Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  “Something on your mind?” he asked.

  “Just a lot of impressions in a short time,” she said, shaking her head. “I want to be coherent when I talk to Dad.

  Mel grinned, just a bit. So that was it. Even in his current condition, Dad continued to scare the hell out of Mary Catherine.

  “Just give your professional opinion,” Mel said. “After that, we’re all grownups.”

  He slowed the Mercedes and turned off the highway. The tires started to buzz as they drove down brick streets. A plywood sign marked the entrance to town:

  WELCOME TO TUSCOLA

  ATTEND OUR CHURCHES

  “It’s small in terms of staff. It is absolutely gigantic in terms of resources. Everything they own seems to be brand new,” Mary Catherine said.

  She was sitting on the sofa in the living room. Dad was sitting directly across the coffee table from her, watching her face. Mel was off to the side. Patricia was hovering, throwing logs on the fire, getting coffee.

  “If you buy their basic scientific approach, then these guys are certainly equipped to move forward with it,” Mary Catherine continued. “They have money to burn.”

  “Do you buy it?” Mel said.

  “It works on baboons. It makes paralyzed baboons capable of moving, and even walking again. That has been proved, I think, beyond a doubt.”

  “Does it work on femelhebbers?” Cozzano asked, using his new word for people.

  “I asked them that question many times,” Mary Catherine said, “and I might as well have been saying ‘femelhebbers’ for all the information I got.”

  Cozzano laughed and shook his head ruefully.

  “I was skeptical going in. But what they have done is extremely impressive, and it seems to me that if they could produce one healthy person who has gone through their therapy, then we might actually have something.”

  “Tell me about your detailed impressions,” Mel said.

  “I saw the institute itself dead last - just this morning. These guys made up the whole itinerary for me, so I didn’t have much flexibility.”

  “Did you feel you were getting the Potemkin Village treat­ment?” Mel asked.

  “Yes. But that’s normal.”

  “True,” Mel said.

  “First place I went was Genomics, in Seattle. It’s south of down­town, near the Kingdome, in a big old warehouse that they gutted and redid. All pretty new and clean, as you’d expect. Most of the space is used for things unrelated to this project. They have one suite on the top floor where they do brain work for Radhakrishnan. When I was there they had several cell-culturing projects underway. It’s a typical lab with small glass containers all over the place with handwritten labels stuck to them, and by reading the labels I could pick up the names of some of the subjects they’re working on. The names I saw were-” Mary Catherine leafed through her notes for a second, “Margaret Thatcher, Earl Strong, Easyrider, Scatflinger and Mohinder Singh.”

  An uneasy laugh passed around the table. “I know who the first two are…” Mel said.

  “That’s what I thought. But later, when I went to Elton, I found out that Margaret Thatcher and Earl Strong are two of their baboons. They name all the baboons after political figures.”

  “Did you also see baboons named Easyrider and Scatflinger?” Mel said. “Those sound more like animal names to me.”

  “No. And I have no ideas on Mohinder Singh, either.”

  “Mohinder Singh might be a baboon,” Mel concluded, “named after some guy in India that Radhakrishnan doesn’t like. But it’s also possible that Mohinder Singh is a human being.”

  “They keep talking about their facilities in India,” Mary Catherine said. “It may be a person they are experimenting on out there. Working on, I should say.”

  “Well, go on,” Mel said.

  “From Seattle I went to New Mexico for a couple of days. Very nice facility there - the Coover Biotech Pavilion.”

  Mel and Cozzano exchanged looks.

  “Again, they obviously know what they’re doing. I spent a long time going over detailed records of all of the baboons they’ve worked on. It’s clear that they have learned a lot about this over the years. Their first subjects had rejection problems, or the biochips failed to take, et cetera. Over time they have solved those problems. Now they can do it almost routinely.

  “Then I went to San Francisco and talked to some of the people working on the chips at Pacific Netware. These guys are really good - the best in the business. They were the only ones willing to talk about the human element.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Mel said.

  “All of the biologist types are gun-shy about the idea of doing this with human beings. You can’t get them to talk about it. It’s clear that there are some potential ethical problems there that they have been trained to avoid. But the chipheads don’t have any of those cultural inhibitions. They would probably volunteer to get these things implanted in their own heads.”

  “Why? Are they brain damaged?”

  “No more so than anyone who works on computers for a living. But to them, see, it’s not a therapy so much as it is a way of improving the human mind. That’s what gets these guys psyched about it.”

  “You’re joking,” Cozzano said.

  “The biologists won’t even allow themselves to think about trying this on people - even several brain-damaged volunteers. The computer people have already gone way beyond that point in their thinking. Half the guys I talked to firmly believed that in ten or twenty years they would be walking around with supercomputers stuck in their heads.”

  “This is getting weird,” Mel said.

  “I don’t want to wash a duck,” Cozzano said. “I just want to bring the trousers.”

  “Understood,” Mary Catherine said, “but I’m here to talk about the credibility of this process. And the point I’m making here is that it is extremely credible as far as the people at Pacific Netware are concerned.”

  “Okay, we got that point,” Mel said. “Tell me about the institute.”

  “Beautiful piece of real estate on the California coast. Very secluded. Has its own private airport. Lots of open space for recreation.”

  Once again, Mel Meyer and the Governor were exchanging significant looks. “A guy - even a famous guy - could get in and out of the place without being noticed?”

  “Mel, you could fly in, go down the road to this institute, sun yourself in the courtyard, swim on the beach, and no one would ever see you.”

  “Read me the blueprints,” Cozzano said.

  “You want some information about the building?” Mary Catherine guessed.

  “Yes.”

  “The building is nice and new, like everything else. Some parts of it aren’t even finished yet. There’s an incredible operating theater, which looked like it was finished, but there’s no way to tell that without actually going in and trying to do brain surgery there. And the actual rooms are luxurious. All private rooms. Big windows with balconies over the ocean. The patients hang out on the balconies, watch TV, listen to CDs, or whatever.”

  “You actually saw patients there?” Mel said.

  “Yes. But because of privacy considerations, I couldn’t go to their rooms or talk to them. I saw one or two, from a distance, sitting out on the balconies in their wheelchairs, reading news­papers or just staring into the distance.”

  “You saw patients there. Which means they have actually done operations on human beings,” Mel said.

  “I guess that’s the conclusion we are led to,” Mary Catherine said.

  “Well put. Well put,” Mel said.

  “You think we are being led to a false conclusion?” Mary Catherine said incredulously.

  “No way to know, is there?”

  “There’s a couple of small things,” she said, a little uncertain.

  “Tell us everything,” Mel said. “We’ll decide what’s small and what isn’t.”

  “I went to the bathroom at one point
and washed my hands. And when I turned on the faucet, it sort of coughed.”

  “Coughed?”

  “Yeah. Sputtered for a few seconds. As if there was air trapped in the pipes. It used to happen here, whenever Dad worked on the plumbing.”

  At first, Mel shook his head, not getting it. Then his eyes widened with astonishment. Then they narrowed in fascination. “You were the first person ever to use the faucet in the ladies’ room,” Mel said.

  “Goddamn it! I think you are wrong,” Cozzano said to Mel.

  “Since parts of the building were still under construction, it’s possible that they had to alter some of the pipes after that sink had been in use for a while,” Mary Catherine said, “and that this caused air bubbles to be introduced.”

  “Please continue,” Mel said. He was acting like a lawyer in a courtroom now, interviewing a neutral witness.

  “I wandered around the grounds a little bit. It’s a nice place for a stroll. And on the bluff, overlooking the sea, a few hundred yards away from the building, behind a little rise, I found the remains of a fire. Someone had piled up a bunch of straw there and burned it.”

  “Straw?” Mel said.

  Cozzano nodded. “It keeps the patio slippery.”

  “When we used to pour concrete on the farm, we would cover it up with damp straw. You have to keep concrete damp for several days, preferably a week or two, while it cures,” Mary Catherine said. “So it’s not surprising that they would have a bunch of straw lying around a place where they were building a big reinforced-concrete building. There are a lot of ranches nearby and it’s a natural thing for them to use. When I walked back from the site of the fire to the building, I saw a lot of pieces of loose straw caught in the undergrowth, and many of them were stained white with concrete. Some of the straw was still damp.”

  “So when they were finished, they got rid of the straw by dragging it to this place and burning it,” Mel said.

  “Yeah. They burned it the night before,” Mary Catherine said.

  “How do you know that?” Cozzano said.

  Mary Catherine held up the little finger on her right hand. The tip was cherry red. “I made the mistake of sticking my finger down into the bed of ashes.”

  Mel said, “They got rid of the straw right before you got there.”

  “It was lying around somewhere after they finished the building,” Mary Catherine said. “They knew that I was coming and they wanted the place to look tidy, so they burned it.”

  “What about the goddamn patients? What about other potential contributors? Don’t they want the place to look tidy for those people too?” Mel said. “What’s so special about you?”

  “It was just a coincidence,” Cozzano said.

  “I think they finished the building the day before you got there,” Mel said.

  Everyone except Mel burst out in nervous laughter.

  “Bullshit,” Cozzano said.

  “Mel you showed me a photograph of the place two and a half, three weeks ago,” Mary Catherine said. She said it kiddingly. She knew what Mel was up to here. It was just like him to state things in the most exaggerated, overstated way possible, just to shake people up.

  “There was something funny about that photograph. It was too clean-looking. I think it was fake,” Mel said.

  Cozzano shook his head and twirled one finger around his ear. There was no point arguing with Mel when he had shifted into full combat mode.

  “They have ways of faking that stuff now,” Mel insisted.

  “And the patients I saw?”

  “Actors.”

  “What are you getting at, Mel?” Mary Catherine said. She said it with one eye on Dad; she was trying to anticipate the kinds of things he would say if he could. “I can’t think of any logical explanation for what you are saying.”

  “I can. Here’s how it goes: Coover runs into that guy from Pacific Netware. Kevin Tice. They run into each other golfing or something. And Coover tells Tice about this guy Radhakrishnan and his work with baboons. Coover is a tired old guy with a soft spot, he just thinks of it as a way to help stroke victims. But Tice is a big idea man, he reads too much science fiction, he’s not satisfied with just being a billionaire, he wants to have a supercomputer in his head as well. Because if what you are saying is true, then this process of putting chips into people’s heads will one day be huge. It’s the kind of technology that Tice has to get a jump on right now so he can become the world’s first trillionaire a couple of decades down the road.

  “So Tice starts pumping money into it for his own purposes. They continue working with baboons, maybe even round up some untouchables in Calcutta or somewhere and do it to them so they can learn how to do it on humans. And then, all of a sudden, Governor Cozzano has a stroke. And Tice and Coover see a big opportunity. By fixing the brain of someone who is powerful and famous they can jumpstart this new industry of theirs. So they go out and build this thing in California. I’ll bet it ‘was already under construction and they just hurried up the process a little bit. Just got it done yesterday in time to impress Dr. Mary Catherine Cozzano here. But she was a little too observant.”

  “Bullshit,” Cozzano said.

  “If what you say is true,” Mary Catherine said, “then the worst conclusion we can come to is that they really want Dad as a client, and they’ve pushed their schedule up in order to make a good impression on him.”

  Mel thought that one over for a while. Cozzano, obviously amused, watched Mel’s face. “I don’t like the idea of them using Willy as a guinea pig,” Mel said.

  “Phooey,” Cozzano said. “Better a dead pioneer than a live feeb.”

  “You want to pursue this?” Mary Catherine said.

  “Yes, goddamn it,” Cozzano said.

  Mel just closed his eyes and shook his head in disbelief.

  “There is a step we can take now, without committing ourselves,” Mary Catherine said. “I don’t know whether I like this. But I have to give you all the information. As you said, Mel, we’re all adults.”

  “What is it?” Mel said warily.

  “Dad has to go up to Champaign, to Burke Hospital, tomorrow for a routine checkup. While he’s in there, we could arrange for a biopsy.”

  “Of what?”

  “Brain cells.”

  “Why?”

  “We could send them to Genomics. They could hang on to them there. That way, if Dad made the decision to go ahead with an implant, they could culture the cells and prepare the biochip at any time.”

  “Do it,” Cozzano said.

  “Oh shit,” Mel said.

  “Do the biopsy?” Mary Catherine said. “Tomorrow?”

  Cozzano just looked her in the eye and nodded. His eyes looked a little brighter. He smiled at Mary Catherine with the good side of his mouth, and a thin trickle of drool steamed down out of the other side.

  “I’m tired of this,” Cozzano said, wiping off the drool with his good hand. “This is bad.”

  “Yes, it’s bad,” Mel said, “but-

  “I want to be the Milhous,” Cozzano said.

  “And one day you will be,” Mel said, “but-”

  “Shut up, goddamnit!” Cozzano bellowed. Suddenly he riped the blanket off his lap with his good hand. Then he pitched forward in his wheelchair so violently that he seemed to be falling out.

  Everyone jumped up and converged on him. But he wasn’t falling. He was trying to stand up. The momentum of his upper body carried him halfway to his feet and he used the powerful thrust of his good arm to push him up on one leg. Then he almost tottered over, but Mary Catherine had already danced around the coffee table and now she drove her shoulder up under her father’s armpit, taking most of his weight.

  Though no one but Mary Catherine would ever know it, this had taken a lot of guts on her part, because her impulse had been to shrink away. Suddenly back on his feet, Dad was massive, dark, and towering. Mary Catherine’s love for her father had always been mingled with a judicious amount of f
ear, or maybe respect was a nicer word for it. He had never struck her or even threatened to, but he never needed to. The tornadic force of his personality made people cringe and scurry, especially when he was mad, and right now he was really pissed. He threw his entire weight on her body for a moment, nearly buckling her knees, and finally got his weight centered over his good leg again.

  And then he started to hop. He was going somewhere. He had fixed a dark, unblinking gaze on the far wall of the den, and seeing this, Mary Catherine tried to help him along. They moved together one hop at a time across the shag carpet and into the den. Mel shuffled along behind them.

  Cozzano was headed for a framed picture hung on the wall. It was a picture of Cozzano shaking George Bush’s hand on the south lawn a few year ago. Barbara Bush stood off to the side, hands clasped together, beaming supportively. Behind them rose the columns of the White House.

  Cozzano went straight across the floor and fell, crushing Mary Catherine into the wall with his bad shoulder and pinning her there. He reached across his body with his good hand and slammed the end of his index finger into the framed picture so hard that it whacked back into the wall and a couple of cracks appeared in the glass.

  He wasn’t pointing to himself or to the Bushes. He was pointing to the White House.

  “This is mine,” he said. “This is my barn.” He slammed his index finger into the White House a couple of more times for emphasis. “I should have done it before.”

  “You have to get better first,” Mary Catherine said in a strangled voice.

  “Well, I guess I better print up a shitload of bumper stickers,” Mel said morosely. “Femelhebbers for Cozzano.”

  Mary Catherine didn’t say anything. She was feeling the hairs stand up on the back of her neck.

  Her dad was running for president. Her dad was running for president. President of the United States. It was enough to make her forget about the stroke, to obliterate the fact that there was no way he could be elected in his condition.