Interface

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  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 veranda 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 onto 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 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 a 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 the 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 in.”

  “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 compres
sed, as if coming from a very small speaker. It was a patriotic fifes-and-drums number. Shane Schram stared in astonishment.

  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 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 such 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 was more astonished than offended. The idea seemed ludicrous. My father—and all of 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 were 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 the 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.