Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  Aaron rolled his eyes. “What meeting would that be?”

  “Emergency board meeting for Ogle Data Research, which you’re invited to sit in on, to be followed immediately by an emergency board meeting for Green Biophysics.”

  “When and where?”

  “Right here at Seven Corners, at two o’clock this afternoon. That should give you time to grab a pair of shuttle flights. Oh, and Aaron?”

  “Yes?”

  “We bought you out at twice your book value.”

  “So I heard.”

  “We’ll double that figure again if any of your existing stockholders want to sell out. But they have to do it today.”

  “I’ll pass that along.”

  “See you at two o’clock.”

  Aaron hung up his phone. Cy Ogle’s phone. MacIncyre’s, Gale’s, Coover’s, and Tice’s phone.

  “The bad news is, we just got hit by the financial equivalent of Desert Storm,” he said, “and we lost. The good news is that we all just quadrupled our net worth.”

  Marine laughed, verging on hysteria.

  “Not bad for an hour’s work,” Greg said, looking at his watch. It was ten o’clock.

  A big, handsome head shot of Governor William A. Cozzano flashed up on the television screen. Roaring white noise came out of the speaker, the sound of a wildly cheering multitude.

  Aaron sold his stock. There was no point in hanging on to the stuff when he knew that it would drop to one-quarter of its current value by the end of the day. He took a taxi to Logan, hopped the shuttle to LaGuardia, walked across the concourse and hopped another shuttle to National Airport in Washington.

  As the shuttle twisted and veered down the lower Potomac, Aaron looked out the window and saw the Washington Monument, the Mall, which seemed prematurely green to a person used to New England winters, and the dome of the Capitol. He realized, somewhat to his own astonishment, that this was the first time he had been to Washington, D.C., since his high-school band trip fifteen years before.

  It was thirty degrees warmer here, humid, green, with flowers coming out all over the place. Spring, which hadn’t even started in Boston, was a memory here. It gave him a feeling of being out of it, of being way behind the times. He got on a little bus that inched its way through the airport’s pathetically constricted traffic pattern and finally let him off at Avis. There, he climbed into a brand-new navy-blue Taurus. It was about a hundred and twenty degrees inside the car, and the controls for the air conditioner were already set to MAX.

  D.C. was going to take getting used to. His car in Boston didn’t even have air-conditioning. He was going to have to buy a new goddamn car.

  He went right out and got badly lost. That was okay, he had plenty of time, and he felt like driving around lost for a while. Eventually he pulled into a 7-Eleven and bought a big oversized street map atlas for northern Virginia and figured out where Falls Church was: just a few miles due west of D.C. Right in the middle of that was a place called Seven Corners, where a whole lot of roads came together. It was difficult to miss. From its folksy name, Aaron was expecting it to be sort of a quaint, woodsy crossroads.

  It wasn’t. It was a place where seven different franchise ghettos intersected and piled their congestion on top of each other, a universe of asphalt parking lots stewing in the Virginia sun. And most of it was a couple of decades old, and showing its age. It had been superseded by newer and nicer competitors farther away from the center of the metropolis.

  And because Aaron Green had come to know and appreciate the style of Cyrus Rutherford Ogle, he knew where to look. He eventually found his way into the vast, mostly empty parking lot of a big old shopping center at the heart of Seven Corners. It was a ghost mall. The anchor store, the behemoth at the dead center of the mall, was a windowless monolith, sheathed in a sort of white-gravel substance that had probably been sparkling and clean back in the fifties but which had now gone dully gray and become stained with long vertical streaks of rust. A constellation of rusty, decapitated bolts projected from the wall way up high, and

  Aaron could see that it had once been a major department store. But now the sign was torn down and the row of plate-glass display windows and double doors that stretched along the entire front of the building at sidewalk level had been replaced by particle board, painted black. Aaron walked into the place without hesitation.

  It was just like the Cadillac dealership, except bigger. And, at the moment, it was somewhat noisier and more crowded than Ogle’s operations tended to be when he was between campaigns. More colorful, too. A lot of people were working here right now, mostly young people, most female, mostly black. Most of them were wearing bright new Tshirts. And all of the Tshirts had the word Cozzano printed on them. They were operating T-shirt printing machines. Printing up more of them.

  But they weren’t fancy. The insignia going on to those shirts (and hats and sweatshirts and windbreakers) was not a nifty logo, like a national campaign would use. Everything was being done in simple block letters, with no graphics. It was exactly what you would get if you went into a seedy discount T-shirt printing place at a carnival midway and asked them to print the word Cozzano on to a T-shirt.

  The same could be said of the crude 8½-by-ll campaign posters floating out of the xerox machines, and of the campaign signs, being stapled together from fence pickets and refrigerator boxes and hand-lettered by more women in cheap Cozzano Tshirts.

  One corner was given over to folding tables with many telephones on them. Young people sat behind the tables talking on the phones. There were also a dozen desks with older people, suit-wearing people, sitting behind them, and these people were talking on the phones too. On the wall behind all of this was a large map of the fifty states, nearly obscured with little colored pins, streamers, flags, and yellow notes.

  “That right there,” said the familiar voice of Cy Ogle, “is the spontaneous ground-swell department.”

  Aaron ignored him. Ogle walked around until he was standing in Aaron’s peripheral vision. He had pulled a bright yellow Cozzano T-shirt over his dress shirt and donned a Cozzano skimmer.

  “See, the problem with spontaneous ground swells is they are so damn disorganized,” Ogle said. “And that don’t cut it, because the ballot rules in the various states are just unbelievably complicated. For example, in New York-”

  “Spare me,” Aaron said. “Spare me.”

  “Anyway, welcome to the metacampaign,” Ogle said.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. What is the metacampaign?”

  “Y’know how, after the New Hampshire primaries, the com­mentators always concentrate on the runner-up? They never seem to give a shit about who actually won the damn thing. All they want to talk about is who came in second. Who’s got momentum. Big Mo. That’s the metacampaign. The struggle for the hearts and minds of the media, and of big contributors.”

  When Aaron first came into the Pentagon Towers offices of Ogle Data Research, carrying half a dozen PIPER prototypes in a box, he knew that Ogle must be serious about something, because he had never known his new boss to own, rent, or come anywhere near real estate that was so civilized.

  This particular nice new office building was rooted in a big shopping mall called Pentagon Plaza. It was one of the nicest malls in the D.C. metro area, which was saying something. It was a self-contained metropolis; in addition to the mall it had a parking ramp, movie theaters, a Westin, a Metro station, and office space. From the suite that Ogle had rented, on the eleventh floor, you could look out over the vast geometry of the Pentagon itself, across the Potomac, and into Washington. Or, if you looked in the other direction, you could stare straight down through the spectacular glass roof of the mall, down through its atrium, and into the food court, half-full of tired shoppers, half-full of lunching brass from the Pentagon.

  The office had been professionally decorated by someone with a serious thing about sleek. It was sleek from top to bottom and end to end, the kind of place where any man who didn’t have h
is hair slicked back felt like some kind of a shit-kicking redneck. A sleek receptionist sat at the polished-granite cyclorama of the front desk, ensconced beneath the ODR logo, answering phone calls and routing nearly all of them to the shabby department store in Falls Church or the shabby Cadillac dealership in Oakland. Behind her was all windows, chrome and glass - beautiful offices that no one ever used except, apparently, when they had some kind of an important meeting with someone fatuous enough to be impressed by this kind of thing. Which probably included 99 percent of all politicians.

  But Ogle hadn’t chosen this building because it was new, sleek, or convenient. As he told Aaron repeatedly, he liked it for one reason and one reason only: you got into the place by walking through a mall. The point was all in the symbolism of the thing. Rooted in a goddamn shopping mall. The ultimate symbol of the American middle class. The very people that Ogle made his money and staked his reputation on.

  It was also practical at times like this, when Ogle wanted to do what was known as focus group interviews. The idea behind an FGI was that you got a few people together who represented a cross section of America and you interviewed them, maybe showed them a few proposed campaign commercials, and got their reactions.

  Finding a cross section of America was pretty easy at Pentagon Plaza. Take the elevator down to the mall level, wait for the doors to open, fling out a lasso, and you could reel in a complete focus group before they even knew what was happening.

  People who assembled focus groups for Ogle were very good at wandering through the mall and sizing people up. By watching a person’s clothing, hair, jewelry, the way they walked, the things they looked at, the stores they were fascinated by and the stores they ignored, the kind of food they selected at the food court and how they ate it, these observers could peg a person’s income bracket to within about ten thousand bucks and make some pretty accurate guesses about what part of the country they were from, whether they came from a big city or a small town, and even what sorts of political views they were likely to hold.

  These Ogle employees were officially called Focus Group analysts, but in the corporate parlance they were simply referred to as ropers. The ropers had a parlance all their own, a system of classifying the American population. It was a vast field of expertise and Aaron didn’t have more than a foggy idea of how it worked. He didn’t need to. They assembled the focus groups. Aaron ran the equipment.

  They attached half a dozen PIPER prototypes to the backs of chairs. Each one had a cuff dangling from it. The chairs were arranged in a cozy semicircle in a nice little carpeted room in a nice, proper office in the Pentagon Towers offices.

  When they had gotten their little room all hooked up with the prototypes and some video stuff, Shane Schram, the burly, rumpled, prematurely bald, tough-guy psychologist, materialized from some other part of the country and sent a couple of ropers down into the mall. Within a few minutes, sample Americans began to drift out of the elevators.

  Schram met them right there in the elevator lobby with a hearty hello and a thank-you for having agreed to participate. The receptionist showed them into the interview room, where they filled out little information cards, drank coffee, and ate doughnuts. Pretty soon, they had a full complement of half a dozen. Schram came into the room, shut the door, thanked them all one more time, and launched into his spiel.

  Each of the six subjects was being paid a hundred dollars for this. Ogle was spending a total of six hundred bucks to test a system that cost millions. It was a heck of a deal.

  26

  “This is our office,” Schram said, “and we’re paying you our money. But this time is all yours. You haven’t heard of us. But we are a public opinion research company with a lot of big clients in politics and corporate America. A lot of people are listening to what we say about American opinion. And the way we learn about that is by talking to people like you. And that’s why I say that this time is all yours - because the whole idea is for you to unload on us. To tell us exactly what you’re thinking. I want you to be brutally frank and honest about it. You can say anything you want in this room, because I’m from New York City and you can’t hurt my feelings. And if you don’t bare your true opinions to me, then I can’t tell my clients what is going on in the minds of America.”

  Aaron wasn’t in the room. He was in the next room, watching all of this on television. Or hearing it, rather. None of the cameras was pointed at Schram. They had half a dozen cameras in that room, each pointed at one of the subjects. Their faces appeared on half a dozen television monitors, lined up in a nice neat row, and underneath each TV monitor was a computer monitor providing a direct readout from the PIPER prototype attached to their chair.

  The PIPER readout consisted of several windows arranged on a computer screen, each window containing an animated graph or diagram. Right now, all of these were dead and inactive. On the monitor speaker, Schram could be heard explaining to the subjects how to put on the cuffs: roll up your sleeve, remove jewelry, et cetera.

  One of the ropers, a young woman named Theresa, came into the monitor room. She was carrying a stack of cards, one for each of the subjects. She took a seat behind a table, where she could watch the monitors, and began to arrange the cards in front of her.

  “Got a pretty wide spread today, considering,” she mumbled. She shuffled through the deck, pulled out a card, and laid it out on the left side of the desk, looking up at the TV monitor on the far left. The monitor was showing a woman in her fifties, frosted blond hair in a complicated set, big jewelry, shiny lipstick, harshly penciled eyebrows. “Classic MHCC, which we get too many of in this mall.”

  “MHCC?”

  “Mall-hopping corporate concubine,” Theresa mumbled. “Though to really find them in their pure form you need to go somewhere like Stamford, Connecticut. Here they aren’t really corporate, they’re more government. Generals’ wives.”

  “Oh.”

  Theresa put another card on the desk. This one apparently belonged to the person on the second TV monitor, a slightly portly man in his mid-thirties, with a receding hairline and a somewhat nervous affect. “This guy is a debt-hounded wage slave. In its purest form,” she said.

  “Is that a pretty common one?”

  “Oh, yeah. There’s millions of debt-hounded wage slaves.” Theresa put down a third card. The third TV monitor depicted an older black woman, gray hair in a bun, thick-rimmed glasses, with a wary look on her face. “Bible-slinging porch monkey.”

  Number four, another black woman, this one in her late thirties, wearing the uniform of a major in the Air Force: “First-generation beltway black.”

  Number five, a pleasingly plump middle-aged white woman with a big hairdo, who seemed excited by the whole thing, eager to please: “This dame is a frosty-haired coupon snipper right now. Later in life, depending on the economy, she’ll probably develop into either a depression-haunted can stacker or a mid-American knickknack queen.”

  Number six, an older white gentleman with a gaunt face, very alert and skeptical: “Activist tube feeder. These guys are really important. There’s millions of these and they vote like crazy.”

  “How many of these categories do you have?” Aaron said.

  “Lots of ‘em. Hundreds. But we don’t use all of them at once,” Theresa said. “We tailor the list to the job. Like, if we’re trying to sell athletic shoes, we don’t pay attention to the tube feeders, porch monkeys, Winnebago jockeys, or can stackers. On the other hand, if it’s an election thing, we can ignore groups who don’t vote very much, like trade school metal heads and stonefaced urban homeboys.”

  “I see.”

  “Also there’s a lot of overlap between groups, which makes the stats a little gloppy sometimes.”

  “Gloppy stats?”

  “Yeah, it’s hard to interpret the statistics because things get confused. Like, you’ve got your 400-pound Tab drinkers. That’s an adjective, pertaining to their lifestyle. You could treat 400-pound Tab drinkers as a group unto t
hemselves. Or you could narrow things down by looking at the ones who have no worthwhile job skills. In that case, you’d have a new group called 400-pound Tab-drinking economic roadkill.”

  “What good would that do you?”

  “Say you wanted to market a new diet system that was really el cheapo. You decide to market this thing by aiming for fat jobless individuals. You come up with a marketing strategy where you say that losing weight improves your chances of getting a job. Then you zero in on the 400-pound Tab-Drinking economic roadkill and market it to them as directly as possible.”

  As the members of the focus group snapped the cuffs into place around their wrists, the computer screens came alive with data. The windows on the monitor screens, which had been blank and inert, sprang to life with colorful, rapidly fluctuating graphics. The cuffs contained sensors that tracked various bodily responses and sent them down the cable to the prototypes; here, the information coming in from the cuff was converted to digital form and transmitted to a receiving station in this room.

  Aaron had spent much of the last month writing software to run on a Calyx workstation. This software would scan the incoming stream of data and present it in a graphical form so that Ogle, or anyone else, could glance at the computer screen and get an immediate snapshot of what the subject was feeling.

  Several times, Aaron had been on the verge of asking why it was that such quick analysis was needed. He couldn’t understand what the big rush was. But before he asked this question, he always remembered what Ogle had told him during their meeting in Oakland: You can’t understand everything. Only I, Cyrus Rutherford Ogle, can understand everything.

  Shane Schram’s voice continued to drone from the speaker. When he had greeted these people as they came from the elevators, he was bouncy and exuberant. But now that they were cuffed to the chairs, he had gone back to speaking in a knowing, New York tone. Everything he said, he said as if he were resigned to it, tired of it, and as if it should be fairly obvious to anyone who wasn’t stupid. If you listened to it long enough you began to think that you and Schram were in together on a number of secrets that were hidden from ordinary saps.