Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  Cozzano looked snappy in his homburg, the sort of old-fashioned men’s hat that had gone out of fashion when JFK had refused to wear one, and that Cozzano was now singlehandedly bringing back into fashion. In the middle of his campaign-kickoff address, a new 767, painted with the logo of Japan Airlines, taxied on to the runway. Its tail fin momentarily came between Cozzano and the glaciated slopes of Rainier, then narrowed into a vertical blade as the plane turned onto the runway, revealing the mountain, illuminated by a peach-colored sunrise. The icy clarity of Rainier was muddled by the heat waves rising from the jet’s engines. Then those engines glowed bluish-white, the plane accelerated down the runway, directly toward Rainier, shot into the air, banked into a climbing turn, and headed west, bound for Japan. It happened just as Cozzano was making a point about the trade deficit; and as the roar of the jet engines died away, it was almost possible to hear a dim cacophony of whacking noises from the directions of California and of Flint, Michigan, as Cozzano’s competitors and their campaign managers smacked their foreheads in anguish.

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak watched this lovely spectacle in a cool, dark hollow set in the folds of the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. He was not much more than a hundred miles outside of Washington D.C., and yet the location could scarcely have been more remote.

  He had been camping out here for a couple of days, just lying low for a time, watching Cozzano on his wristwatch TV-cum-brain-control device, tossing the occasional lure into the stream that ran past his little campsite, draining cans of beer and then shooting them full of big starburst holes with his nimble Fleis­chacker. His truck was stopped on a gravelly floodplain, the floor of a ravine with nearly vertical sides that made a perfect backstop for shooting. He had brought two cases of inexpensive beer with him, going out of his way to obtain cans rather than bottles. You could only shoot a bottle once, but you could shoot a can over and over again until not much was left of it; this was how a man had to pinch his pennies nowadays.

  Out here in the Eastern time zone, the sun had already been up for a few hours and so the peach-coloured light on the slopes of Rainier looked strange and faky. Vishniak was sure that the lumbering jetliner and the ice-covered volcano looked great on the kind of thirty-nine-inch Trinitron that rich people would own, but on his postage-stamp wristwatch it didn’t really look so hot.

  That was okay. Images were all fakery and manipulation cobbled together by the evil gnomes of Ogle Data Research, who had their secret headquarters just a short distance away, in the mysterious place called Pentagon Towers. What counted was words. So when Cozzano stepped up to the microphones to make the formal campaign kickoff speech, Vishniak emptied his Fleischacker into a hapless beer can, set the safety, put the gun into the shoulder holster under his QUAD CITIES WHIPLASH windbreaker, and sat down on the tailgate of his pickup to listen to the murmuring of the stream and the speech that William A. Cozzano was delivering to him and the rest of the American people. As the introductions were being made, Vishniak pulled a small reporter’s notebook out of his pocket. The last page read:

  COZZANO’S HATS (CONTD.)

  SUN AUG 25 CHICAGO CUBS BASEBALL CAP

  MON AUG 26 HARD HAT (STEEL MILL VISIT)

  TUE AUG 27 NO HAT - BUT HE STAYED INDOORS!!!

  WED AUG 28 THE HOMBURG

  THU AUG 29 U.S. FLAG BASEBALL CAP

  FRI AUG 30 BIKE HELMET (ORLANDO BIKE-A-THON)

  SAT AUG 31 THE HOMBURG

  SUN SEP 1 NO HAT - WENT TO CHURCH

  and now he added a new line:

  SUN SEP 2 THE HOMBURG AGAIN

  Some kind of spooky shit was definitely going on with those hats. They were all saying now that the homburg was some kind of a Fashion Statement, but William A. Cozzano had never felt any need to make such statements until he had gotten that chip stuck into his brain. It obviously had something to do with brain waves.

  In his speech, Cozzano covered the usual bases: the corruption of big-party politics, the need for change. Change not only in the political system but in the values system of the entire country. Change that would renew our commitment to education and to long-term investment in the future. This topic led, inevitably, to the subject of the economy, at which point Vishniak finally started to pay attention. The economy was the only thing that mattered to him.

  “There are those who say that we are doomed to be a secondrate power, subjugated to the Japanese,” Cozzano said, just as the big Boeing jet was beginning its takeoff run. Vishniak clenched his teeth and became enraged, as he always did when people said this kind of thing.

  “To those people,” Cozzano continued, “I have only one thing to say: BEHOLD!” He turned aside and swept out one arm toward the jet, then watched it take off. To shout above the scream of its turbofans would have been futile, would have made him look tiny by comparison. As Vishniak watched the miniature figure of the jet take off on his little screen, saw it bank into its turn, exposing the Rising Sun logo painted on its tail fin, his anger was replaced by a surge of defiant pride. Sure the economic situation looked bleak, but a country that could make airplanes like that could accomplish anything if it just set its mind to it.

  Cozzano turned to the microphones and said, “No matter how bleak the economists and the pundits say our situation is, I think that any country that can make airplanes like that one can, with hard work and determination, accomplish anything.”

  Vishniak felt relieved that a great man like Cozzano felt the same as he did, that his feelings weren’t just stupid, blind patriotism. But he was a jittery and suspicious fellow by nature and could not be satisfied with this kind of happy talk for long.

  “Now, I would be lying if I stopped there, and left you with the impression that happy talk is going to close the trade deficit,” Cozzano said. “Uplifting speeches and slick media images do not an economy make. What we need is to educate our children. But not just to cram their heads with facts and figures - to teach them values as well, values of hard, steady work.”

  That was a little better. Cozzano was talking some sense there. Although Vishniak was beginning to get a little skeptical about politicians who always spouted this easy talk about education. Education was great but it wouldn’t really help the economy for another twenty years. And it wouldn’t help the likes of Floyd Wayne Vishniak at all.

  “People think that when I speak of education I mean kinder­garten, elementary school and high school,” Cozzano said, “but

  education is more than that. Education is a lifelong process. An unemployed, down-and-out factory worker in the Midwest can benefit from education just as much as a five-year-old child.”

  “Wait just a goddamn minute,” Floyd Wayne Vishniak said, out loud.

  It was just a little too much - that bit about the down-and-out midwestern factory worker. He rewound his mental tape of the last few minutes and played it back inside his head, ignoring the rest of Cozzano’s speech (Cozzano had now gone on to talk about the need for corporate America to shape up and restructure itself).

  Vishniak held the Dick Tracy watch up to his eye and scrutinized the scene carefully. Cozzano didn’t have any notes up there on the lectern. And it didn’t seem like he was using a TelePrompTer. He was looking around naturally, seemingly speaking off-the-cuff, making everything up as he went along. This was a habit that had been noticed and remarked upon by all the papers that Vishniak had been reading over the summer: Cozzano, who in years past had written his own speeches and read them back, hewing closely to a fixed script, had, in the last few months, taken to speaking extemporaneously.

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak was beginning to understand why. William A. Cozzano was reading his mind. He was reading Vishniak’s brain waves and telling him exactly what he wanted to hear! How was he doing it? Through the wristwatch, no doubt. That was the key to the whole thing.

  Vishniak rotated his forearm, the palm of his hand facing upward, to expose the little button that would release the ratchet and pop the watch off his wrist. All he had
to do was take it off and then he would be a free man again, and William A. Cozzano would no longer be able to read his brain waves. He had been wearing it continuously for a couple of weeks, and underneath it his skin was itching fiercely. But he couldn’t take it off, no matter what. He had to trust his instincts. He knew that they were watching him and that to remove the wristwatch meant certain death, a nice dose of shellfish poison straight into his arm. He’d never get that thing off. He was on a suicide mission.

  He jumped off the tailgate, climbing into the cab of his truck, dug his road atlas out from under the seat, and began to contemplate possible approach vectors to the seat of all evil in the world.

  49

  Shortly after Floyd Wayne Vishniak entered the greater Washington metropolitan area, something completely shocking and unprecedented happened to him: he got a job.

  It happened in Pentagon Plaza, of all places. He had gone there expecting to stage a bloodbath and ended up filling out job applications. The unpredictability of life in America was a constant source of amusement to him.

  He had spent half a day doing recon. Pentagon Plaza, he concluded after driving around it at high speed several dozen times, was a single building that just happened to look like a whole bunch of different buildings very close together. There was a parking ramp (the rich and powerful had to have their parking spaces!) and a low, squat, enormous structure mostly concealed behind that, and rising up from it were a couple of skyscrapers - Pentagon Towers. But they were all part of the same complex. The fortress of darkness owned and opened by Ogle Data Research.

  How best to make his approach? His maps told him that there was a Metro stop beneath Pentagon Plaza. That would be a good way to get in close. But in the end he decided against it. He had no idea what was going to happen. If he didn’t get killed, he would want to get out of there fast, and taking the subway wasn’t the way to do it. Better to have his truck handy.

  He could park outside and walk in or - daring idea - he could actually drive on to the parking ramp. This latter idea, while it might seem impossibly audacious, held major advantages. It was worth checking out. He drove past the entrances to the parking ramp several times, going very slowly, his window rolled down, and observed people driving into the place. Everyone got in without hassle. They pulled up to a little machine, slammed a button, and pulled out a ticket. The gate rose up and they drove on in. No one inspected them. You didn’t have to show any kind of ID.

  It was worth a try. The worst thing that could happen was that he’d have to crash through the gate. He pulled into the chute. So much adrenaline was pumping through his system now that his teeth hurt and his gums felt hot and swollen.

  He stopped by the little machine, and, trying to look nonchalant, like he did this every day, he reached out and punched the button. A cardboard ticket spat out of the machine. He jerked it out. The gate rose up.

  Calmly, like he belonged here, Floyd Wayne Vishniak piloted his pickup truck into the bowels of Pentagon Plaza.

  The parking ramp held no secrets. He found a space and backed into it. This unorthodox maneuver caused consternation and horn-honking among several other would-be parkers, but (a) they could all fuck themselves, (b) he had a gun, and (c) he needed to park this way so he could pull out rapidly when the time came.

  The Fleischacker was hanging in his armpit. He had purchased several overly long thirty-round magazines for it. Loaded with teflon armor-piercing bullets, these were secreted in the long cargo pockets built into the thighs of his trousers. By reaching down and unsnapping the flaps on the tops of these pockets, he could whip out a new magazine in a fraction of a second. One magazine was already stuck into the handle of his Fleischacker, making the gun huge, unwieldy, and L-shaped. His QUAD CITIES WHIPLASH windbreaker hid the weapon adequately as long as he kept it zipped up most of the way, and kept his arm down to his side.

  He locked up his truck (wouldn’t do for his getaway vehicle to get ripped off while he was busying himself inside) and then followed a few other people toward the sky bridge and a set of glass doors that joined the parking ramp to the huge, squat building next to it.

  The headquarters of Ogle Data Research was cleverly disguised as a fancy department store!

  Vishniak forced himself to keep calm. He walked through the middle of a huge display of women’s shoes, trying to act just as cool as all the other people, like he came through here all the time. He did this on the assumption that the department store was just a false-front operation like the ones of Mission: Impossible and that it would be all of about thirty feet deep. Once he passed through this shoe display he would begin to see the brain-wave monitors and satellite dishes. Then the Fleischacker would come out and Ogle’s evil operation would come to an end. Vishniak would die, probably, and Cozzano would be released from electronic bondage.

  But when he made it through the shoe display, he came to a section full of purses. Then more women’s clothes. Perfume. Cosmetics. He went up an escalator (Keep walking! Don’t stop and look!) and found a display of television sets, then a little gourmet restaurant. It went on and on and on.

  He kept walking. His brain was reeling. He went up and down the escalators several times and eventually walked out through the huge doorway and into something that looked very much like a shopping mall. But not like any shopping mall that Vishniak had seen in the Quad Cities. For him, a mall was a single narrow concourse, one story, lined with tiny shops, a few benches, and maybe a fountain in the middle.

  Compared to the malls he was used to, this place was like - well, like Washington, D.C., compared to Davenport, Iowa. It was four stories high. The floors were gleaming white marble. A central atrium was filled with light streaming down through a glass ceiling; looking up through it, Vishniak could see the sky, and airplanes taking off from the airport, and the office skyscrapers towering overhead.

  It went on forever. Thousands of people were here, visiting hundreds of stores. Some of the stores were tiny rinky-dink ones, but a lot of them were huge and fancy. It was no longer possible to support the belief that this was all a false-front operation for Ogle Data Research. This was a real, honest-to-god shopping mall, albeit an incomprehensibly vast and rich one.

  He kept walking. On the one hand, he was confused and a bit disappointed that he had failed to locate Ogle Data Research. On the other hand, he was relieved, and breathing easily for the first time since he had entered the city. This business was clearly much more complicated than he’d thought at first. He was going to have to settle in and put a lot more thought into the intelligence-gathering phase of the operation.

  Before long, he came to a big electric sign: a color-coded directory of the Pentagon Mall. It contained floor plans of each of the four levels, each store identified by number with a listing of all the stores by category.

  It was almost too much to hope for that he could find ODR in this way, but he gave it a shot. The stores were arranged by category: WOMEN’S APPAREL, MEN’S APPAREL, RESTAURANTS, JEWELRY, GIFTS, and so on. Vishniak was unclear about which category described Ogle Data Research, and so he just began at the beginning and read through the names of every single business in the mall, which took several minutes. There was no Ogle Data Research listed.

  Inspiration came in the form of a HELP WANTED sign in the window of one of the stores. Applying for jobs was one good excuse to get into a store and check it out without actually spending money. And - unthinkable as it might seem - if he could actually get a job here at Pentagon Plaza, he would be able to spend all his time here, and recon the place in detail. An inside job was always the best way to do a crime.

  He had filled out enough job applications in his day to known that you had to have an address. So he exited the mall the way he had come, paid an outrageous fee for parking, and, under the name Sherman Grant, rented a room at a motel near National Airport, only a mile or two from Pentagon Plaza. Then he found a post office where he was able to rent a box, giving him that all-important mailing address,
by this point his money was beginning to run low, but he had spent the summer accumulating credit cards that had been mailed to him, unasked-for, by fatuous banks in places like Delaware and South Dakota, and these went a long way.

  Thus did Floyd Wayne Vishniak set up his own little base of operations in the nation’s capital, joining every other person, company, pressure group, trade association, and maniac with a national agenda. A second trip to Pentagon Plaza that evening (this time via the less expensive Metro) netted a dozen more job applications. He stayed up until one in the morning filling them out in his best sixth-grade penmanship, and was down at the mall bright and early the next morning, as soon as the stores opened up, to hand them all in. And on this, his third trip to the mall, he didn’t even bother to bring his gun.

  Success came surprisingly quickly; the mall management offered Sherman Grant a job working in the food court, clearing and wiping down tables. A yuppie bastard interviewed him for the job, just to make sure that he, who had formerly assembled giant tractor transmissions for a living, was intelligent enough to pick garbage off of tables and wipe them with a damp rag. Vishniak swallowed his resentment and averred that he would try his very best to handle the unprecedented challenges of the job.

  He considered holding out to see if any other jobs were offered to him, but decided to take the first one that came along. He had to keep his eye on the ball here. The purpose of this trip was not to develop new career paths. The purpose was to put bullets in the heads of the top management stratum of Ogle Data Research and then destroy as much of their hightech brain-wave equipment as he could get into his gunsights before he himself was gunned down by the SWAT teams that showed up, so inevitably, at these kinds of events.

  He started immediately. They issued him an apron and a hat. The training period lasted for about ten seconds and then he was working. The food court at Pentagon Plaza was on the ground floor, filling up a big open space in the floor plan that, in higher stories, was occupied by a hole with a railing around it: a huge atrium that looked down on the sea of tables and chairs shared by all of the fast-food places lining the food court. The atrium and the court were vaulted by a huge glass ceiling that let in so much light that Vishniak often wore sunglasses.