez,” Zeldo said, walking into the place, “all we need is a skylight and some lightning rods.”

  They did it much better this time around. Everything was calm and quiet. Everyone knew their moves. All the equipment was brand new and worked perfectly.

  They lowered the biochip down a shaft into the middle of Mohinder Singh’s brain and nestled it into the space that had been cut away. This time it was a perfect fit. The incision had been made under the control of a computer, there were no gaps, the new cells would knit together with the old ones much more quickly.

  The closing process took a couple of hours but Dr. Radhakrishnan stayed there through the whole thing, watching his assistants put Mr. Singh’s head back together. Zeldo stood off to the side at a Calyx console, monitoring the signals from the chip.

  By the time they were sewing Mr. Singh’s scalp flap back down over the reassembled skull, lines of data had begun to scroll up the monitor screen. The biochip had already made contact. Zeldo was astonished by this, but Dr. Radhakrishnan wasn’t. They had done it right this time.

  “What is it?” Mr. Salvador said. He had just come in from the hotel. Clearly, he had been catching up on sleep, sex, drinking, or some other fundamental bodily function, and had been interrupted in the middle by Dr. Radhakrishnan’s telephone call. Clearly he was not happy about it.

  “Check this out,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said, leading him into the room where Mohinder Singh had, for the last few days, been recovering from the operation.

  “Is this going to be more wubba wubba?” Mr. Salvador said.

  Mohinder Singh was sitting up in bed, as usual, and smoking, as usual. His scar was nearly obscured by the deepening shadow of his hair. He looked up as Dr. Radhakrishnan and Mr. Salvador came into the room, squinting at them impassively through cigarette smoke.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke to him briefly in Hindi, gesturing in the direction of an ashtray that rested on a table next to the bed on Mr. Singh’s paralyzed left side.

  Mr. Singh looked down at the hand and it began to twitch. Then it jumped into the air like a small animal spooked by a sudden noise, and came to a stop out in front of Mr. Singh’s face. The hand began to move toward his mouth, a few inches at a time, in a zigzagging course, like a sailboat trying to tack upwind into a moorage. As it got closer the fingers began to vibrate nervously. They wanted to close over the cigarette but they didn’t want to get burned.

  Then, suddenly, he had gripped the cigarette. He yanked it out of his mouth and extended his arm out over the ashtray in one explosive movement, scattering ashes the whole way. His hand vibrated for a moment above the general vicinity of the ashtray, dumping a few more ashes from the end of the cigarette, some of which actually landed in the ashtray.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke another couple of words and Mr. Singh’s hand dropped straight down into the ashtray, crushing the cigarette and mostly putting it out. Then he jerked his hand back into his lap, leaving the cigarette in the tray, spinning out a long tenuous line of smoke.

  “Astonishing,” Mr. Salvador said. He looked quite awake and considerably less grumpy.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke another few words. Then he said, to Mr. Salvador, “I have asked him his name.”

  Mr. Singh’s mouth came open and then closed again, the lips coming together: “Mmmmmo-r />
  “Mo,” Dr. Radhakrishnan echoed.

  “Derrrrrr.”

  “-der. Mohinder.”

  “Ssssin.”

  “Mohinder Singh. Very good.” Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke in Hindi again, then translated: “What kind of lorry were you driving at the time of your accident?”

  “Ta… ta.”

  “That’s right. A Tata 1210.”

  “Still no signs of tumor or rejection?”

  “None.”

  “Right,” Mr. Salvador said, “that’s it, then.” He spun on his heel and burst out of the room.

  Dr. Radhakrishnan waited for a few moments, then followed him.

  The offices were upstairs. He entered the stairwell and heard Mr. Salvador above him, taking the steps two or three at a time.

  By the time he had followed Mr. Salvador, quietly, up to the office level, old Bucky had already got through to someone on the telephone:

  “What? All right, I’ll speak loudly. Can you hear me? Good. Listen carefully; we are go for launch. Yes. Yes. Unequivocally. Yes, you have a good day too.”

  17

  Working out the politics of Mary Catherine’s temporary leave of absence from her residency and arranging the trip to the various and far-flung organs of the Radhakrishnan Institute took a few weeks. The trip itself lasted a week and a half. When Mary Catherine flew home from California, Mel drove his sports car, a Mercedes 500 SL, down from Chicago and picked her up at the Champaign-Urbana Airport. He took U.S. 45 from there; it passed within two blocks of the Cozzano house and served almost as a private driveway connecting the family with the outside world. Mel preferred two-lane roads with lots of heavy trucks, because that way he had something to pass.

  Mel tried to make small talk as they blasted along between the snowed-over cornfields. Mary Catherine was preoccupied and spent most of the time squinting out the window. Farm machinery threw spouts of black diesel straight up into the sky, visible from miles away. From time to time the tires of the Mercedes rumbled as they drove over a spot where mud and cornstalks had been tracked across the road by a tractor and then frozen down hard to the pavement. South of Pesotum it became possible to see the towers of CBAP heaving up over the linear horizon, kicking out silvery bubbles of steam that dissolved into the clouds.