Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  “I have insufficient data to answer that,” Mel said, “but as long as it’s a possibility, I have to consider it. Maybe you can help gather more information for me, so that I can rule out this ridiculous theory and buy into a more respectable explanation.”

  “What should I do?” Mary Catherine said.

  “First of all, assume it could be true,” Mel said. “Assume that you might be enmeshed in a very large conspiracy. Assume that you are being listened to and watched, all the time. I already found a bug in my car, and I just found one on you,” Mel said.

  Mary Catherine was stunned. “Are you sure?”

  Mel clenched his jaw and actually looked a little peeved. “Don’t ask me if I’m sure when I say something like this. Of course I’m fucking sure. I have connections you don’t know about, kid. My whole life is not this fucking corncob business.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I went out of town for a couple of days. Came back. Got in my car. Pushed the button for WGN and got some Jesus station from DeKalb. All my station presets were screwed up. So I took it to a friend of a friend who used to work in the Agency, and he found a bug. Then we did a full sweep and found bugs in my house too.”

  “My god,” Mary Catherine said. If Mel was telling the truth, then there really was some heavy shit going on. If he wasn’t, he was demented. Either way, this was starting to get serious.

  “They weren’t Radio Shack special either,” Mel said, “they were very good bugs. KGB-level technology.”

  “Okay, I’ll assume I’m bugged. Then what?”

  Mel sighed. “Hell, I don’t know. The problem with you downstaters is that everything has to be spelled out.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Just keep your eyes open. Is that too general? You want a specific question from me? I can’t provide you with a specific question.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes peeled for signs of the military-industrial complex,” Mary Catherine said.

  “It’s not that. It’s something else,” Mel said. He turned to look at the flock of birds, which was still careening across the fields, turning this way and that according to some plan that Mel and Mary Catherine couldn’t puzzle out, vanished and then snapping back into full view, each bird somehow knowing what all the other birds were doing. “Let’s call it the Network.”

  This discussion was crystallizing a number of vague ideas and perceptions that had been floating around in Mary Catherine’s mind for a few months. The outlines of an idea were beginning to emerge, much as Mel and his car had materialized from the fog.

  “There is something going on, now that you mention it,” she said.

  “What can you tell me about it?” Mel asked. He had suddenly relaxed and softened.

  “I don’t know. It’s just that the same few names keep coming up. Gale Aerospace, Pacific Netware, GODS, Genomics, Ogle Data Research, MacIntyre Engineering. They’re independent, yet they act in a coordinated fashion.”

  “Can you give me names of any people who work for the Network?”

  Mary Catherine leaned her forearms on the roof of the car, watching the birds, trying to bring things into focus. “A lot of people work for the Network. Including me, I guess, in a way. Cy Ogle, Dr. Radhakrishnan, Pete Zeldovich, are all in that category. But I’ve only seen one person who seems to be of the Network. Does that make any sense?”

  “Sure. Who is this person?”

  “He is called Mr. Salvador,” Mary Catherine said. “He stops in from time to time. Like he’s on an inspection tour or something. From the way people act around him, I’d say he’s definitely the one in charge.”

  “Of the whole Network?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Just a feeling. He acts like a guy who has a boss. I think he’s in charge of everything pertaining to Dad.”

  “So Salvador is an ops man,” Mel said. “He manages one of the Network’s projects - Willy. Who is this boss of Salvador’s?”

  “I don’t know,” Mary Catherine said. “I’ve had a bare minimum of contact with Salvador. His boss doesn’t even enter the picture.”

  “Can you give me any clues at all? Does he make phone calls when he’s there?”

  “Yeah. But he uses the phone in his car.”

  “Does he get phone calls, or letters, at the house?”

  Mary Catherine suddenly remembered something. She stood up straight and stared intently at nothing in particular, her eyes jumping back and forth as she tried to reconstruct the memory. “Yesterday morning when I was coming back from my run, a GODS van pulled up in front of the house. The driver had an envelope for Mr. Salvador. But he wasn’t in; he was due to show up a few hours later. So I signed for the envelope. Salvador showed up later and ripped it open. And threw it away.”

  “You’re saying that the envelope is still in the garbage?” “They’re too security-conscious to throw things in the garbage. They only throw away things like McDonald’s wrappers. Every­thing else goes into a burn bag, or straight to a shredder.”

  “My god, it’s just like the Agency,” Mel said.

  “I think that they shred the contents of envelopes. But the envelopes themselves go into the burn bag - and those only get collected once or twice a week. So I may be able to dig it out.”

  “I need that envelope. It has tracking codes and stuff on it,” Mel said.

  “I’ll do some looking around later,” Mary Catherine said.

  Mel looked ever so slightly crestfallen. Apparently she had not shown enough enthusiasm for this cloak-and-dagger assignment.

  He had a Bruckner symphony going on the CD player in the trunk of the Mercedes. He climbed back into the driver’s seat and turned it up. Mary Catherine climbed in too. They sat in the car and listened to it for a few minutes.

  “Listen to me,” Mel said, turning it down again, “I’m way behind the curve in dealing with this thing.”

  “How’s that?”

  Mel laughed. In another man it would have been a laugh devoid of humor. But Mel had a talent for finding humor in strange places and he seemed genuinely amused, though he was not exactly happy. “I’m supposed to be Willy’s trusted adviser. I’m supposed to tell him whether it’s a good idea to run for president. And now look. He’s announcing in a few hours. And I’m still trying to figure out what the hell’s going on.”

  Mary Catherine had nothing to say to that. She waited for Mel to continue.

  “I take my job very seriously and right now I’m failing at it,” Mel said. “I have to get my ass in gear. I have to do stuff. To take steps. Some of what I do may not make me very popular with the Network. So let me ask you something: do you want to work with me? Or not? Either way is fine.”

  It was Mary Catherine’s turn to laugh. “Either way is not fine,” she said. “We’re talking about Dad.”

  “No, we’re not,” Mel said gently, “we’re talking about what your dad became when that chip went into his head. And I’m not sure it’s the same thing.”

  This was such a disturbing comment that Mary Catherine decided not to let it sink in just now. “Well, even if he were just another presidential candidate - one way I’m doing good and one way I’m doing evil.”

  “Leave it to a farmer to see things in those terms,” Mel said. “Okay, are you going to do good or evil?”

  “Good,” Mary Catherine said.

  “That’s a nice girl,” Mel said.

  “I think that Dad wants to do good also - whatever you might think,” Mary Catherine said.

  Mel turned and looked at her face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know,” she said, “there are many cases of people who have had strokes and recovered from them.”

  “I thought the brain tissue was dead. How can you recover from being dead?”

  “The dead tissue doesn’t recover. But in some cases, other parts of the brain can take over for the parts that died. It takes a lot of work. A lot of therapy. And some luck. But it’
s been known to happen. There are people who had half of their brains blown out in Vietnam who are walking and talking normally today.”

  “You don’t say. Why didn’t you try this with Willy?”

  “We did,” Mary Catherine said, “but when the chance of a quick fix arose, he opted for that. There’s no telling where he would have gone with normal therapy.”

  “You think he might have come back?”

  “The chances are very low,” she said. “But remember, he’s mixed-brain dominant. People like that have a knack for recovering from these injuries.”

  “So what are you saying exactly - about Willy wanting to do good?”

  “I’m saying that the Network may be able to exert great influence over him through the biochip,” she said, “but that under­neath, his brain may be struggling to reassert control. And that if he pursues the proper therapy, we can increase the chances that this will eventually happen.”

  “What kind of therapy?” Mel said.

  “He just has to use his head. That’s all,” Mary Catherine said. “He has to exercise his brain and his body, in a lot of different ways, and retrain his neural pathways.”

  “Hell,” Mel said, “a presidential campaign’s not exactly the place for that.”

  “Granted,” she said, “unless the candidate travels with, dines with, and rooms with a neurologist.”

  She and Mel locked eyes for a moment.

  “You sure?” Mel said.

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  40

  “Last year at about this time I accepted an invitation from the chairman of my party to deliver the keynote speech at their convention, a couple of weeks from today,” William A. Cozzano said. “Last night, I telephoned him from my home here in Tuscola and expressed my regrets that I would be unable to participate in that convention in any way, shape, or form - as a keynote speaker, a delegate, or a nominee. And he was gracious enough to accept my apology for this sudden change of plans.”

  Cozzano finally paused long enough to allow the crowd to detonate - something that they were primed to do, since they had been practicing it under the eye of Cy Ogle’s crowd handlers for the last hour and a half. When he finally paused for breath, the freshly painted bleachers surrounding the Tuscola High School football field suddenly bloomed with signs, banners, balloons, confetti, and all the other bright insubstantialities of a political campaign.

  “It’s not that I bear a grudge against my party, because I don’t. In fact, I am still a card-carrying member and expect to remain one, assuming they’ll still have me after today.”

  This line triggered a laugh that developed into a cheer, which built into another flag-waving crescendo.

  It looked great. It looked great to Cozzano, to his close friends and family seated around him on the field, and to the three dozen camera crews that had come in from all the networks, major urban markets, and several European and Asian networks.

  Until about a month ago, this field had only had one rank of low-rising bleachers, on one side of the field. That was adequate for just about any crowd that the Tuscola Warriors were likely to draw. Then a big donation had come in from the Cozzano family and the bleacher space had been quadrupled, with brand-new ranks installed on both sides of the field. The lighting system had been beefed up to the point where it lit up half the town. Tuscola now boasted the best football field of any town of its size in Illinois.

  For today’s festivities, a huge podium had been built straddling the fifty-yard line, raised about six feet off the ground. There was enough space for a couple of hundred folding chairs, heavy media support, and one great big red-white-and-blue lectern, massively constructed but nevertheless groaning under the weight of nearly a hundred microphones. Amazingly enough, most of those mikes had arrived preattached to the lectern, were not actually connected to anything, and bore the logos of networks and TV stations that were imaginary or defunct.

  Mary Catherine was especially interested to note that Dad now rated a Secret Service detail. Half a dozen of them were clearly visible on and around the podium, which probably meant more circulating through the crowd.

  Ogle had arranged the thing in concentric circles. The inner circle consisted of VIPs, friends and family in the folding chairs up on the podium. A few select camera crews and photographers had also been allowed to circulate up here, getting closeup shots. Surrounding the podium was an inner circle of especially hysterical Cozzano fans, sort of an all-American cross section, spiced with a few dozen astonishingly beautiful young women who were not wearing very much in the way of clothing but who were careful to hold up their Cozzano signs and point to their Cozzano skimmers whenever photographers and cameraman pointed lenses in their direction, which was constantly. Banks of high-powered bluish-white floodlights, similar to stadium lights but only a couple of yards off the ground, had been erected on the edges of this crowd, pointed inward so that their light grazed the heads of the Cozzano supporters. At first Mary Catherine had thought that this must be a mistake, and that the technicians would turn the lights toward the podium. But then the Cozzano supporters had held their white COZZANO FOR PRESIDENT signs up above their heads and the light had caught them brilliantly, making them glow like snowflakes in a car’s headlights.

  Beyond was a broad sweep of open turf where most of the media were stationed, including a raised platform for the TV crews, arranged so that every time they aimed their cameras at the lectern they had to shoot over the unnaturally brilliant field of waving signs, flags, soaring skimmers, mylar balloons, and pumping fists.

  The outermost circle, surrounding everything, was a vast sweaty crowd consisting of all the population of Tuscola and then some. Their function here was to hurl up a barrage of noise whenever Cozzano said something mildly interesting, and to provide a colorful backdrop rising up behind him. In fact, the geometry of the bleachers, the lectern, and the main media area was such that it was impossible to get a shot of Cozzano without taking in several hundred supporters in the bleachers behind him, all waving hankies and signs, just like fans seated behind the goalposts at a football game. To make sure that the level of enthusiasm never dropped, the Tuscola High School cheerleading squad had been deployed, in full uniform, in front of one set of bleachers, and the squad from Rantoul was egging on the opposite set of bleachers. Cy Ogle had promised a free set of new uniforms to whichever squad elicited the most noise from their half of the crowd. The Tuscola High School marching band was lined up behind the podium, primed to burst into music whenever the mood seemed right. All of this, combined with the reckless Cozzano supporters setting off strings of fire­crackers amid the crowd; the giant vertical Cozzano banner hanging from the soaring sign of the Dixie Truckers’ Home; the circling airplanes trailing more banners; the hovering choppers; the team of three precision skydivers who had skimmed over the podium in formation just before Cozzano was introduced, trailing plumes of red-white-and-blue smoke; and the appearance of William A. Cozzano himself, landing in the home team’s end zone in a National Guard chopper and jogging -jogging - across the field, through a tunnel of supporters, slapping hands on either side the whole way - it all added up to a show the likes of which had never been seen in downstate Illinois, and which Guillermo Cozzano could not have imagined when he first came down to toil in the coal mines.

  Mary Catherine had the seat closest to the lecturn. She was wearing brand new clothes purchased for her by her personal shopper at Marshall Field. The personal shopper and the clothes were both paid for by Cy Ogle. The personal shopper was a fifty-five-year-old Sunday school teacher and had chosen the clothing accordingly. Except, that is, for the underwear, which Mary Catherine had picked out herself, and which probably would have gotten her in big trouble if she got into a car accident.

  It had already become obvious that for purposes of the campaign, Mary Catherine would serve as a kind of surrogate wife. This was an awkward notion, to say the least, and as she sat there boiling and sweating under the July sun she ma
de up her mind that she was going to have to have a talk with Ogle about it. The fact that she was now acting as a secret agent for Mel Meyer made it a little more palatable.

  James was next to her, very handsome in a new suit that had obviously been chosen by a personal shopper of his own. She hadn’t seen much of him lately, which was probably a good thing. His book project seemed to have added years to his age - in a good sense. Somehow he looked taller, leaner, more confident. He looked like a grownup.

  The remainder of the front two rows was completely occupied with family. The Cozzano family, after a dodgy first couple of generations during which a lot of people had fallen victim to war of influenza, had begun to multiply ferociously during the last twenty years. The distribution of ages up here on the podium - a few oldsters, a few more middle-agers, and half a million kids - was a visible demonstration of the exponential growth concept. In addition, her mother’s family, a prosperous clan of blue-eyed midwestern engineers, had shown up in division strength. The Cozzanos still had deep roots in the Chicago Italian community. A lot of them were here. And so were a bunch of Meyers.

  It was the biggest family reunion ever. She had kissed a hundred people on her way to her seat. She must have half an inch of powder caked up on each cheek from bussing all those old ladies. Roughly one thousand people had come up to her and told her that she looked beautiful.

  Mary Catherine was glad that this campaign hadn’t yet gotten so slick and controlled that kids had been banished from these big events. The podium was an absolute riot. A little toddler girl wandered around behind Cozzano with her diaper peeking out from under her dress. A Domenici boy and a Meyer boy, both wearing suits that were a size too small, jumped and ducked around the rows of chairs, sniping at each other with squirtguns, occa­sionally picking off an old lady by mistake. Some of the mothers with young kids had folded up a bunch of chairs, tossed them off the platform, spread out blankets, and set up an impromptu day-care center. With their wide-brimmed hats and their spreading skirts, all in light hues of yellow and white, they looked like a field of daffodils, the toddlers running around from one to the other like fat little bees. Inspired by the bleacher crowd, the extended family up here on the podium had become rowdy. A dozen ex-Bears had showed up and were seated in a massive phalanx at the very back of the podium, where their shoulders wouldn’t block anyone else’s view; they had started passing a hip flask very early and were now beginning to lead the podium crowd in cheers.