Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  Merriam had seen the Mercedes-Benz side-impact simulator in action on the promotional videotape that the Mercedes dealership had given to him. It was a naked automobile chassis with a huge block of concrete projecting out the front end, painted with dangerous black-and-yellow diagonal stripes. Like a rifle bullet, exploding balloon, or hummingbird’s wings, it was a thing never seen by the naked eye; it was visible only in high-speed movie films, drifting in from the side with ghostly clarity, utterly silent, seeming to move only at a snail’s pace. But when it drifted into the side of the big Mercedes-Benz sedan, like a cloud scudding across the summer sky, the side of the car caved in and the head of the dummy snapped sideways and you realized, for the first time, just how fast that black-and-yellow juggernaut was moving.

  Those side impacts could be vicious. It didn’t take many viewings of the side-impact videotape to figure that out. The side of your head always whacked into something. And that’s where all of the good stuff was. The front of your head held your personality, and if the rim of the steering wheel happened to punch through it at sixty miles per hour, the worst you could expect was maybe a divorce and then you had to throw out your ties and buy new ones. Big deal. A personality change, after all these years of having the same old one, would be kind of interesting. But the side of your brain held all the good stuff. That’s where you did your thinking. The left side, which was the one at risk during a side impact, contained your logical, rational, spatial capabilities, and if you got a hunk of imploding door frame jammed into that, you’d be out of a job. You would have to start taking pottery classes.

  The Mercedes people were intelligent enough to realize this and so they had plowed their big black-and-yellow slab of concrete through a few million dollars’ worth of rolling stock, gone over the creepily silent high-speed films, and made a few changes. Which meant that the left hemisphere of Chase Merriam’s cerebral cortex was about as safe as it could ever be inside of a moving car.

  These factors put together - the guarded parking space, his safe haven up in Westchester, where crime was still illegal; the mysterious psychological force field; and the high-speed films - all combined to give Chase Merriam a feeling of invulnerability. Which was a good thing, because he liked to work late, long past the dinner hour in his office in lower Manhattan. And he wouldn’t have been able to do that if he drove a Subaru and parked it on the street. He would have been too terrified to venture out after dark, he would have slept on the leather couch in his office and scurried out at daybreak to find that his Subaru was now a stripped frame.

  He did some of his best work late at night. Which, in any given month, more than paid back the cost of the big car. The one drawback to working late was that, lately, his damn wristwatch kept interrupting him. But in a way, he didn’t mind all that much. He enjoyed keeping up with political events. This thing on his wrist only came to life once or twice a day, and it was always with something important. It was like having a personal assistant who did nothing but screen the political coverage for him, letting him know when to tune in.

  Cozzano’s National Town Meeting was about halfway through its one-week life span when Chase Merriam worked rather late one night, watched the eleven o’clock news just long enough to get the baseball scores, and then headed down to the parking space where his Mercedes-Benz awaited, keys in the ignition, gleaming and polished under the brilliant homeboy-chasing lights in his private parking ramp. The guards washed and polished the car during the day. They didn’t have much else to do.

  Chase Merriam thought that his car looked especially clean and nice tonight and so he slipped a few greenbacks to the guard as he opened the driver’s-side door for him. He sank into the ergonomic leather and twisted the key and the tachometer needle lifted off the pin and settled in at a comfortable idle. Short of getting down on your hands and knees behind the car and sticking your tongue into the tailpipe, this was the only way to tell that the engine was running. He was out on the West Side Highway, northbound, almost instantly.

  The West Side Highway was not much of a highway at all until you got a little bit farther north and it became a proper limited-access affair with on-ramps and so on. At this hour it was always surprisingly free from traffic. The only people out tonight were a few nocturnal taxi drivers and one or two heavily burdened third­worldish vehicles, the lifeblood of the New Economy, out running errands.

  Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center towered above the highway on concrete buttresses, like a hydroelectric project accidently constructed in the wrong place, appallingly large. Chase Merriam weaved through some complicated ramps and lanes under the George Washington Bridge, almost out of Manhattan now, and pulled up short behind a rickety, windowless gray-and-rust-colored van, bouncing along on bald tires and dead shocks, with a whole lot of shit piled on top of the roof. The driver was badly confused by all of those lanes, splitting and converging inexplicably under the distracting sight of the mighty bridge. Chase Merriam could have roared past him to one side or the other, but the driver of the van kept changing his mind as to which lane he should be in, making violent changes in his course, and each time he jerked the wheel toward this lane or that, his van, top-heavy with scrap metal, rocked dangerously on its overmatched suspension.

  The gloom-slicing headlights of the Mercedes-Benz illuminated the rear bumper of the van, some kind of a homemade number welded together from diamond-tread steel plate. The owner, who was quite obviously in the scrap business, had manufactured the bumper himself. It was hardly less imposing than the black-and-yellow ram of the sideways impact simulator, and so Chase Merriam resolved to keep the gleaming perfection of his Mercedes far away from it.

  The maker, upon finishing the structural part of the bumper, had turned his torch to decorative purposes. He had laid down a thick bead of molten iron on the back surface of the bumper, inscribing the following message on it in careening, heavy-metal cursive: SOLO DIOS SABE HACIA DONDE VOY.

  Chase Merriam, who did not speak Spanish but who had developed a basic level of skill in Romance languages during his prep years, was mentally translating this phrase (ONLY GOD KNOWS something…) when a sleek aluminium-alloy wheel rim, freshly stripped from a hapless Acura Legend somewhere on the streets of the naked city, slid off the roof of the van, bounced once on the pavement, and plunged directly through his windshield, catching him in the forehead.

  In the instant that the rim had taken its fateful bounce, glittering in his headlights like a meteor, the whole world had become a Mercedes-Benz crash-testing laboratory. Chase Merriam, of course, was the dummy. But he experienced it with the eerie clarity of the white-coated Teutonic engineers in the safety of their screening room, going over the silent videotapes. It all happened silently and very, very slowly, and when the car, at some point several minutes into the crash, slammed into some sort of a momentous object - he wasn’t sure exactly what, but he had the sense that he was a great distance from the roadway proper at this point, and that the car hadn’t been properly horizontal for a long, long time - he actually saw the air bag unfurl before him, fluttering like a white flag raised in a hurricane.

  The car kept skidding and rolling and plowing through things for a long time, repeatedly changing direction, like the Magic Bullet meandering through Kennedy and Connally. Each little scrape and secondary impact probably did about five thousand dollars’ worth of damage. After a while, it almost got boring; he must be leaving a trail of torn-up sod and flattened road signs all the way to Yonkers. But eventually, he stopped. His inner ear still told him he was riding the Tilt-a-Whirl, but by now his left arm had flopped outward, through the place where the double-glazed window was supposed to be, and was resting limply on some kind of a surface - hard-packed, inorganic New York dirt - and that surface sure wasn’t moving.

  So far he had not experienced even the smallest bit of physical pain, but something about the car just didn’t feel right. Because his eyes got smeary with blood and then swelled shut pretty quickly, he had to figure out
using other sensory inputs. But the upshot seemed to be that his Mercedes-Benz was upside-down now and he was hanging by the safety belt and the shoulder harness, his legs supported by the steering wheel, his knees poked uncomfortably by the turn-signal levers.

  The phone was right there, he could find it by groping for it, he knew which button turned it on. Then all he had to do was dial 911. But he couldn’t see the number buttons. He punched one of the presets, the one that dialed his home number. He would tell Elizabeth to call the NYPD. But it was now past eleven thirty and Elizabeth had turned off the ringer on the phone and gone to bed; all he got was his own answering machine.

  He considered dictating a last message to the world. Elizabeth would find the light blinking on the machine tomorrow and listen to it; she would call the NYPD and they would at last find him, dead from boredom. They would play the tape at his memorial service. It would be dry, calm, witty, noble, and brave.

  But he could always call back later and do that. So he hung up to consider his options. All the other presets were business numbers. No one would answer them at this time of the night. Dialing 911 was harder than it sounded, because the phone had too many buttons and they all felt the same. “You okay?” a voice said. A man’s voice. “Hello?” Chase Merriam said.

  “Shit, man, that was incredible,” the man said. “I can’t believe you alive. That is a bitchin’ car, man!”

  He couldn’t seem to move his left arm, which was still dangling on the ground. He reached across the body with his right hand and stuck the phone out the window. “Would you please dial 911?”

  “Sure,” the man said. Chase Merriam heard him shuffling the phone around in his hands, figuring out which way was up, then he heard the three electronic beeps.

  “Hello, Officer,” the man said, “I would like to report a car crash in Fort Washington Park. Down by the river. This car jumped the guardrail on the highway and now it’s upside down. And I think you better get here real quick, because this dude is stuck inside the car, and this is a real bad area. It’s full of bad criminals man, people who would cut this guy’s heart out for a dollar, and they are all gathering around the vehicle right now, like jackals around a wounded beast, waiting for the right moment to strike. Huh? No, I’m sorry, I won’t give you my name. Okay. Bye.”

  “Thank you,” Chase Merriam said.

  “No problem,”

  “That business about the jackals - that wasn’t for real was it?”

  “Shit man, where do you think you are? Cape May?” the man said. “We are, like, just a couple of blocks from the biggest homeless shelter in New York City. The only ones here are the people they wouldn’t let into the shelter because we’re too big and bad and scary.”

  “Take whatever you want,” Chase Merriam said. “I don’t care.”

  “Okay. We’ll begin with the watch,” the man said. He picked up Merriam’s arm, which instantly began to hurt, and after a little bit of fiddling around, figured out how to detach the watch. “What kind of watch is this, anyway? Looks like some cheap piece of digital shit.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Well, if a guy was going to look for your wallet-”

  “Beats me,” Chase Merriam said. “I have to assume it fell out.”

  The man reached in the window and patted Merriam down, finding no wallets in the usual places. “Does this thing have a dome light?” he asked.

  “I believe a dome light is standard on the big Mercedes. It’s probably broken.”

  “Yeah,” the man said, crestfallen. “I guess I’ll just have to grope around.”

  He picked up Merriam’s left arm and moved it out of the way, gently and firmly. Then he lay down on his belly and crawled forward, shoving his arms, head, and shoulders in through the crumpled window frame, shoving Merriam back against the set, and began to feel around on the ceiling of the car, now the floor.

  “Damn!” he said. “It ain’t anywhere. You sure you had a wallet?”

  “Positive. Maybe it was thrown out of the car.”

  “Shit!” the guy said. He crawled into the car even farther, all the way up to his waist, the bulk of his body pinning Merriam tightly back. To judge from his breath, it had been a few decades since this guy had laid hands on dental floss.

  The insides of Chase Merriam’s eyelids glowed a warm pinkish-orange color.

  “Shit!” the guy said again, and began to thrash around wildly, trying to extricate himself from the car. In the process he did a little bit more damage to Chase Merriam, but by now it was all kind of superfluous. “They never come this fast!”

  “Freeze!” shouted a nearby voice that could only belong to a cop. “You are under arrest!”

  After that it was all footsteps. The man ran away. A cop followed him; they crashed into some brush and then receded into the distance. And then another set of footsteps approached the over­turned car. Slowly, calmly.

  “Nice car,” the cop said. “Didn’t know these babies were four-wheel-drive.”

  The debate would be starting in less than five minutes. In addition to the cavernous exhibition space where most of the Town Meeting was happening, McCormick Place had its own theater, which was currently filling up with audience members chosen at random from Ogle’s ten thousand typical Americans.

  Eleanor Richmond, sitting in a dressing room backstage, having her face fixed by a professional makeup artist, was startled to realize that she wasn’t nervous at all.

  That was strange because she was about to go on national television. She had been on national television quite a bit recently, but this time she was going to engage in verbal combat with three other people who were better at this kind of things than she was. Had she become so jaded that she didn’t even care anymore?

  Someone knocked on the door and pushed it open before Eleanor could tell them to get lost. It was Mary Catherine Cozzano. She slipped quickly into the room, glancing nervously behind her, and leaned back against the door, pushing it shut. She was carrying a bouquet of blue flowers.

  “Sorry, I didn’t want to be seen coming in here,” she said. “People would say I was playing favorites.”

  “Did you get those from a boyfriend, or just some political weasel?” Eleanor said, eyeing the flowers. “They’re nice.”

  “I got them from a florist,” Mary Catherine said. “They’re for you.”

  “Well, how nice! Thank you!”

  “I got blue ones, to symbolize the truth,” Mary Catherine said, “because you always tell the truth.”

  “Well, not always,” Eleanor said, “but often enough to give people the willies.”

  “You look great,” Mary Catherine said. “I hope you knock ‘em dead.”

  Eleanor didn’t figure out the real reason for her lack of nervousness until she went out and sat down on the set. She was the last one to get there. The other debaters were a white man; a somewhat Anglicized Hispanic man; and a middle-aged woman, blond and blue-eyed. And all of them were perfect. They were good-looking, with large, clear features that looked good on television. They were poised, coiffed, made-up, dressed, prepped. She felt like she had blundered into the Academy Awards.

  She was here as a token. Nothing more. She didn’t have a chance of becoming William A. Cozzano’s vice-presidential candidate, even if she and Mary Catherine did have a mutual admiration society. That’s why she wasn’t nervous.

  Less than a hundred yards away from the debate set, Cyrus Rutherford Ogle was settling into the comfy swivel chair at the center of the Eye of Cy. For purposes of the National Town Meeting, the GODS container had been driven into the very heart of McCormick Place and everything else constructed around it; the platform where Cozzano and his guests stood every night was directly above his head.

  Compliance was good tonight. Ninety-eight of the hundred screens were lit up. The PIPER 100 had started out as a somewhat disorganized and unreliable group and, through practice, had now become steady and disciplined.

  That was comforting
, because Cy Ogle was scared. The v.p. thing was the hardest of all. Practically everyone screwed this up. For the last week, Ogle had not been able to close his eyes at night without seeing the ghostly faces hanging before him. Nixon, Agnew, Eagleton, Bush, Quayle, Stockdale.

  The best that Ogle could do was round up the four best people he knew of-that is, the four people who made the best impression on television - put them up on the tube, side by side, and chart people’s reactions to them. Of course, he would have to bring in a moderator to ask them some questions. What kinds of questions didn’t really matter. Neither did the answers. The important thing was just to get their faces up on the tube, get their voices working. The hard part was going to be interpreting the data. Because the deeper he got into this, the more weird little angles he began to notice inside the minds of the PIPER 100.

  Mae Hunter was sitting not far from the banks of the Hudson River, applying lipstick and watching the sun go down on New Jersey. She had discovered the lipstick earlier today, in a wastebasket in the women’s room at the New York Public Library, and decided that it was a good shade for her. It was a pretty nice one, and brand new; some fickle shopper must have picked it up in one of the nice stores on Fifth Avenue, ducked into the library to touch herself up, and decided that under that light, it didn’t look so hot.

  Mae Hunter admired that decisiveness, the ability to fire a brand-new lipstick directly into the wastebasket because it was the wrong shade. Most women would have taken it home and put it on their dresser and left it there for the next twenty years. But here in New York, you met all kinds. People had higher standards. They did not tolerate imperfections quite so easily. This lipstick had obviously been thrown away by a woman of breeding.