Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  The red digits of the bedside clock flipped over to 12:00. A barrage of firecrackers went off all over town, ringing out the Fourth of July. “God forgive me for this,” Mary Catherine said, reaching for the remote control on her bedside table, “but I have to see how this looked on TV.”

  It was the top story on CNN. And it looked fantastic. Mary Catherine had always known, vaguely, that things looked different on TV than they did in reality. But she didn’t understand that well enough to predict how something would turn out on the small screen.

  Ogle, obviously, had the knack. The rally had been impressive enough in person. But on television, you didn’t see any of the boring, grungy stuff around the edges. All you saw was the good stuff. They covered the smoke divers. They showed most of Cozzano’s run across the football field, and even a brief glimpse of a string of firecrackers being set off. The shower of confetti looked incredible.

  And she looked incredible. She almost didn’t recognize herself, but was embarrassed anyway. Could it be that she was destined to wear this sort of clothes?

  The CNN report didn’t last long. They hit all the high points of the rally, airing all of the shots that Ogle had handed them on a silver platter, and then tossed in a few shots of the picnic, including some great footage of Cozzano throwing the Hail Mary.

  CNN moved on to other topics. Mary Catherine picked up the remote control again and wandered up and down the electro­magnetic spectrum, catching glimpses of fishing shows, Home Shopping Network, Weather Channel, and Star Trek before finally locating C-SPAN, which was playing Dad’s speech back in its entirety. For the first time, she got a chance to hear what he had been saying while she was looking around and chatting with all the little kids.

  “About half a mile from here there’s a factory that my father built, largely with his own capital and with the sweat of his brow, during the 1940s. The Army wouldn’t let him fight - his mother had already lost one son to a German torpedo - but he was determined to get into the war one way or the other.”

  This was not true. He didn’t build it with his own capital. The Meyers raised most of the money.

  On the TV, Dad continued. “That factory made a new product known as nylon, which was an inexpensive replacement for silk - the main ingredient in parachutes. When the D day invasion was finally launched, my father couldn’t be there. But the parachutes that he manufactured right here in Tuscola were strapped to the backs of every paratrooper who ventured into the skies of France on that fateful day.”

  He didn’t make the chutes. Just the nylon fiber. The Army bought nylon from a whole bunch of suppliers.

  “After V-E Day, a young man showed up in my father’s factory one beautiful spring morning, asking to see Mr. Cozzano. Well, in a lot of places he would have gotten the brushoff from the receptionists and the P.R. people but in my father’s company you could always go straight to the top. So in short order this man was ushered into John Cozzano’s office. And when he finally came face-to-face with my father, this strapping young lad became positively choked up with emotion and couldn’t bring himself to speak for a few moments. And he explained that he was a para­trooper who had been in the very spearhead of the D day invasion. A hundred men had parachuted down from his unit and a hundred of them landed safely and took their objective with a minimum loss of life. Well, it seemed that these troopers had noticed the Cozzano label printed on to their chutes and decided that they liked that name and they had begun to call themselves the Cozzano gang. That became their rallying cry when they would jump out of the airplane. And at that point, my dad, who never shed tears in my presence in his entire life, well, he just burst out crying, you see, because that meant more to him than any of the money or anything else that he had gotten out of his factory-The TV set went dark. Mary Catherine was sitting up in bed, holding the remote control, aiming it at the screen like a gun. She was frozen in place.

  The man she had been watching on the TV set wasn’t her dad. Everything he’d just said was an out-and-out fabrication. And Dad would never tell a lie. Mel was right.

  A familiar feeling came back. It was the clammy fear that had gripped her on the night of her father’s first stroke. For weeks she had thought it would never go away. Then it had begun to relax its hold over her mind and her heart, and as Dad had recovered after the operation, it had gone away completely. She had thought that she and her family were out of the wood.

  She’d been wrong. They weren’t out of the woods. They had just walked through a little clearing. Now she found herself in the heart of a deeper and vaster forest than she’d ever imagined.

  The party noise downstairs had faded to a low murmur. She could hear a new sound from the next room. James’s old room. It was the sound of fingers whacking a keyboard with the speed and power of a drumroll.

  Zeldo was sitting at his workstation. He had turned off the lights and inverted the screen so that it was showing white letters on a black background. He had a huge high-resolution monitor with at least a dozen windows open on it, each one filled with long snaking lines of text that Mary Catherine recognized, vaguely, as computer code.

  “Hi,” she said, and he almost jumped out of his skin. “Sorry to startle you.”

  “That’s okay,” Zeldo said, taking a deep breath and spinning his chair around to face her. “Too much Jolt. You can turn on a light if you want.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. She grabbed another swivel chair and sat down.

  “Thanks. I’m running in blackout mode here,” Zeldo said, “been on this damn machine too long and my eyes won’t focus anymore.”

  “What’s going on?” she said. She had to assume, from what Mel had told her, that they were probably being listened to right now. For that matter, Zeldo himself was presumably part of the Network, though he seemed like a nice enough guy. And today, in the football game, she had seen a side of Zeldo that he didn’t normally show. She could tell that, whatever devious schemes Zeldo might be involved in, he genuinely liked William A. Cozzano.

  “We’ve had interference problems when your father goes near microwave relay stations,” Zeldo said. “We’re going to keep him away from those things, maybe work up some kind of a hat with EM shielding in it.”

  “But TV trucks use microwaves, don’t they?”

  “Exactly. And he spends a lot of time around TV trucks. So as a last line of defense, I’m building some safeguards into the software so that when the chip starts getting stray signals; it’ll be smart enough to realize that there’s a problem.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’ll go into Helen Keller mode until the interference goes away.”

  “What happens then? Dad goes into a coma?”

  “Not at all,” Zeldo said. “The chip will keep doing what it’s supposed to do, filling in for the damaged parts of his brain. It’s just that it won’t be able to send or receive data anymore.”

  “That’s not an important function anyway, is it?” Mary Catherine said. “You only send signals into his brain when you are fixing a bug in the software. Right?”

  There was a long pause, and Mary Catherine wished that she had turned on the room lights. She suspected that she might be able to read some interesting things on Zeldo’s face right now.

  “As we mentioned before the implant,” Zeldo finally said, “the biochips do more than just restore his normal capabilities.”

  This struck Mary Catherine as evasive. “You hackers aren’t very good at playing these kinds of games, are you?” she said.

  “No comment,” Zeldo said. “I didn’t spend half my life learning what I know so that I could get tangled up in politics.”

  The snappy technical patter had been replaced by a completely different sort of conversation. Both of them were now speaking elliptically with long pauses between sentences. Suddenly, Mary Catherine realized why: both of them knew that they were being listened to. Both of them had things to hide.

  She had said something to Mel earlier in the day: Zeldo was
in the Network but not of the Network. His fear of speaking freely in the bugged room was confirmation.

  “As Ogle may have told you, I’m the campaign physician,” she said.

  “Yes,” Zeldo said. “Congratulations. It’s going to be a grind.”

  “Nothing like residency, I’m sure,” Mary Catherine said.

  “Because of… because of these pesky bugs and glitches,” Zeldo said, framing the words carefully, “I’ve been assigned to travel with the campaign, at least for a while. So let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you out.”

  “For starters you could tell me exactly what happens when he goes near a microwave relay station.”

  Zeldo answered without hesitation. Now that they had gotten away from dangerous topics he had relaxed again. “He has a seizure.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Well… before that there are other symptoms. Disorientation. A flood of memories and sensations.”

  “When these memories and sensations enter his mind, can he tell that they are just hallucinations from the chip?”

  This question made Zeldo pause for a long time.

  “You shouldn’t grind your teeth. Bad for the enamel,” Mary Catherine said, after at least sixty seconds had gone by.

  “That’s a profound question,” Zeldo said. “It gets us into some heavy philosophical shit: if everything we think and feel is just a pattern of signals in our brain, then is there an objective reality? If the signals in Argus’s brain happen to include radio transmissions, then does that mean that reality is a different thing for him?”

  Mary Catherine held her tongue, for once, and did not ask why Zeldo was referring to her father as Argus. It was most definitely a slip of the tongue, a glimpse into something that Mary Catherine hadn’t been allowed to see yet. If she got inquisitive, Zeldo would just clam up again.

  Another, more interesting, possibility occurred to her: maybe Zeldo had slipped the word in deliberately.

  “And if so,” Zeldo continued, “who are we to say that one form of reality is preferable to another form?”

  “Well, if he says things that simply aren’t true, and seems to believe them, I would say that that was a problem,” Mary Catherine said.

  “Memory is a funny thing,” Zeldo said. “None of our memories are really accurate to being with. So if he’s got a memory that works a little differently from ours, and is otherwise healthy and happy, is that better than being aphasic in a wheelchair? Who’s to say?”

  “I guess it’s up to Dad,” Mary Catherine said.

  Clearly she had to find the GODS envelope. The events of the day had convinced her beyond doubt that Mel was right: there was a Network, and it was up to something. Mary Catherine went back to her room, changed out of her daughter costume, put on a bathrobe, and walked downstairs. The caterers were at work in the kitchen, cleaning up the aftermath of the party; all of the guests had gone home except for a few old Vietnam buddies of Cozzano’s who sat around the coffee table in the living room having a few drinks and reminiscing about the war, alternately laughing and crying.

  Mary Catherine avoided them and went out on to the back porch. A row of black plastic garbage bags were lined up against the wall, waiting to be collected. She opened one of the bags, sorted through a few loose pieces of paper, and found the brightly colored enveloped, still intact except for the broken seal. The mailing label was a bewildering panoply of numbers, code words, and bar codes; the inscrutable mutterings of the Network. Mary Catherine folded the envelope, stuffed it into her bathrobe, closed up the burn bag, and called it a day.

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak

  R.R. 6 Box 895

  Davenport, Iowa

  Aaron Green

  Ogle Data Research

  Pentagon Towers

  Arlington, Virginia

  Dear Mr. Green:

  Just for starters, I figured out your game that you are playing. When you came here you gave me some shit about working for that Ogle Data Research. Like you were some scientist writing a dissertation. But now I have figured out what you really are: you are working for William A. Cozzano. He must be paying you money to work on his campaign.

  How did I figure it out? By just noticing what things you put on the little TV set on my wrist. You always show Cozzano but you don’t show the other candidates as much.

  Well, I watched Cozzano announcing that he would run for president this afternoon. I did not watch it on the little wristwatch. I went down to Dale’s, which is a bar, and watched it on the big-screen TV there with some other guys. And I can tell you for your information that just about all the guys who were in that place thought it was real impressive.

  I thought it was impressive too. But now it is two o’clock a.m. and I can not get to sleep. Because I am thinking about some of the things that Cozzano said and it troubles me.

  When he was in that debate in Decatur, Illinois, he spoke about his dad’s parachute factory and how important it was to the men on D day standing in the open door of the plane. But today, he told a whole story about a bunch of paratroopers and how one of them came to personally thank his dad. This is a strange discrepancy, don’t you think?

  My opinion: something got scrambled up inside Cozzano’s head when he had those troubles. And now, either he has memory troubles or else he can’t tell right from wrong. So don’t expect me to vote for him.

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

  Sincerely, Floyd Wayne Vishniak.

  42

  Mel Meyer drove into Miami, Oklahoma, in his black Mercedes 500 SL at 4:30 on a hot mid-July afternoon. The sky was a sickening, yellowing white. He stopped at the Texaco station to fill up with gas and check his oil. He checked his oil religiously -though the car used none to speak of-because thirty years ago the Cozzanos had made fun of him for not knowing how.

  He also needed to ask for directions. As he opened the window to talk to the attendant, the 103-degree heat poured in on him like boiling water. He ordered ultrapremium from the Texaco pump and popped the hood for the oil check. “How far to Cacher,” he asked the grease-streaked, acne-ridden kid smearing his windshield with an equally appetizing-looking rag.

  The kid had never seen anything like Mel Meyer - dapper, intense, clad in a perfect black silk suit - nor had he seen many 500 SLs. “Why d’ya wanna go to Cacher? Nobody lives in Cacher except some crazy old farts,” he said. He went to the front of the car, could not figure out how to raise the hood, looked pleadingly at Mel.

  Mel did not like the kid, did not like Miami, Oklahoma, and would have given anything to avoid being there. But this was the closest thing to a lead he had come across in four months of investigating the Network. He could have hired a private investi­gator in Tulsa or Little Rock and had him drive out to the place and look around. But he knew that, whatever this Network might be, it was good at hiding itself. A private investigator, who made his living watching unsubtle people commit marital infidelities in cheap motels, could not be trusted to pick up the nearly invisible spoor of the Network. In the end Mel would have to come out and look around himself. He might as well get it over with.

  “Why do you think people in Cacher are crazy?” Mel asked, thinking to himself that he had no right to ask that question, sitting in a black silk suit in a black car in July in Oklahoma.

  He had found precious little in absolute terms as he chased down lead after lead: the institutional roots of the Radhakrishnan Institute; the fascinating pattern of stock trades surrounding the takeover of Ogle Data Research and Green Biophysical Systems in March; the interlocking directorates of Gale Aerospace, MacIntyre Engineering, Pacific Netware, and the Coover Fund; and the even more shadowy group of very private investment funds that held majority shares in them.

  He had even placed intercepts on the lines and numbers of various people, hiring monitors placed in vans near microwave relay towers. Nothing had come up. He had gone through financial reports, he had gone to friends in the FBI, he had tried
everything, but he could not find the Network. He had hired private detectives, he had hired investigative accountants. He had spent a whole month pulling strings and working various connections in order to get his hands on some IRS data that he thought would be promising. It had turned out to be worthless.

  The one lead that he had was the GODS envelope that Mary Catherine had pulled from the Cozzanos’ burn bag on the night of July fourth. Mary Catherine was the one to blame for his being here.

  The envelope did not bear anything as obvious as a return address. It had code numbers instead. GODS was a well-run com­pany, highly centralized, and was not interested in helping Mel decipher those codes. He had provided some financial aid to a financially troubled GODS delivery man in Chicago and eventually gotten the information that the envelope appeared to have been routed through the Joplin Regional Airport in extreme southwest Missouri, near where that state came together with Kansas and Oklahoma.

  Mel had spent four days living at a Super 8 Motel on Airport

  Drive outside of Joplin. He claimed to be a businessman from Saint Louis, working on a big project of some kind. He spent several hundred dollars express-mailing empty packages to an address in Saint Louis, and quickly became a familiar sight to the three people who worked at the Joplin GODS depot.

  One of them had informed Mel that he was now their biggest customer. Mel pursued this line of conversation doggedly and got the man to say that they had another fellow across the border in Oklahoma who mailed almost as much as Mel did. Finally, yester­day afternoon, Mel had gotten them to specify a town: Cacher, Oklahoma.

  He snapped back to the steamy reality of Miami. The gas station kid was peering at him. “You okay, mister?”

  “Yeah. How’s the oil?”