Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  The man took his hands out of his pockets. One wrist had an Ace bandage wrapped around it. The music became louder. He ripped the Ace bandage off. The sound of applause was now coming from his wrist.

  William A. Cozzano stepped to the lectern and waved down the applause and cheers of the attendees at the Tulsa Gun and Knife Show.

  “My Secret Service people wanted to provide additional security for me today,” he said, “because I was addressing a bunch of gun owners, and for some reason that made them nervous. Well, I have one thing to say to you gun owners: if any one of you really wants to take a shot at me, here I am!”

  Cozzano stepped back from the lectern and held his arms out wide. The hall was filled with stunned murmuring for a few moments. Then the gun owners exploded. Peals of cheers, applause, and foot-stomping overwhelmed the sound system on the PIPER watch.

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak was staring into Shane Schram’s face, sizing him up. Schram’s eyes were jumping back and forth between the little TV and his face.

  “You’re Economic Roadkill,” Schram said. “You’re Floyd Wayne Vishniak!”

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak unzipped his windbreaker and reached inside. “That was a really stupid thing for you to say,” he said. Then he pulled out a handgun and pointed it at Schram. Everyone else in the room collapsed out of their chairs.

  “I can see that you’re very upset,” Schram said.

  “How many times do I have to tell you,” Vishniak said, “to stay the hell out of my brain waves!” Then he fired a single round that entered Schram’s head through the bridge of his nose and left through an exit wound, in the back of his skull, that would have accommodated a grapefruit.

  “Don’t worry,” Vishniak said to the five people on the floor, who could scarcely hear a word he was saying because their ears were ringing from the incredible blast of the handgun. “You don’t have to worry about these bastards anymore!”

  “What the hell was that?” Mr. Salvador said. He and Green were in the PIPER monitor room, watching Cozzano shake his hands together above his head, basking in the waves of applause.

  “Nothing,” Green said. “Another one of Schram’s psychological experiments.”

  “I thought we were finished with the calibration phase,” Mr. Salvador said.

  “Believe me,” Green said, “this place is like Dodge City sometimes. It’s all fake.”

  Vishniak popped his head into the hallway and withdrew it before anyone could get off a shot. But the precaution was unnecessary. No one was there.

  He chanced a second look and saw the fat security guard in the lobby, looking back at him with only mild concern, as if high-ranking executives at ODR got their brains blown against the walls every day. Vishniak drew back into the room, his back to the doorway. He gripped the Fleischacker in both hands, spun around into the hall while bringing the gun downward, steadied his arm against the door frame for a second, and fired three quick shots. The first two hit the guard in the chest and the last one was high.

  Now he had to move fast. He ran toward the lobby, spun through the doorway, and took aim at the old guard, who was in the act of unsnapping his holster. He fired two rounds into the man’s head and upper body from a distance of about six feet. Then he spun toward the receptionist’s desk.

  She had already vaulted her desk and was cowering and screaming on the far side. That was okay, she was just a gnome. The key was to take out the switchboard. Vishniak fired a spread of some half-dozen bullets into her computer and her telephone switchboard.

  He turned back into the hallway, reached down with one hand, and unsnapped the flaps on the tops of his cargo pockets. He tucked the flaps down into the pockets, as he had practiced many times, so that they would not get in the way when he reached down to pull out more clips.

  Then it hit him: though it was a bit early in the day to be getting cocky, he was doing an incredibly good job so far. He had wiped out their pathetic security detail and blown their communications to shreds. Now he’d be able to clean out the remainder of the eleventh floor in a thorough and methodical way.

  “Generally good results so far,” Mr. Salvador said. “Of course, the gun control advocates will never like this kind of thing.”

  “Yeah. But check out some of our gun owners,” Green said. “Look at Vishniak?”

  “Who?”

  “Economic Roadkill,” Green said, tapping a screen that had suddenly gone brilliant emerald. “He’s one of my guys. And you can see how happy he is with the speech so far.”

  He had gone almost completely deaf from the blasts of the Fleischacker and could barely hear the voice of William A. Cozzano coming from his PIPER watch: “… would go out in the fields with my father, each of us with a shotgun tucked under his arm, and look for the pheasants that would go through the harvested fields for loose corn. Our retriever Lover would accompany us, often staying well back because he had learned that the blasts of the shotgun hurt his ears.”

  At this point Cozzano paused in his speech as the audience laughed indulgently. It wasn’t really that funny, but he had delivered it in the cadence of a joke, and they knew their cues.

  Vishniak kicked open an office door and saw nothing but a desk, and the knees and elbows of a man in a suit who was cowering behind it. This was not much to go on, but he was able to use his mind’s eye to reconstruct the approximate shape and position of the owner of those knees and elbows, and pumped several rounds into the probable locations of his vital organs. When he saw what looked like an appropriate quantity of blood on the floor, he left the office, leaving the door ajar as a reminder that he had already visited this particular room.

  “This is a bit excessive, wouldn’t you say?’ Mr. Salvador said. “I shall have to speak with Dr. Schram about this. It’s too late in the campaign for these distractions.”

  “There is an incredible amount of gunfire,” Green said, a little nervous.

  On the central TV screen. Cozzano continued: “On one of my first trips, after Lover had flushed a pheasant, I swung my gun in its direction, as I had practiced so many times with clay pigeons. But suddenly the barrel swung up in the air and I held my fire. My father had suddenly reached out and pushed the barrels up in the air, ruining my aim, and I was very upset.

  “By way of explanation, he pointed to our neighbor’s house, which had been directly in my line of fire - almost a mile away from us! I protested that there was no way that birdshot could travel for such a distance. ‘Better safe than sorry,’ he said.”

  Vishniak moved on to the next room. This one contained half a dozen TV screens and an equal number of computer monitors. One of the computer monitors was dead and the other five were glowing a brilliant red color. He put a bullet into each. This clip was running low, so as long as he was in a safe room, he ejected it, put it in his trouser pocket, and put in a fresh one. Cozzano’s voice was still coming from his wristwatch. “When I first learned that there were some people in Washington who wanted to take our guns away from us, I were more astonished than offended. The idea seemed ludicrous. My father - and all the other gun owners I knew - practiced firearm safety, and were at pains to pass those practices on to their children. The notion that some person in Washington could come out to Tuscola, Illinois, and take our guns away from us, because we were not, in their view, fit to own them, was completely baffling to me. And it still is.”

  The audience laughed; the laugh deepened into a cheer.

  “Something’s definitely going on out there,” Aaron Green said. “I’m going to lock the door.”

  “Good idea,” Mr. Salvador said, picking up the phone, holding it to his ear. “It’s dead. The phone’s dead.”

  Aaron had almost reached the door when the knob rotated and it opened. A man with a gun was standing in the hallway looking him in the eye.

  The man’s eye was drawn to the enormous racks of computer monitors that covered every wall of the room, the banks of computer systems. His jaw dropped open as he took it all in. While the
man was gaping, Green had time to recognize him: it was Floyd Wayne Vishniak with a haircut.

  Vishniak’s gaze finally returned to Aaron’s face. And it was clear that the presence of Aaron Green, here in this room, was the final piece in some kind of mental puzzle that Vishniak had been assembling in his head. “This is it,” Vishniak said, talking way too loud, as if he was deaf. “Isn’t it?”

  Never argue with a man with a gun. “Yes,” Green said, “this is it.” He turned to Mr. Salvador for support. “Isn’t it?”

  “Yes, this is it,” Mr. Salvador said, climbing very gingerly out of his chair, holding his hands together in front of his chest, fingertip to fingertip, in an attitude halfway between contemplation and prayer. He had the presence of mind to look over at Vishniak’s monitor screen; it had gone pale and colorless.

  Then it turned brilliant green.

  “You’re the Big Boss of it all!” Vishniak said. He stepped forward, shoved Aaron out of the way, leveled his gun at Mr. Salvador, and began to pull the trigger. He pulled it over and over again and the muzzle flashed like a strobe. Mr. Salvador was backing across the room with his hands dangling numbly at his sides, and before long he collapsed against a window.

  But the window wasn’t there anymore; it had long since been blown out of its frame, and the only thing there was a closed Venetian blind with a lot of holes in it, flopping outward into the wind, betraying the warm Virginia sunshine. Suddenly, Mr. Salvador was no longer in the room.

  “Jesus, where’d he go?” Vishniak said. He stepped forward into the room, looking around suspiciously. He went over to the window, pushed the blind out with one hand, and looked down.

  But by that point, Aaron Green was already in the elevator.

  The lunchtime crowd in the foodcourt at Pentagon Plaza had first been alerted by a loud rattling noise on the glass overhead. The roar of conversation mostly drowned this out, but a few perceptive diners looked up to see fragments of broken glass sparkling in the sun as they bounced on the greenhouse roof.

  Then the body came toward them in a smooth silent arc and punched through the ceiling without any perceptible loss in speed. When it hit the glass it lost its sharply edged silhouette as a lot of stuff was forced out of it by the impact. It continued through the central atrium of the mall, now more a cloud of loosely organized

  remains of a corpse, and burst across four separate tables. A couple of seconds later, the broken glass came down in a hailstorm.

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak, esq.

  Parts Unknown

  United States of America

  Letters to the Editor

  Washington Post

  Washington, D.C.

  Dear Mr. (Or Miss, Mrs., or Ms.) Editor: I have a bone to pick with you. Your coverage of my shooting spree (your way of describing it, not mine!) was the most biased and inaccurate piece of newspaper reporting I ever saw. All this year I have been reading a lot of newspapers (more than $300 spent so far) so that I could be an informed voter come November. But when I read a piece of garbage like your articles of 14, 15, and 16 September it makes me wonder if I have been informing myself at all. Or was I just filling up my head with all kinds of trash that your reporters just made up when they decided it was too much work to just go out and find out the Real Truth?

  It was not a “bloodbath,” as you have called it over and over. Only five people got killed. And the injuries to the diners in the food court do not count as this part was an accident. Just today you had an article about a car accident on the Beltway where five people got killed, but you never said it was a bloodbath.

  You said I “roamed through the office suite firing indiscriminately.” This is totally biased. I was not roaming. And I was not firing indiscriminately, or else why didn’t I kill the five people who were in the brainwashing room with me? I will tell you why: because these five were average all-American citizens who I was trying to protect, not kill.

  The part about the “spray of gunfire” really made my blood boil. There was no spraying. I decided what to shoot and I shot it.

  Then in the article on 16 Sept. you said that I calmly and methodically went through the office suite executing people. If I was so calm and methodical then why did you write all that stuff about roaming, spraying, firing indiscriminately, etc. This shows the bias that is in your writing.

  I am not a reclusive loner. As you would understand if you had to WORK for a living, it is cheaper to live out in the middle of nowhere. This does not make me a loner, just a poor honest working man.

  Finally (this is the BIG POINT of my letter), every single word of your coverage makes me out to be a psycho. Like you would never even consider the idea that I might ACTUALLY BE RIGHT!

  WAKE UP AMERICA! The so-called election of the president is a SHAM controlled by the MEDIA MANIPU­LATORS who have turned Cozzano into a ROBOT by planting a CHIP IN HIS HEAD that receives secret coded transmissions from SATELLITES. These same MEDIA MANIPULATORS have also put BRAIN WAVE MONITORS on average people’s wrists disguised as DICK TRACY WRISTWATCHES.

  One day I will be recognized as the hero I am for uncovering this secret conspiracy. Then you, the Washington Post, will be exposed for what you are: A TOOL OF THE CONSPIRACY that helps to control people’s brains by putting out BIASED SO-CALLED NEWS.

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

  Sincerely,

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak

  51

  The Cozzano campaign was a third-party effort, which meant that it had to fight for every voter and every state. It had gotten off to a relatively late start in July and hadn’t really gotten rolling until August; then Cozzano had suffered in the polls for a couple of weeks from his surprising choice of Eleanor Richmond as running mate.

  Since then, Cozzano had crushed everything in his path. In city after city he strode up to the microphones, utterly relaxed and con­fident, shrugging off his aides, ignoring the notes and teleprompters, and spoke. The words poured out of him effortlessly. He wasn’t speaking to the journalists; he seemed to be speaking directly to the American people. In his homburg he looked like a figure from the middle of the century, like one of the men who had defeated Hitler and charted the course of empires and alliances. Compared to the sniping, weasely sons of bitches who had been leading America for the last few decades, he seemed like a throw­back to the days when leaders were leaders, when there was such a thing as a great man. He looked as if he would have been right at home at the Yalta Conference, sitting with Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Whether he was meeting with foreign leaders or tipping a hotel doorman, he conducted himself with surefooted dignity and gentlemanly grace mixed with a kind of earthy, scab-knuckled vigor.

  He did not seem to be running for anything at all. He seemed to be going around the country just being himself.

  Mary Catherine didn’t know a lot about presidential politics, but she knew it was significant when they ended up in Boston for an overnight stay. Massachusetts never went to anyone except Demo­crats; the fact that Cozzano was there meant that it was now up for grabs. It meant that her father was heading for a fifty-state sweep.

  They stayed at a magnificent hotel along the waterfront with a huge arch that opened up like a gateway on Boston Harbor. This was, of course, Ogle’s choice; the arch made a great backdrop for television appearances, and the proximity to the harbor made it easier to bash the Democrats on environmental issues.

  The campaign had rented out a floor of suites. Mary Catherine and William A. Cozzano shared a two-bedroom suite, which was normal. She came straight from the airport and got settled in while her father hit a number of campaign stops, including tours of some hightech firms in Cambridge.

  The Cozzanos traveled with a lot of luggage, which was an easy thing to do when you never had to carry it yourself, and you had your own airplane. Not all of it was clothing. Some of it was equipment that Mary Catherine had bought for use in her father’s therapy. Early in the campaign this had been simple stuff, like
wads of stiff putty that Cozzano would squeeze in his left hand to develop strength and dexterity. By this point in the campaign, late in September, he was way beyond the putty-squeezing stage. He was now almost completely ambidextrous. In fact, he could sign his name with both hands at the same time. The left-hand signature looked similar to his pre-stroke version, albeit bigger and lazier. The right-hand signature was completely unfamiliar, though she had to admit it looked more presidential.

  They had flown into Boston’s Logan Airport from a string of campaign appearances in Arizona. Mary Catherine had insisted that since it was going to be a long flight, Dad should write her a letter, and he should do it with his left hand. He had grumbled at this suggestion and tried to find ways to avoid it, but she had insisted, and finally he had buckled down to the job, ejecting all journalists and aides from his private cabin and sitting down with the big fountain pen gripped securely in his left hand and a pad of lined paper on his lap, writing the letters carefully, in block capitals, one at a time like a schoolboy.

  She had left him alone to the task. But when she came back an hour later, he was typing on a laptop computer.

  “Dad!”

  “Peanut,” he said, “it was driving me crazy. I thought my head was going to split open.”

  “But you need to work on your right-hemisphere-”

  “Spare me the neurobabble,” he said. “Please observe that I am typing. I am typing a letter to you. And I am using both hands.”

  Now, alone in the hotel, she turned on Dad’s laptop and opened up the file named “Letter to MC.”

  Ddeeaarrest 3Maarryee Ccaattheerine,

  3As eyqowuals claentter sle3e my therapy is progressing well. I have you to thank

  wfaovres rtahveage gdraedast sbterlifdreese I have made since you signed onto the

  tcearmapfaeiegn. wlrtcs whealsl been a constant joy having you with me. As you

  hdaavde pfreoabrasbly naovteirceeed Ibad carmew having some involuntary twitches in the