Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  They pulled on to the shoulder, opened the back doors of the car, and laid Cozzano out full-length on the backseat. But then he sprang back up, slid out the open door into the roadside ditch, and began to march into a field of eight-foot-high corn, bellowing in Italian. At first it was just inchoate noise, but then it settled down into a passable rendition of an aria from Verdi, baritone stuff, a bad-guy role. The state patrolmen did not know what to do, whether or not they should try to restrain him, so they did what cops do when they feel uncertain: they shone lights on him. He had thoughtfully removed his suit jacket and so his white shirt, neatly trisected by suspenders, stood out brilliantly among the cornstalks. He was walking across the field, leaving trampled stalks in his wake, followed at a respectful distance by a couple of the patrolmen. His course zigged and zagged, but he seemed to be settling on one particular direction. He was headed for the only landmark in the vicinity: a tall narrow tower that rose from the field several hundred feet from the road, with blinking red lights.

  “The red lights,” one of the patrolmen said. “He’s attracted by the lights!”

  But Zeldo just shook his head. Right now his brain was almost as overloaded as Cozzano’s, and it was all he could do to force an explanatory word out: “Microwaves.”

  Cozzano finally collapsed a stone’s throw from the microwave relay tower. The patrolmen rushed inward, converged on him, hoisted him into the air, and began to hustle him back.

  By the time they got him back to the car he was thrashing around again, but the spittle and blood around his mouth told Zeldo that he’d had a seizure and probably bitten his tongue. “Let’s get out of here!” Zeldo said.

  Zeldo had already folded down the rear seat of Cozzano’s sport/utility vehicle and opened the tailgate. They threw him in back like a heavy roll of carpet. “Go! Go!” Zeldo shouted, and the driver pulled off the shoulder and down the road, all four tires burning rubber.

  Cozzano relaxed and, apropos of nothing, quoted a lengthy passage, verbatim, from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades. Then he was silent for a while.

  Then he said, “Why the hell is the tailgate open? You want us to end up like Bianca Ramirez?”

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak wanted to sleep but his thoughts would not let him. He lay on his mattress having an imaginary discussion inside of his head, moving his lips and gesturing with his hands in the air as he debated politics with William A. Cozzano and Tip McLane. The more he went over the discussion in his head, the clearer his thoughts became, and he kept finding ways to explain them. Finally he decided that he would write them down.

  The light over the kitchen table hurt his eyes. He held one hand over his face as a visor and tripped around the kitchen looking for something to write with. Eventually he located the stub of a pencil on top of the fridge. Back next to his mattress was his weight bench and underneath that was a box full of weights and dumbell parts. In the bottom of that, under all the weights, was an old spiral note­book with half the pages missing, which he had used to record his progress when he was sticking to his weight-lifting program. He turned it to a fresh page and tossed it on to the kitchen table; directly under the light, the white page was very bright and made him squint. He grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat down to collect his thoughts.

  He took the address from the videotape, as Aaron Green had told him to do.

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak

  RR. 6 Box 895

  Davenport, Iowa

  Aaron Green

  Ogle Data Research

  Pentagon Towers

  Arlington, Virginia

  Dear Mr. Green:

  I am writing this letter to you to express my additional thoughts and opinions, which you said you wanted to hear all about. Maybe you have already forgotten about me since I am just a nobody who lives in a trailer. But we have seen each other face-to-face once, and maybe we will again. This is about the Debate that was tonight in Decatur, Illinois, not so very far from where I live.

  It is real interesting that one hundred years ago people were thinking the same things they are now about the Wall Street financial kingpins running the country. How ironic that still nothing has changed. I wonder why that is. Maybe it is because all of the politicians run on money, money, money.

  McLane is power-grubbing scum and you can see it in his face and in how he acts, like a stiff. That is because if he acts natural and tells the truth he will probably offend someone who is feeding him money.

  But Cozzano is an honest man and he tells it straight. He is the only honest man up there because he is the only one who is not running for anything. To me, the favorite part of the debate was when he invited McLane to step outside. I felt good when I heard Cozzano speak words of righteousness, like out of the Bible, and I truly wanted to see his fist smashing into McLane’s face.

  I bet that you got some good reactions off my wristwatch at that moment. I bet the readings all went off the scale. Now you probably think that I am some kind of a violent person.

  But in my heart that is not the real truth. When I lay in bed I felt ashamed to think that I had felt such violent thoughts. Even if Tip McLane is a shithead it would not be OK to punch him out because that is not the basis of our democratic system. So I think that I would not vote for Cozzano after tonight’s debate, no matter what your computer system said about me. Please make a note of it.

  You will be hearing again from me soon, I am sure.

  Sincerely, Floyd Wayne Vishniak

  39

  Dr. Mary Catherine Cozzano finished her neurology residency during the last week of June. She spent a couple of days in Chicago celebrating with her fellow graduates, but during the past four years they had forgotten how to goof off, and it took a positive effort to have fun. Then she moved back into her old bedroom in Tuscola. She wasn’t crazy about moving back home at the age of thirty, but she needed a quiet place in which to study for the board exams. She didn’t have a job lined up yet, and probably wouldn’t, at least until things settled down, which would not be until Election Day.

  Besides, the house was still partly occupied by technical personnel from the Radhakrishnan Institute, their computers were all over the place, and so she could almost convince herself that she was actually living in an advanced neurological research center. She spent an hour or two each day going over the records of Dad’s recovery, learning about the therapy and how it worked. As Dad had gotten the basic rehab out of the way - learning to walk, learning to talk - his staff of therapists had withered away to a hand­ful who helped him with things like writing. In the same way, the hard-tech people had dwindled, going back to the Radhakrishnan Institute and leaving high-bandwidth communications links in their place, so that they could monitor the biochip from the other side of the country. Zeldo had told her at the beginning of June that he too would be leaving soon, but he was still here, sleeping on the floor of James’s old bedroom, which had become a weird mixture of James’s adolescent decor (ILLINI pennants and Michael Jordan posters) with appallingly pricey, high-powered computer gear. When Mary Catherine asked Zeldo why he was still here, he broke eye contact and muttered some hacker aphorism about how hard it was to chase down the last few bugs.

  She wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that her father was now right-handed.

  On the night of the State of the Union address, the blood clot had shot up Dad’s aortal arch, the giant superhighway that carried almost all of the heart’s output. It had spun off into two separate fragments. One had gone up each of the carotid arteries, left and right. The one on the right had caused paralysis on the left side of his body, and the one on the left had nailed that hemisphere’s speech centers, causing aphasia.

  Then, a couple of months later, in the den, the second stroke had caused more damage to the left side of his brain, causing paralysis on the right side of his body.

  Dad’s soul could make the decision to move, and his brain could issue the order to his arm or leg, but the order never got there because the lin
ks had been severed by the stroke. Dr. Radhakrishnan had implanted two chips, one on each side of the brain. Their function was to replace those broken links so that the orders to move could get out to his body again. Now that the chips had been trained to convey messages to the correct body parts, Dad’s paralysis was gone.

  But aphasia was a different thing. It wasn’t just paralysis of the tongue. It went deeper than that. And you couldn’t stimulate it with baboons. It was uncanny that this therapy had worked so well the first time out. Dad sounded like Dad, and said the things that Dad would say, but sometimes when he was talking, she suddenly became disoriented, stopped listening to him, and began to wonder where his words were coming from, whether they were passing through the biochip. Dad could tell when Mary Catherine was doing this; he called it “going neurologist” and it drove him crazy.

  She felt flaccid and out of shape after four years of residency. Every morning she would rise at five and go for a run. Any later in the day, and it would get so warm and sticky that she couldn’t really get a good workout. Besides, she had done much worse things to her sleep schedule during residency and so she didn’t mind getting up early to do something she felt good about.

  Her usual route took her down the street to the city park, where she would take a couple of laps around the Softball diamond and do some stretching on the infield. Then she would head out of town, crossing U.S. 45 and the Illinois Central, and run along one of the farm roads, measuring her distance by counting the crossroads, which came at one-mile intervals. Central Illinois in July was stiflingly humid, and as often as not she found herself running through fog and mist. The early morning sunlight, shining in low, threw a clammy metallic haze over the landscape.

  On the morning of the Fourth of July, a shape materialized in front of Mary Catherine as she jogged down the country road. At first she thought it was a car coming toward her in the wrong lane, but then she realized that it was not moving. She thought it must be a car that had broken down. As she got closer she could see a dark shape standing next to the car, motionless, waiting. She unzipped her belt pack and reached into it, making sure that that the stun gun was in there.

  It was a small car, low to the ground. A sporty little Mercedes. A big hand-lettered sign was leaning against the rear bumper, printed on a square of poster board. It said, MARY CATHERINE - DON’T MAKE A SOUND!

  The figure leaning against the car was Mel Meyer. As Mary Catherine approached, Mel straightened up and turned to face her, holding one finger up to his lips, shushing her.

  It was not exactly a warm and affectionate reunion. Mel pulled a small black box from the pocket of his black raincoat. He walked toward Mary Catherine, clicked a switch on the box, and then waved it up and down the length of her body, watching an LED graph built into its top. Every time the box passed near her midsection, the graph shot up to its peak level. Mel moved the little box in a narrowing orbit until he finally zerowed in on her belt pack.

  The pack was still unzipped. Mel pulled it open and peered into it, his bald head grazing Mary Catherine’s bosom. He nudged the stun gun out of the way and carefully pulled her key chain out. The world’s largest keychain had shed a couple of pounds since Mary Catherine had left the hospital, but it was still formidable. Mel turned it over in his hand, waving his little black box over it, and finally zeroed in on the miniature Swiss Army knife.

  He disconnected it from the keychain and held it right up next to his black box. The LED graph was pinned at its highest reading.

  Then he walked across the road, wound up, and flung the knife off into the middle of a cornfield. He made one more pass over Mary Catherine’s body with the little black box. This time the LED meter did not flicker.

  “Okay,” Mel finally said. He spoke quietly, but it was easy to hear him in the absolute silence of predawn. “You’re clean.”

  “What-”

  “If anyone asks, tell them that, uh- ” Mel closed his eyes and stood motionless for a few seconds, “you noticed a dog that had broken away and gotten its collar tangled up in a barbed wire fence and you had to take out your knife and cut through his collar to get him loose. In the process you dropped your knife on the ground and forgot to pick it up.”

  “Hardly plausible.”

  “It doesn’t have to be plausible. Just good enough that no one can call bullshit on you without bring down the wrath of the Governor.”

  “What was in the knife?”

  “A listening device.”

  “Must have been a small one.”

  Mel was disappointed. “Are you kidding? Don’t be a sap. They can make them the size of fleas now.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Mary Catherine, some heavy shit is going on, and we need to talk. What time you usually get back to the house?”

  “Around six.”

  “Okay, I’ll drop you off by the park about then,” Mel said. “Hop in.”

  The passenger door of the Mercedes was already ajar. Mary Catherine, a little shell-shocked, climbed into it. Mel sat down behind the wheel, started the engine, drove thirty feet up the road and turned on to a gravel farm road, a tunnel into the corn. He drove for a quarter of a mile, until the main road was shrouded in the mist.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Partly we’re just getting off the road so people won’t see us,” Mel said. “Partly I want to show you something.” Mel let the Mercedes coast to a stop, set the hand brake, and popped his door open.

  A short distance away from the lane was a tree, one of the magnificent, solitary oaks that sprouted from the cornfields every few miles and that was allowed to remain there by the farmers, just because it was beautiful.

  “Now I’m totally lost,” Mary Catherine said, getting out of the car. She faced Mel over the hood. “You’re acting kind of paranoid, Mel, if I can offer a professional opinion.”

  “I’m fully aware of that,” Mel said. “Now, check this out. You might be surprised to know that I have become quite the observer of nature on my little drives down here.”

  “Nature? I didn’t know there was any nature left in downstate.”

  “Well, you have to look for it, but it’s there. Watch the tree.” Mel turned toward the oak, cupped his hands around his face like a megaphone, and then did something incredibly un-Mel-like: he made a high-pitched screeching sound, three sharp falsetto cries.

  The tree rose into the sky. That’s what it looked like, for a moment. A thousand black birds rose from its branches in unison and soared across the cornfield, holding for a moment the shape of the tree, then forming into a tightly organized cloud that twisted around itself, turned inside out, changing directions and leaders but always staying together.

  Mel was grinning at her. “You didn’t know those birds were there, did you?”

  Mary Catherine shook her head no.

  “Look at ‘em,” Mel said. “I’ve been watching them from my car. Watch how the flock can vanish.”

  Every bird in the flock snapped into exactly the same banking turn. At a certain point they were all coming directly toward Mel and Mary Catherine, and the flock became nearly invisible as each bird was viewed edge-on. Then Mel made his screeching noise again and they all turned sideways, the hidden flock snapping back into existence, much closer to them, almost merging into a solid wall.

  “You know, Mary Catherine, that I have spent my career as an integral part of the military-industrial complex. Whatever the hell that is.” Mel waved his arm toward a patch of mist at about three o’clock. “Right over there is Willy’s nylon factory, where they made parachutes for the Army. You can’t get much more military, or industrial, than that. So I have always scoffed at people who blamed all the world’s troubles on the military-industrial complex. But I can’t escape the idea that something very big is going on involving our Willy. Something that involves spending an ungodly amount of money.”

  “The biochip implant is definitely a big deal,” Mary Catherine said. She was still mystified by the b
usiness with Mel’s little black box, and the bird thing made no sense at all, but she decided to play along for now. “The Radhakrishnan Institute definitely has a lot of money behind it. We knew that from the beginning. And we’ve always been realistic enough to understand that there’s an economic dimension to this therapy. If it goes well, the institute and its backers will have a gold mine on their hands.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Mel said, waving his hand dimissively, “that is all a given. That’s the Invisible Hand argument - that we’re seeing free enterprise in action here. I’ve been thinking about that argument ever since you came back from your inspection trip. It doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sure, a lot of people have brain damage. But there are a million diseases. Cancer, muscular dystrophy, car crashes. Now, there’s a good example - car crashes. For decades, a ridiculous number of people died in car crashes. Still do. But even simple things like seat belts took a long time to develop. The car makers had to be dragged kicking and screaming into air bags. The Invisible Hand didn’t work then.”

  “What other possible reason could there be?”

  “That this therapy was developed specifically for one patient - William A. Cozzano.”

  But you’re talking about a vast expenditure,” Mary Catherine said. “Billions of dollars.”

  “Right,” Mel said, “which means two things: first of all, the people who did this are loaded. In fact, it can’t be a single entity. It has to be a group of separate entities working in tight formation - like that flock of birds. And secondly, they expect to get a huge return on their investment.”

  “What could possibly be worth that much money?”

  “Only one thing I can think of. The presidency of the United States,” Mel said.

  At the intellectual level, Mary Catherine thought this whole conversation was ridiculous. But at some deeper level she was coming down with a severe case of the creeps. She had cooled off from her running now and the sweat on her limbs was suddenly replaced by goosebumps. She said, “And you think that this explanation is actually more believable than the Invisible Hand theory?”