Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  “Shit,” Floyd said, “what the hell is it?”

  “Most of the time it’s a digital watch. Part of the time, it’s a television set, complete with a little speaker for sound.”

  “Can I get Whiplash games on it?”

  “I’m afraid not. The TV will only show one type of program and one type only, and that is political programming having to do with the election.”

  “Shit, I knew there was a catch.”

  “That’s why we’re offering you the money. Because this is not all fun and games. Some responsibility falls on your shoulders as part of this deal.”

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak thought that if Aaron Green were not trying to pay him ten thousand dollars, he might throw him down the stairs and jump on him out in the yard and mess him up a little bit. He did not appreciate the fact that this little man, who was about the same age as him, and maybe a bit younger, was lecturing him about responsibility. It was the kind of thing his dad used to say to him.

  But for now he was going to be cool. He put his feet up on the table next to the briefcase, sat back, raised his eyebrows, peered at Aaron Green through the smoke of his cigarette. “Well, for ten thousand bucks I guess I could be responsible.”

  “Think of it as a part-time job. It’ll take maybe ten minutes of your time every day. It doesn’t prevent you from having other jobs. And it pays very, very well.”

  “What do I got to do in this job?”

  “Watch TV.”

  Floyd laughed. “Watch TV? On this little wristwatch thing?”

  “Exactly. Now, most of the time, it’ll just act like a digital watch.” Green pressed a button on the face of the wristwatch and the screen began to show black numerals on a gray background, giving the current time and date. “This is just a convenience for you,” he explained. “But from time to time, something like this will happen.”

  The watch emitted a piercing beep. The numerals on the tiny screen disappeared and were replaced by a color-bar test pattern.

  “Whoa, it’s in color!” Floyd said.

  “Yeah. Of course, you can’t see any color when it’s pretending to be a wristwatch. But in TV mode, it’s just like a small color television set.”

  After a couple of seconds, the test pattern was replaced by a videotape of John F. Kennedy giving his “Ask not what your country can do for you” speech.

  “This is just a little canned demonstration. Once the program gets underway, it’ll show you coverage of campaign events. Debates, new conferences, and so on.”

  “Why don’t I just watch ‘em on my own TV set?”

  “Because we’re going to pipe our own coverage directly to you, through this watch. We might want you to see some events that the networks wouldn’t cover, so we have to generate the programming ourselves. Besides, we think we’ll get better compliance this way.”

  “Compliance?”

  “Suppose you’re out of the house. Like maybe going to a Whiplash game. You wouldn’t be able to watch normal TV. But with this PIPER watch, you can watch it wherever you are.”

  “PIPER?”

  “That’s the name of this program.”

  “How much of this stuff do I have to watch?”

  “Many days there won’t be anything at all. We might show you fifteen minutes or half an hour of programming a few times a week. Sometimes it’ll be a little more intense. The only time when we’ll really give you a lot of stuff to watch will be during the conventions in July and August.”

  “What else do I gotta do? You call me up and ask me questions about this stuff, or what?”

  “That’s it. Just watch the TV programs.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how do you know what my opinion is? I thought the whole idea was to get my opinion.”

  “It is. But we can do that electronically.”

  “How?”

  “Through the PIPER watch.” Green reached into his briefcase and pulled out a videotape. “I see you have a VCR in here. You should watch this tape. It’ll explain how everything works.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “The PIPER watch does more than just show you campaign events. It also monitors your reactions. You ever go to a mall or an amusement park and see one of those machines where you drop in a quarter and it gives you your biorhythms, or your emotional state, or something like that?”

  “There’s one down at Duke’s Tavern that gives you your sex rating.”

  “Oh.” Green seemed embarrassed. “How does that work?”

  “You grab this big rod sticking out of the top and it measures your sex quotient and flashes it up on the screen. I always get a real high score.”

  “Okay, it’s probably a galvanic skin response device.”

  “Say what?”

  “This PIPER watch has the same kind of thing built into it as your sex quotient machine. So it could provide a twenty-four hour a day readout of your sex quotient, if that was what we wanted.”

  “Why would you want my sex quotient?”

  “We probably wouldn’t to tell you the truth - no offense!” Green laughed nervously. “But by using the same type of detectors, we can get a sense of how you are reacting to the programming shown on the TV screen. That information is piped directly back to us over the radio.”

  “So, it gives you my emotions. Tells you what my body’s thinking.”

  Green smiled. “That’s a good way to describe it. What your body is thinking. I like that.”

  “What about my opinions, though?”

  Green shook his head and frowned. “I’m not sure quite what you mean.”

  “Well, this tells you how my emotions respond, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s not the same as an opinion, is it?”

  Green seemed to be baffled, lost. “It’s not? I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  “Well, maybe I watch some guy giving a speech. Maybe he’s real good at giving speeches and so my emotions are good. Then, I’m lying awake in bed in the middle of the night, thinking about what he said, and suddenly it doesn’t seem so logical any more, and I can see all kind of holes in his argument and I change my mind and decide he’s just another pencil-neck, media-slick son of a bitch out to take my money and send the jobs to Borneo. So my final opinion of the guy is that he’s a bastard. But all you know is that I had a good emotional response to his speech.”

  Floyd knew that he had Green now. Clearly Green, the big-city, high-paid intellectual, had never thought about this. He had never anticipated that someone might make this objection. He did not know what to say. “We don’t have the technology to read that sort of thing,” he finally said, speaking very slowly and carefully. “We don’t have any way to read your mind in the middle of the night and find out that you think Senator So-an-so is going to send your job to Borneo.”

  “Humph,” Floyd said, shaking his head.

  “But PIPER is just one way we have of getting information,” Green said, picking up momentum now. Floyd had the distinct impression that he was just trying to talk his way out of the tight corner that Floyd had backed him into. “Needless to say, we are receptive to any kind of input that you might want to give us. So if you have these thoughts in the middle of the night-”

  “I do,” Floyd affirmed, “all the time. They come to me like a thief in the night.”

  “-in that case, you would be more than welcome to provide those to us.”

  “My phone service got cut off,” Floyd said. “But I could write you letters.

  “That would be absolutely fine,” Green said. “Our address is printed right there on the videotape. You go ahead and send us as many letters as you like. We’d like to hear your opinions on any subject.”

  “So I gotta wear this thing twenty-four hours a day?”

  Green shrugged. “Just when you’re awake.”

  “And what else do I gotta do to get this ten thousand bucks?”

  “Absolutely
nothing.”

  “Absolutely nothing?”

  “Just get up in the morning and put it on, every day from now until Election Day. If you agree to this, I give you a thousand dollars right here and now. We’ll be able to tell, by monitoring the signals from the watch, whether you’re wearing it or not. As long as you keep it on during all of the programming segments that we broadcast, we will continue to send you a thousand dollars a month. On Election Day, we send you the remainder of the ten thousand.”

  Floyd grabbed the PIPER watch. The two halves of the watchband were spread wide apart. He put it on his wrist, wrapped his other hand around it, and the watchband tightened down firmly but comfortably.

  “To take it off, just push that little button right there and the ratchet will be released,” Green said.

  “We got a deal,” Floyd said. “Where’s my thousand?”

  36

  “Ths is it, baby,” Cyrus Rutherford Ogle said, sitting in the big chair and twiddling the joysticks. “This is the moon shot. T minus half an hour and counting.” That is what Aaron Green saw as he was climbing into the back of the big GODS truck out in back of the Decatur Civic Center in Decatur, Illinois. It was 7.30 p.m. on Flag Day.

  “My god,” Aaron said. That was all he could force past his lips for the first several minutes.

  It looked just like a plain flatbed semitrailer truck with a shipping container on the back. The shipping container, a steel box about the size of a mobile home, was brand new and slickly painted with the three-colored logo of Global Omnipresent Delivery Services. These days, as the U.S. Postal Service continued to go the way of Greyhound, the logo had become as ubiquitous as a mailbox. Most people wouldn’t notice this thing unless it was parked in their driveway. Out behind the Decatur Civic Center, sandwiched in between a food delivery truck and a video truck from Television North America, it was invisible. The only indications that it carried something other than mail were a soft humming noise and a glassy twist of heat waves coming from a small opening on its top. It carried its own power plant.

  Aaron entered through a door in the rear, passing directly into a narrow aisle, some ten feet in length, between racks of electronics and heavier equipment that stretched from floor to ceiling. Nuclear submarines must be like this, Aaron thought, as he peered into the racks, picking out the familiar shapes and logos of various top-of-the-line Pacific Netware computer systems.

  The aisle finally opened up into sort of an office and com­munications center. Countertops ran along both walls for several yards and a couple of desks sat in the middle. These surfaces were strewn with telephones, scrawled yellow notes, staplers, laptop computers, a miniature photocopier. Higher up, at head level, heavy shelves and racks were mounted to the walls, loaded with video stuff: three-quarter-inch and half-inch tape machines, monitors, and other rack-mounted goodies that Aaron recognized as being parts of a television editing suite.

  The front third of the trailer belonged to Cy Ogle. It looked totally different. The other parts of it were nice, hightech expen­sive, but they hadn’t even started to spend money until they’d reached this part.

  The trailer was eight feet wide. They had built a hollow sphere eight feet in diameter, put Cy’s big chair in the center, and then paneled the inner surface of the sphere with monitors. Each monitor was about the size of the ones used in notebook com­puters. They were in full color and they were very sharp. The only feature that broke this sweep of tiny little color monitors was a twelve-inch television screen, dead center, right in the middle of everything.

  “Welcome to the Eye,” Ogle said. “Welcome to the Eye of Cy.”

  Now that he mentioned it, it did look as though Cy Ogle were sitting in the center of an eight-foot eyeball, lined with computer monitors, with the TV screen in the middle serving as the pupil.

  Aaron already knew the answer, but he had to do it anyway: he started counting the monitors. There were exactly one hundred of them. Each one of those monitors was running the software that Aaron Green had spent the last couple of months developing. All of the experience they had gathered from all of those focus groups at Pentagon Towers - all of the mock shootings, fire drills, movie clips, hunchbacked janitors, staged marital disputes, and every other scenario that had come from the fevered imagination of Shane Schram - had been distilled into the animated graphs and charts and colored bars on those hundred screens.

  By examining those graphs in detail, Ogle could assess the emotional status of any one of the PIPER 100. But they provided more detail than Ogle could really handle during the real-time stress of a major campaign event. So Aaron had come up with a very simple, general color-coding scheme. The background color of each screen fluctuated according to the subject’s general emo­tional state. Red denoted fear, stress, anger, anxiety. Blue denoted negative emotions centered in higher parts of the brain: disagree­ment, hostility, a general lack of receptiveness. And green meant that the subject liked what they saw. Green was good. Regardless of color, the brightness went up with the intensity of the emotion.

  Stepping a little closer and scanning the screens, Aaron could see that a good eighty or ninety of the PIPER 100 were wearing their wristwatches, as per their agreement with Ogle Data Research. There were a few stragglers. Almost all of them were women. One of the problems that had come up with the PIPER program was that the bulky watches looked clumsy on a woman’s wrist, and most women didn’t want to wear them all the time. Hopefully, they were carrying them around in their purses, and would take them out and put them on as soon as the program started.

  If they didn’t, they’d forfeit the rest of their money, and their wristwatches would be given to someone a little more reliable. For this, the first test of PIPER, a 90 percent compliance rate would be pretty decent.

  “So, what’s the mood of America?” Aaron said. He couldn’t resist asking. He stepped as far forward as he could and stood right next to Ogle’s chair, so that the panorama of screens completely filled his peripheral vision. The effect was like hanging in outer space, in the center of a dynamic young galaxy: against a backdrop of velvety black, bursts of colored light flared unpredictably in every direction, in hues of red, green, blue, and mixtures thereof.

  “Hard to say, since we don’t know what any of these people are reacting to,” Ogle said. “I been keeping an eye on this poor guy right here.” He pointed to a screen that had been consistently red ever since Aaron had come into the room. “I think this guy must be right in the middle of a bar fight or something.”

  Aaron leaned closer to the red screen and squinted to read the label at the bottom. It read, TRADE SCHOOL METAL HEAD/KENT NISSAN, MT. HOLLY, N.J.

  “His blood pressure is through the roof,” Aaron said. “Maybe you’re right.”

  He couldn’t help checking out his five participants. Floyd Wayne Vishniak seemed to be in a quiescent state, probably sacked out on his couch watching television. Chase Merriam was in an excellent mood; probably getting lubricated at a cocktail party in the Hamptons.

  “Hey, this looks great!” another voice exclaimed. “Jesus! Look at this thing! It’s virtual reality, man!”

  It was a tall man in early middle age, with a neatly trimmed beard and a ponytail: the controlled hippie look. He was wearing shorts and sandals and a Hawaiian shirt, and was just tossing a weather-beaten leather satchel on to one of the counters.

  “Evening, Zeldo,” Ogle said.

  Zeldo’s gaze was fastened upon the Eye of Cy. “This thing is killer,” he said. “Does it work?”

  “The input side works,” Ogle said, “as you can see for yourself. Now that you’re here, we can run some tests on the output side.”

  “What’s the output side?” Aaron said.

  “Okay, I’m up for it,” Zeldo said. He ran over to the nearest Calyx workstation and started to sign in. “I just came over from Argus’s dressing room. He’s waiting.”

  “Who’s Argus?” Aaron said.

  A faint beeping noise sounded from the
direction of Cy Ogle. His big chair, in the middle of the Eye of Cy, had a telephone built into it, and he was punching in a number.

  “Good evening, this is Cy Ogle,” he said. “Is there any possibility that I could speak to the Governor? Thank you so very much.” Ogle was actually capable of delivering this kind of dialogue as though he meant it.

  “I have acquired Argus,” Zeldo said. The screen of his Calyx system had come alive with a multiple-window display showing the status of some incredibly complicated system.

  “Evening, Governor. You mind if I put you on the speakerphone?”

  One of the windows on Zeldo’s screen was a rapidly fluctuating bar graph. It had been dead for a little while, but now it put on a burst of colorful activity.

  “Okay,” Ogle said, and punched a button on his phone.

  “I hate these speakerphones,” said a deep voice. When he spoke, the bar graph on Zeldo’s screen came alive.

  “They make me feel like I’m in a box,” the voice continued. Aaron had finally recognized it: it was the voice of Governor William A. Cozzano.

  “We want to test our communications link,” Ogle said.

  “That’s what Zeldo told me,” Cozzano said. “Go ahead and do something.”

  The armrests of Ogle’s chair were huge, like the captain’s chair on the bridge of the Enterprise. The right one was covered with small keys, like on a computer keyboard. Each key was labeled in small letters.

  The left armrest contained a row of several joysticks or sliders that could individually be moved back and forth, left to right, between two extremes. Aaron stepped forward, leaned over Ogle’s shoulder, and read the labels on the joysticks:

  LIBERAL 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 CONSERVATIVE

  LIBERTARIAN 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 AUTHORITARIAN

  POPULIST 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ELITIST