Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  At first he was humiliated to take the job. He was the only English-speaking person doing it. He never felt good about the job itself, but after a short while he began to understand that, from a reconnaissance standpoint, it could hardly have been more perfect. Vishniak ambled across a large territory all day long, sizing up thousands of people, overhearing snatches of their conversations, learning where they worked and what they did. It was exactly the job he needed.

  One day, after he’d been there for about a week and scanned tens of thousands of faces, he actually saw one he recognized: Aaron Green. Green was all by himself at one of the stand-up tables, eating raw fish - sushi, they called it - and reading a computer magazine. He was wearing a suit. On the floor, a briefcase stood up between his legs. Vishniak circled around him once or twice, watching his face, and confirmed an ID.

  Vishniak got that adrenalized feeling again for the first time since he’d made his first approach to Pentagon Plaza. If Aaron Green looked up and recognized him, he was as good as dead. Fortunately he was wearing his sunglasses. And since he had begun working here he had taken the precaution of wrapping an Ace bandage around his wrist every morning to conceal the wristwatch Green had given him.

  Vishniak watched Green through his sunglasses the same way that he watched babes down along the river on hot summer days: his head turned sideways to the target, his eyes swiveled in their sockets so the women didn’t know they were being watched. Eventually Green finished eating his sushi, flipped through the last few pages of his computer magazine, and picked up his briefcase. He maneuvered through the crowded floor of the food court and climbed on the up escalator. Vishniak followed him, climbing on to the bottom of the escalator just as Green was getting off at the top.

  Green went up a couple of floors and then began to walk through the mall, skirting the edge of the atrium. Vishniak followed him at a distance. Finally Green stopped at a pair of elevator doors set unobtrusively into the wall, between a leather store and an electronics place. He took a key out of his pocket and shoved it into a wall switch. The elevator doors opened and Green climbed on board and disappeared.

  Vishniak gave the elevator doors a closer inspection, cursing himself for having been so dense. He had walked past these doors a hundred times and never really noticed them. He had assumed that they were a freight elevator or something else - not a secret entrance to Ogle Data Research.

  This discovery did not help him much; you had to have a key to get on the elevator. But still, a lead was a lead. That day, Vishniak took an early lunch, went to a haircutting place in the mall, and spent his day’s salary getting his long hair cut short and his beard shaved off. He couldn’t risk being recognized by Aaron Green. With the new hair and the sunglasses he was unrecognizable.

  Not far from the elevator doors was a bench where tired shoppers could rest their legs. During his off hours, Vishniak took to spending a lot of time on that bench, watching the elevator doors.

  Most of the people who went in and out of the elevator were typical office workers, all nicely dressed. But very soon Vishniak began to notice a pattern: certain of these office workers would habitually come out of the elevators, always in pairs. One of them would stand by the elevator doors with a key. The other would go off into the mall. Within a few minutes, unfamiliar people would begin to gravitate toward the elevator doors - plain, old, off-the-street types. The person stationed by the elevator doors, would use the key to open the doors and dispatch them up to the eleventh floor. An hour or two later, these people would emerge again and then go their separate ways.

  Vishniak was curious as to what was being done to these regular people during the hour or two that they spent up on the eleventh floor. Was it some kind of brain surgery? Were they all being turned into robots like Cozzano?

  After a while he came to recognize the people who went into the mall to rope these people in, and he took to following them around to see what they were doing. They always carried clipboards; the clipboards always had lists on them, and as they persuaded different people to come up to the eleventh floor they would cross an item off the list. And they did not go up to people at random; they would go to particular stores, or busy intersections in the mall, and scan the faces of the shoppers, looking for particular types.

  Vishniak overheard an interesting bit of conversation on one occasion, as he was trailing a young woman with a clipboard. She happened to run into another clipboard-toting woman who was out in the mall trolling for subjects.

  “Marcie! Hi!”

  “Oh, hi, Sherry. What are you looking for?”

  “The usual - a mall concubine and a porch monkey. How about you?”

  “I’ve got everything on my list except for a Post-Confederate Gravy Eater.”

  “Oh. You know what you should do? See that newsstand over there?”

  Sherry gave some instructions to Marcie. Marcie thanked her and went to the newsstand, where she found a long-haired young man, wearing a T-shirt and a confederate flag on the back, leafing through a copy of Guns & Ammo. After a short conversation, this young man nodded, put the magazine back on the rack, and followed Marcie out of the store.

  Pentagon Plaza was not the kind of mall where you could come by Confederate flags easily, but there were many such places in the less affluent stretches of northern Virginia, and that night Floyd Wayne Vishniak hit a few of them. He also stopped in at a newsstand and bought a few gun magazines - a subject that interested him anyway. The next day, after finishing his shift wiping tables, he went to the men’s room, locked himself into a stall, and took off his apron and his hat. He pulled on a Confederate T-shirt. Over that he put on his shoulder holster. He was wearing his cargo pants with the ammo clips in them. Finally he pulled on a bright red windbreaker with the Confederate flag on the back and zipped it up just enough to hide the gun. Then he went upstairs and sat on the bench near the elevators and settled in comfortably to read his gun magazines. He was going to have to come up with a new name - Lee Jackson or something.

  In the end, he read those magazines pretty thoroughly, and got to know everything a man could know about the latest in weapons technology, because he ended up spending three solid eight-hour shifts on that bench before he was finally noticed.

  “Excuse me, sir?” a young woman said.

  Vishniak looked up. It was Marcie. She had her clipboard.

  “I work for an opinion research company called Ogle Data Research,” she continued, “and I was wondering if you’d mind if I asked you a few questions? Are you in the twenty-six to thirty-five age group?”

  “Yes, I am,” he said.

  “Are you from the South, and do you consider yourself to be a Southerner?”

  “Proud of it too,” he said.

  “And would you consider yourself unemployed or under­employed?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Well, how would you like to make fifty dollars? It’ll take about an hour?”

  “Fifty bucks in an hour?” Vishniak said. “Well, yee-ha! This is my lucky day.”

  50

  This was where he’d have to be careful. He still had no idea what the Ogle Data Research people were actually doing to their test subjects up there on the eleventh floor. If it was some kind of brain surgery, then Vishniak would have to open fire before they could get him under anaesthesia. Otherwise he would become one of the living dead, a robot slave like Cozzano.

  To outward appearances, everything seemed real nice. They had a big lobby by the elevators. It was all decorated. A nice young woman, whom Vishniak recognized from his reconnaissance, greeted him and led him around past the big curving desk where the receptionist sat with her space-age headset. Two security guards stood by, shifting their weight from one tired foot to the other; one of them was about ninety years old and the other one was overweight. Vishniak considered picking them off right here and now but decided against it; as long as they kept leading him deeper into the bowels of ODR, there was no reason to get feisty.

>   The girl offered him coffee but he refused; maybe that was how they knocked people out. She ushered him into a room with half a dozen chairs, all facing a big fancy TV set. Made in Japan, naturally. Three other people were already sitting there, and Vishniak recognized them as the sort of typical mall-cruising Americans that the ODR agents were always trying to recruit. A couple of them were drinking coffee but seemed to be suffering no ill effects so far.

  Vishniak took a seat and waited for the usher gal to leave the room. Then he stood up, ambled over to the door, and stuck his head out into the hallway, trying to get a sense of the layout. They were not far from the receptionist’s station. In the other direction, the hallway led past a line of offices. All the offices had big picture windows to let in the light, and so Vishniak could tell from a distance which doors were open and which were closed. Glancing back the other way he saw that the fat security guard was eyeballing him. He withdrew into the room and went over to the windows.

  They had an incredible view. A fellow could probably make money, Vishniak reflected, by renting out an office in this building and charging mall shoppers a quarter to ride the elevators up and look out the windows. They were so close to the Pentagon that you could probably hawk a loogie into its central courtyard. Off to the left of the Pentagon was a huge cemetery with millions of white gravestones. This juxtaposition made good horse sense in that the Pentagon had to do with killing people. Beyond these landmarks was a river, and on the far shore of that river, Vishniak looked right into the heart of Washington. He didn’t recognize it at first because, compared to Chicago, it was sparse and low-slung, like a farm or a park.

  A long, narrow strip of grass ran off into the distance and it was lined with white buildings. In the middle of it was a tall spiky thing. At the far end of it was a dome that Vishniak recognized as being the Capitol. Beyond that, he could not really tell one building from another: there were a million of them, they were all white, they had lots of columns and the occasional squat dome. The only other one that looked familiar was located on the far side of the strip of grass, off the main drag: he thought it was the White House.

  But it didn’t look exactly right. He had seen the White House on TV a million times, always with a TV reporter standing in front of it, and thought it had a simple crackerbox shape with a verandah bulging out from the long side of it, but from this vantage point he could see that this thing he had always thought of as the White House was just the central unit in a sprawling, far-flung affair. The thing had wings sticking out to both sides, and the wings had additions tacked on to them. It was like a simple crackerbox house that the owner kept adding rooms to, until it rambled crazily all over the lot.

  Seeing this, Vishniak felt betrayed. He had been raised to believe that the White House was just the President’s house. His family lived there and his kids hunted Easter eggs on the lawn. It was big and nice by house standards, but still a house. But now he could see that the White House wasn’t a real house at all. It was a false front for a rambling complex of sinister-looking additions that were cleverly concealed behind trees and bushes. And a fellow had to ask himself what happened in those additions, and what kind of people worked there, that their existence was so carefully kept hidden from the American public.

  “Excuse me, sir?” someone was saying. He felt a hand placed gently on his arm, and startled away from it. It was one of the ODR gals. “Would you like to have a seat? We’re about to get started.”

  “Sure,” he said, and took a seat, one that had a good view of the door. While he had been standing at the window analyzing the structure of the U.S. Government, two other mall folk had come into the room, making a total complement of six.

  What happened next was kind of amusing: they passed out wrist cuffs, one per customer. They were just like the one that Vishniak was already wearing, except that these didn’t have the built-in TV screens. Playing dumb, Vishniak watched the gal explain how to put them on your arm, and followed her instructions with artificial clumsiness. Now he had one on each wrist.

  Then she closed the blinds, turned off the lights, and showed them about fifteen minutes of television. Most of it consisted of advertisements but there were a few news stories in there too. All of it had to do, one way or another, with William A. Cozzano. Some of the ads were fuzzy-warm, touchy-feely numbers showing past events in Cozzano’s life, including some grainy home videos of Cozzano recovering from his stroke that made Vishniak get choked up. Some of the ads were attacks on the President or Tip McLane. And then there were news stories - excerpts from what looked like network broadcasts. But the anchormen were unfamiliar to Vishniak. And the news events being reported had not actually happened.

  Watching the anchorman read the stories, Vishniak sensed, somehow, that he was familiar. But not as an anchorman. As something else. Then it came to him: this man had played the captain of a starship - not the Enterprise - in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He was an actor. And this news story was a fake. It hadn’t really happened. It was just a potential news story.

  “Huh. Getting some interesting reactions from our Post-Confederate Gravy Eater,” Aaron Green said. He was sitting in the next room, looking at half a dozen monitor screens. Next to him was Shane Schram.

  “What’s this guy’s problem?’ Shane Schram said. He looked at the TV monitor showing the face of the Post-Confederate Gravy Eater, who was staring fixedly at the screen, jaw muscles throbbing.

  “Incredible cortex activity,” Aaron said, scrutinizing the readout.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means his mental gears are spinning at a million rpm. He’s thinking way too hard about everything.”

  “Can’t have that. We’ll just throw out his results,” Schram said.

  The videotape came to an end. Schram got up, walked next door, and turned on the lights in the focus group room. Then he delivered his usual self-introduction, which Aaron Green had now listened to a million times.

  The door opened and Mr. Salvador came into the room, joining Aaron. Everyone called him Mr. Salvador because he had a kind of intercontinental breeding that inspired un-American levels of formality and because he was their boss. Even Cy Ogle’s boss. But he wasn’t just some figurehead who golfed and went to the occasional board meeting. He was very much a hands-on type. He spent days at a time holed up in the room where they had set up all of the monitors for the PIPER 100.

  “We’re doing a PIPER broadcast in a couple of minutes,” Mr. Salvador said. “I’d like you to join me and give me your analysis.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Cozzano’s giving an address to a convention of gun nuts in Tulsa,” Salvador said. “It’s going to be his major statement on the gun control issue. Which, in this country, seems to be hysterically emotional.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “I’m just sick of all this gutter politics,” the lady said. She was a solidly built, bifocal-wearing woman with a conservative midwestern haircut, wearing a lavender jogging suit. Fresh off a tour bus from Indiana, no doubt. “I just don’t want to see any more of this trash.”

  “I think you do want to see it,” Schram said, “I think you are fascinated by this kind of thing. I think that, when you go to the grocery stores, you deliberately stand in the longest checkout line so that you will have time to pull the tabloids off the racks and leaf through them. And then you put them back on their racks. Because you’re not the kind of person who would read sleazy tabloids - are you?”

  The woman was utterly dumbfounded. “How - how did you know that? Have you been following me around or something?”

  “Stop messing with her brain waves!” said the Post-Confederate Gravy Eater. Contrary to his assigned stereotype, he did not have a southern accent. More midwestern.

  “How’s that again?” Schram asked.

  “You get into people’s brains. I know you do. Can’t you see you’re bothering that woman?”

  Schram shrugged innocently and
held up his hands, palms up. “Hey. I’m just here having a conversation with her. I don’t know anything about brain waves.”

  “Oh, yeah?” the man said, yanking the cuff off his wrist. “Then what’s this?”

  “That’s already been explained,” Schram said.

  “Your explanations are all lies and cover-ups,” the man said.

  “Look,” Schram said, “let me be honest. We’re done with your interview, sir. Why don’t you go ahead and take off. You can pick up your fifty dollars at the desk.”

  “What about these others?”

  “I’d like to talk to them a little bit more.”

  “Why don’t you want to talk to me? Isn’t my opinion important?”

  “We had a bug in our equipment,” Schram said. “It didn’t work in your case. So to keep you here any longer would be a waste of time. Thank you for coming in.”

  The man stood up out of his chair, facing the door, and then hesitated. He had grabbed the zipper pull on his red Confederate flag windbreaker with his left hand and was nervously zipping it up and down. He seemed to be deep in thought.

  “Sir? That’s all we need from you,” Schram said. “You can go home now. Thanks for coming.”

  “Okay,” the man said, finally zipping his zipper all the way up to his neck. “Okay, I think I’ll go back home now. Thanks. It was real interesting. I learned a lot.”

  “You’re welcome,” Schram said.

  The man started for the exit. Then music began to come out of him, as if he were carrying a transistor radio in his pocket. He stopped and froze for a moment.

  The music was tinny and compressed, as if coming from a very small speaker. It was a patriotic fifes-and drums number. Shane Schram stared in astonishment.