Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  “You still have thirty seconds,” Dr. Lawrence said. “Would you like to elaborate?”

  “What’s to elaborate?” Cozzano said.

  A definite pattern was now noticeable when the feed cut between Dr. Lawrence and Cozzano. People had generally made up their minds that Dr. Lawrence was a jerk.

  “That was wild,” Ogle said. He sounded a bit uncertain. He grabbed the POPULIST-ELITIST joystick and shoved it a little closer to POPULIST. “That took balls. Aaron, don’t we have a toilet-scrubbing ex-autoworker?”

  “Yeah,” Aaron said, choosing a line of the same name from a menu on the computer screen. A graphic came up summarizing the way that this particular member of the PIPER 100 had reacted to Cozzano’s speech.

  It was all jaggedy contrasts and mood swings. Clearly this man’s feelings had been hurt. But it wasn’t all negative either. Toward the end of Cozzano’s statement, the ex-autoworker’s emotional state had swung sharply upward.

  “Huh. That’s interesting,” Ogle said. “The appeal to pride seems to work. But it’s not old-fashioned jingoism. It’s a question of personal, individual pride. Core values.”

  On TV, Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence was explaining that the candi­dates could now rebut each other’s statements.

  McLane flashed up on the screen with a bit of a stunned, nervous, beady-eyed look, as if he wanted to stare at Cozzano but couldn’t. “Well, it seems to me that, uh, the best ticket to self-esteem and dignity is to have a steady job. Everything else follows from that. Under my administration, I’ll be pursuing policies that will stimulate the vigor of our free enterprise system and lead to job growth in general. After all, it’s hard to be dignified when you’re living on welfare.”

  The Eye of Cy pinkened briefly as the word “welfare” was spoken. “Cheap shot,” Ogle mumbled.

  “It’s easy to scoff at the concept of the unlevel playing field when you have been born into an affluent family and haven’t suffered from massive layoffs the way our auto workers have,” McLane continued. “But for those people in Detroit-”

  The Eye of Cy displayed a few brief flashes of green as several people took pleasure in McLane’s personal attack on Cozzano. But most people didn’t like it. They didn’t like it at all.

  Cozzano had turned slightly in McLane’s direction. He looked like a great man, alone in his study, busy with important matters, who has to get up and discipline a puppy who has just piddled on the rug.

  “My family is affluent because we love each other and we work hard,” Cozzano said. “And I can promise you, Tip, that if you seek to gain the esteem of the American public by running my family into the ground, I will make you regret it on many levels. When a man makes cracks about my family, my natural response is to invite him to step outside. And I’m not above doing that here and now.” Ogle rocketed half out of is chair and started screaming. “CUT TO TIP! CUT TO TIP! CUT TO TIP!” Aaron could hardly see anything; the Eye of Cy had become blindingly intense, like a parabolic dish pointed directly into the sun. But the image in the middle changed and Tip came on the screen; his mouth was half open, his eyebrows somewhere up in the middle of his forehead, his eyes darting back and forth nervously. The Eye of Cy turned blue (people who, as of three seconds ago, hated Tip McLane), with a few angry red screens (people who wanted Cozzano to punch McLane right here and now).

  “Knockout punch,” Ogle said. “Tip’s out of the race.” But just in case, he shoved the KIND/GENTLE-BELLIGERENT joystick toward KIND/GENTLE. Then he moved the MATERIAL-ETHEREAL joystick a lot closer to ETHEREAL.

  It was almost possible to see the wheels turning in McLane’s head. The look of surprise gradually faded, until he looked impassive, then calm and almost coldly defiant. “It wouldn’t be the first time I had settled an argument that way,” McLane said.

  “Ouch,” Ogle said.

  “But one of the first things a president has to learn is to separate his personal feelings from the affairs of the nation, and-‘

  Colors shifted all over the Eye. “Damage control!” Ogle said, and slammed one of the buttons on the armrest.

  “-as for the issue of the auto industry,” Cozzano said, continuing his own sentence as if McLane had never opened his mouth, and blithely running him off the road, “it is simply wrong to say that people get jobs first and then feel good about themselves. That is a shallow view of human nature. Dignity can’t be bought with a paycheck. Your student deferments kept you out of Vietnam, Tip, so you never saw what I saw: stooped peasants in the rice paddies who never made a dime in their lives but who had more dignity in the last joint of their little finger than a lot of highly paid lawyers and chief executives I can name. It goes the other way: if you have dignity, if you respect yourself, you will find a job. I don’t care how bad the economy is. When my great-grandfather came to this part of the country, there weren’t any jobs. So he came up with his own job. He had only been in America for a few weeks, but in that time he had become thoroughly American. He had come to believe that he could change his own life. That he could take charge of his own destiny.”

  “Very inspiring. But when my family came to California-” McLane began.

  “Some think that unemployment hurts because of money,” Cozzano said. “Because you can’t afford to buy Nintendo games and fancy sneakers. That is shallow and cheap. Americans are not pure, money-grubbing materialists. Unemployment hurts people’s feelings far more than their pocketbooks.”

  In the past few seconds all the graphs had veered downward, the colors turned bluish. “I fucked that up!” Ogle said, whacking keys and sliding joysticks furiously. “Bad move!”

  Suddenly Tip McLane was on the screen. It was too late for Cozzano to dig himself out.

  “Shit!” Ogle hissed. “Where does he get off saying that Americans are not shallow materialists?”

  McLane was amused. He knew he had Cozzano. “Apparently the Governor of Illinois thinks that we’d all be happier being fully employed … in rice paddies!”

  The audience laughed. The Eye warmed suddenly to Tip McLane.

  “Damn!” Ogle said. “Why’d he have to get profound on us?” He scratched his chin nervously, thinking hard, and fussed with the controls. “We have to suppress that urge to philosophize.”

  “Maybe the Governor hasn’t been seeing a full cross section of the American public from his backyard in Tuscola,” McLane said. “But I have, because I’ve visited all fifty states during the long primary campaign - even smaller states that my campaign manager begged me not to visit because he said they weren’t important. I have talked to a lot of people. And over and over again, I get the impression that the people of America don’t like being talked down to by politicians.”

  “That’s for damn sure,” Ogle said, punching a key that caused a hallucinatory bullet to whiz past Cozzano’s head.

  “They know what they want: jobs. Good jobs,” McLane said. “What they don’t need is vague talk about how to feel more dignified.”

  Ogle groaned. The PIPER 100 were showing strong support for McLane now. “They’re killing us,” he said, and slammed a big red button that said, simply, FLIP FLOP.

  “When the forces of freedom and democracy stormed Hitler’s Fortress Europe on D day,” Cozzano said, “the elite spearhead of that invasion rained down out of the sky on parachutes. Parachutes made of nylon that was manufactured about half a mile away from my house in Tuscola, by my family. The nervous paratroopers, standing in the open doorways of those airplanes, looking down at the landscape of France thousands of feet below them, were putting a lot of trust in those folds of nylon.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?” Aaron said, mirroring the feelings displayed on the Eye of Cy: a state of chaotic flux.

  “Shut up,” Ogle mumbled. “This is good material. Reaganesque in its cloying nostalgia - with the metaphorical punch of Ross Perot before he went batshit.”

  “When you jump out of an airplane flying over a war zone, you need more than self-esteem to
get you safely to the ground,” Cozzano said. “You need a solid, well-made parachute. Young people leaving high school and college within the last few weeks have a lot in common with those troopers jumping out of that airplane. And if you think that William A. Cozzano intends to send them out that door with nothing more than some feel-good talk, you’re dead wrong.”

  “But that’s the opposite of what he just said,” Aaron said.

  “Just shut up,” Ogle said. “I think he’s got them going.” As Cozzano’s analogy started to become clearer, the monitor screens had stopped fluctuating and begun settling down into a dim greenish pattern. “We need to get Anecdote Development working on that D day thing.”

  Cozzano continued. “Just as nylon replaced silk in parachutes, new technologies have to replace the old ones in our job market. And I can promise you that no country in the world is better than America when it comes to inventing new technologies.”

  McLane interrupted him. “And no country is better capitalizing on those inventions than Japan,” he said, “which is why I’m going to make sure that America, not Japan, reaps the benefit of her creative powers, unique among all the nations of the world.”

  Ogle slapped his face and groaned. “That McLane son of a bitch is a vampire. Give me a projection.”

  Aaron worked at his computer for a minute, running some statistical routines. “Based on the reactions of the PIPER 100, allowing for a typical seventy-two-hour debate bounce, correcting for their likelihood to actually cast a ballot, we get 27 electoral votes for the President, 206 for Cozzano, and 302 for Tip McLane.”

  “We have a long way to go,” Ogle said.

  “Seems pretty good to me,” Aaron said, “considering he’s not even running for president.”

  “Details!” Ogle scoffed.

  38

  It took William A. Cozzano nearly an hour to fight his way from the dressing room, where his TV makeup had been sponged off, to his car in the parking lot of the Decatur Civic Center. Along the way he had to shake what seemed like every hand in downstate Illinois, and kiss a fair percentage of the babies. His car, a four-wheel-drive sport-utility vehicle with every luxury feature and antenna known to science, showed up regularly on downstate television (every time he changed the oil in his driveway) and so everyone knew where he was going. Meanwhile, Tip McLane skulked from an obscure fire exit into his waiting Secret Service motorcade.

  The Decatur Civic Center was equipped with loading docks and ramps that would have enabled Cozzano’s driver to pull straight into the building and pick him up, but it looked a lot better for him to fight his way through a crowd of supporters. Ogle’s men had set up a double rope line to hold them back, providing a clear corridor across the asphalt from the building to Cozzano’s car. Cy Ogle had personally walked the length of this corridor with a tape measure, making sure it was just narrow enough to allow the crowd to nearly surge in on Cozzano as they bent over the ropes and waved babies and pens and papers in his face. Banks of lights had been erected on mobile jackstands, illuminating the scene like a high-school football field on a Friday night, and network camera crews gladly availed themselves of the platforms Ogle had set up for their use.

  “It was not half-bad,” Cozzano said. He was sitting in the backseat of his car, next to Zeldo. His driver and an Illinois State Patrolman were in the front. They were driving down a two-lane blacktop road at eighty miles an hour, accompanied by one of Ogle’s vehicles, a Secret Service car, and a few Highway Patrol cruisers. It had taken them several hours to get to Decatur this morning because they’d taken a circuitous route through Champaign and Springfield. But on the direct route, at this speed, Tuscola was minutes away.

  Zeldo’s brain was practically overloaded by everything that had just happened, but to him the most marvelous thing about the whole night was that they were driving eighty miles an hour - with a state patrolman right there in the car with them.

  He shook his head and tried to concentrate on matters at hand. Cozzano had turned on a little courtesy light that shone a pool of golden light into his lap, and was jotting down some notes. Zeldo watched the Governor’s right hand, gripping the thick barrel of an expensive fountain pen so tightly it looked like it might burst and spray ink all over the car. He wrote in shaky block letters, one at a time, like a first grader. His recovery had far exceeded their wildest hopes, and a person who did not know of his stroke would never notice anything was wrong - except when he tried to write. Cozzano knew this, it infuriated him, and he spent a lot of time practicing his penmanship, trying to erase this last vestige of weakness.

  “We’ve got a lot of data to crank through. We’re going to do a core dump on this whole night,” Zeldo said. “Analyze it every which way. Then we’ll go over the results with you.”

  “Good,” Cozzano said, thinking about something else.

  “I just have one question,” Zeldo said. Cozzano looked up at him expectantly, and Zeldo hesitated for a moment.

  Even after all the time they’d spent together, Cozzano made him nervous. Zeldo always got thick-tongued and self-conscious when he was about to ask the Governor something personal, something he suspected that Cozzano might not appreciate. Like a lot of powerful men - like Zeldo’s boss, Kevin Tice - Cozzano didn’t suffer fools gladly.

  “What was it like?” Zeldo said.

  “What was what like?” Cozzano said.

  “You’re the only person in history who’s ever done this, so I don’t know how to ask. I know it’s a vague question. But someday I’d like to get an implant of my own, you know.”

  “So you’ve said,” Cozzano said.

  “So I’m trying to get some sense of what it’s like to communicate in that way - transmissions from outside, bypassing all the sensory subsystems, going directly into the brain’s neural net.”

  “I’m still not sure if I follow,” Cozzano said.

  Zeldo started to grope. “Normally we get input through our senses. Information comes down the optic nerve, or through the nerves in our skin or whatever. Those nerves are hooked up to parts of the brain that act like filters between ourselves and our environment.”

  Cozzano nodded slightly, more out of politeness than anything else. He was still nonplussed. But one good thing about Cozzano was that he was always game for an intellectual discussion.

  “Ever seen an optical illusion?” Zeldo said, trying a new tack.

  “Of course.”

  “An optical illusion is what we computer people would call a hack - an ingenious trick that takes advantage of a defect in our brain, a bug if you will, to make us see something that’s not really there. Normally our brains were too smart for that. Like, when you watch something on television, you understand that it’s not really happening - it’s just an image on a screen.”

  “I think I’m following you now,” Cozzano said.

  “The inputs you were getting from Ogle tonight didn’t pass through any of your normal filters - they went straight into your brain, kind of like an optical illusion does. What’s that like?” “I’m not sure what you mean by inputs,” Cozzano said.

  “The signals he was sending you from his chair.”

  Suddenly Cozzano’s face crinkled up in amusement and he chuckled. “Oh, that business,” he said. Then he shook his head indulgently. “I know you guys have a lot of fun with that stuff. It’s all just parlor tricks. Was Cy doing any of that nonsense tonight?”

  “He was doing it more or less constantly,” Zeldo said.

  “Well, then you can tell him to stop wasting his time,” Cozzano

  said, “because it didn’t have any effect. I didn’t notice a thing, Zeldo, have you ever been in a situation like that? Debating on live television before millions of people?”

  “I can’t say that I have,” Zeldo said.

  “You get into a sort of zone, as the football players like to say. Every minute seems to last an hour. You forget about all the lights and cameras and audience and become totally focused on the event its
elf, the exchange of ideas, the rhetorical counterplay. I can assure you that if Cy Ogle were to walk on to the set during one of those debates and throw a bucket of ice water over my head, I wouldn’t even notice it. So none of that silly business with the buttons and joysticks has any effect.”

  “Didn’t it stimulate memories and images?”

  Cozzano grinned paternally. “Son, the mind is a complicated bit of business. It is a churning sea of memories and images and everything else. My mind is always filled with competing ideas. If Cy wants to toss in one or two extras, then he’s welcome to do so, but it’s kind of like pissing in the ocean.”

  Cozzano stopped talking and got a distant look in his eyes.

  “What’s going on?” Zeldo said.

  “For example, right now my mind is full of images, an over­whelming flood of memories and ideas - you have any idea how many memories are buried in the mind? Fishing for bluegill on Lake Argyle with my father, the hook caught in his thumb, forcing it through the other side and cutting it off with wirecutters, the severed barb flying dangerously into the air spinning its cut facet gleaming in the sun and I jerking back for fear it would plunge into my eye, squinting protectively, opening my eyes again it is mud, all mud, a universe of mud and the mortar shell has just taken flight, my fingers jammed into my ears, the smell of the explosion penetrating my sinuses making them clench up and bleed, the shell exploding in the trees, a puff of white smoke but the trees are still there and the gunfire still raining down like hailstones on the cellar door on the day that the tornado wrecked our farmhouse and we packed into my aunt’s fruit cellar and I looked up at the stacked mason jars of rhubarb and tomatoes and wondered what would happen to us when the glass shattered and flew through the air like the horizontal sleet of Soldier Field on the day that I caught five for eighty-seven yards and put such a hit on Cornelius Hayes that he took five minutes to get up. God, I can see my entire life! Stop the car! Stop the car!”

  Then William A. Cozzano froze up entirely, except for his eyes which were jittering back and forth in their sockets, irises opening and closing sporadically, focus changing in and out as they tried to lock on to things that weren’t actually there.