Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  If the Network planned carefully and wasn’t too obvious about it, it could go far beyond managing the outcome of this one election. It could actually erect a system that would enable America’s investors to have a permanent say in the management of their assets. It would eat up a lot of the Network’s liquidity, but by moving some money around, Otho would be able to free up enough to assemble quite a little war chest. The markets had all gone to hell anyway, providing a perfect cover for the enormous shifts he would have to make in the next couple of days.

  The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that it was a sound decision. He should have done it a long time ago. The fact that he hadn’t probably proved that he was obsolete, or something.

  The United States of America had severed its purpose. It was time to cash her in. Like a big creaky old corporation, her individual parts, intelligently liquidated, were worth more than the whole. She still had the best damn military money could buy, as the Iraqis had discovered during the Gulf War, and she still came up with new ideas better than anyone. Under new, fiscally responsible management, she could still perform well, pay her debts, and provide a tolerable standard of living for her citizens. Otho needed to make sure that that management was provided by the Network and not by one of the other entities with which the Network competed.

  He sent out a fax to Mr. Salvador telling him to swing by Cacher for a face-to-face. That was the hard part; he had never been good at the interpersonal stuff. Then he got down to the work he did better than anyone else in the world: sending out sell orders, shuffling assets, arranging his pieces on the board.

  In simple numerical terms, liquidating the Constitution of the United States was not the biggest or the most difficult job Otho had ever undertaken. For some reason it made him nervous anyway. Since the Kennedy assassination he’d had nothing but contempt for politicians. But he wasn’t attacking a particular president here; he was attacking the institution of the presidency. Meddling with primal forces. He moved slowly, made mistakes in his arithmetic, forgot things, kept going back on his own decisions. It was an unfamiliar sensation to be agonizing about his job. Images kept coming unbidden into his mind, clouding his thoughts: FDR declaring war on Japan, the moon landings, D-Day, football games on Thanksgiving, Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech.

  More than once his fingers came to a dead stop on the keyboard as these and more personal, more emotional memories surged uncontrollably through his mind. He wondered if senility had finally touched him. Finally he had to get up and hobble over to

  their little kitchen and take the bottle of vodka out of the freezer. He knew that he was doing the right thing here, that if he didn’t someone else would. But it hurt.

  By 10:00:00 GMT, the communications room was once again quiet. Otis woke up from a short nap and went in to check on Otho.

  From the dark room, a thin voice almost chanted, “Well you know, this country once worked real well, when we had values that people believed in.”

  Otis saw the empty vodka bottle on the table, still fogged with condensation, and realized that his father had just gotten drunk for the first time in three decades. “What do you mean by values?”

  “They were code words like honesty, hard work, self-reliance . myths, actually, to motivate the people to accept the natural inequities found in a market system. In the old days, contract was sacred: divorce, bankruptcy, fraud, were taboos for the average people. The rogues of course, the robber barons were beyond that. We have to return the country to those values so that there won’t even be a thought to renege on the debt.”

  “Daddy…”

  “Yes, boy?”

  “How will you do it?”

  “I think I’ll hand this one off to Mr. Salvador. He’s an ambitious fella. He obviously wants to take my place a couple of years down the road, or whenever Lady Wilburdon decides to replace me. He’s an asshole, and there’s a good chance he’ll get killed or ruined trying to do this. And if he survives, he’ll be a better man for it.”

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, boy.”

  “Good night, Daddy.”

  3

  “Look, it’s not like this is some kind of a-” aaron green said. Then a cautious instinct took control and he brought himself up short. He was looking over the epaulets of the security guard at a large red sign on the wall: DO NOT MAKE JOKES OR COMMENTS REGARDING WEAPONS OR EXPLOSIVE DEVISES.

  “It’s not a what?” said the guard in front of Aaron, a wiry older white man. Aaron was still trying to decide where to begin when the guard spoke the dreaded words: “Step over here with me, sir.”

  Aaron followed the guard over to a table, just beyond the picket line of metal detectors, still within the dreaded security zone. Beyond it lay the concourse, a pacifist Utopia full of weaponless citizens streaming in an orderly fashion toward their gates. In the overpriced bars and overpriced restaurants, business-suited travelers stood, drinks in hand, below television sets, watching the President deliver his State of the Union address.

  “What do we have there, sir?” said the guard behind the table, the chief of this beady-eyed, polyethnic truth squad. He was a very wide, convex black man with a deep voice and he was trying to sound open-minded and jolly. He was wearing an ID flasher with the name BRISTOLS, MAX.

  “It’s a piece of electronic equipment,” Aaron said, setting the case on the table.

  “I see. And you can open this up and show it to me?” Bristol said.

  The case was largely full of gray foam rubber. A rectangular cavity the size of a couple of shoe boxes had been excavated from

  the center. Filling this cavity was a white steel box with ventilation slots cut into the top. The box was exactly the right width to fit into a standard electronics rack.

  The plan was that one day, a whole lot of these things would be sacked together in racks, racks lined up next to each other, hundreds in a single room. The room and the equipment would be owned by big media companies in L.A. They would buy all of the stuff from Green Biophysical Systems, of which Aaron Green was the founder, chief technologist, president, and treasurer.

  With the lid of the case open, the upper half of the faceplate was visible. It had no controls, knobs, or anything, just a single red LED with the word power printed underneath it, and, in big letters, the Green Biophysical Systems logo, and the acronym IMIPREM.

  The power cord was coiled up in a separate niche in the gray foam rubber. Yet another niche contained an item that Aaron hoped they wouldn’t notice: a cuff. Hard plastic shell lined with black foam, for comfort. He wondered what the guards would think of that.

  “Looks interesting,” the guard said. His insincerity was palpable. “What is it?”

  Aaron took a deep breath. “An instantaneous, multiplexing, integrating, physiological response evaluation and monitoring device.”

  “What does it do?”

  It doesn’t blow up. “Well. It’s a little bit like a polygraph.”

  “I need to see it work.”

  “What?’

  “I need to see your IMIPREM work,” Bristol said.

  Aaron pulled the IMIPREM out of its foam rubber nest and set it on the table. Then he uncoiled the power cord, fit one end into a three-pronged recessed socket on the back of the unit, and plugged the other end into a wall outlet near the table. The little LED came on. “There,” he said.

  Bristol raised his eyebrows and looked extremely dubious. “That’s all it does?”

  “Well, it does a lot more than that, naturally,” Aaron said, “but it has no interface, per se, except through a computer. See, if I could hook this up to a computer, it would produce all kinds of meaningful output.”

  “But the only thing it’ll do right now, here, for me, is turn on this little red light,” Bristol said.

  Aaron was trying to come up with a diplomatic way to say yes when they were interrupted by another person. He was carrying a laptop computer. He was holding the device out at arm’s length.

&
nbsp; “Tick, tick, tick, tick!” the man was saying. But he pronounced it “teeuhk, teeuhk.” He was one of those southerners who could add syllables to words and make it sound good. “And then somewhere over Newark - BOOM! Haw, haw, haw!”

  The old guard grinned and guided him to the table.

  “Sir,” Bristol said.

  “Howdy,” the man with the computer said. “This is a Compaq - more bang for the buck than IBM! Haw haw!”

  As Aaron watched in disbelief, Bristol exchanged a friendly, knowing grin with the big southerner.

  “Got a Gamma Prime CPU, a gigabyte drive, and three pounds of Semtex,” the southerner said.

  He had a smooth, trombonelike voice that could be heard for miles. All of the metal detector guards were looking at him and chuckling. The businessmen filing through the metal detectors, picking their pocket change out of the plastic buckets, were looking at the southerner with appreciative grins, shaking their heads.

  He was tall, probably a couple of inches over six feet, had love handles, an unexceptional suit, a high forehead, the beginnings’ of jowls, a florid complexion, eyebrows raised up in a perpetually surprised or skeptical expression, a tiny little pursed mouth. “Whoa, looks like I got some competition here!” he blurted, eyeing the IMIPREM in mock wonder.

  Then his whole face changed; suddenly his eyes were narrowed and darting, he had become secret and conspiratorial, shooting sidelong glances at Bristol, Max. “Abu Jihad!” he hissed at Aaron. “Praise be to Allah! We have perfected a nuclear device capable of fitting under an airline seat!”

  The big guard and the southerner joined together in loud, booming laughter. “I got a glass of bourbon with my name on it in that bar by the gate,” the southerner finally said, “so let me crank this thing up for you and get on out of here. If you don’t mind, sir,” he added to Aaron, courteously enough.

  “Not at all.”

  The man snapped the computer open and folded back the top; to reveal its screen, a flat, high-resolution, color monitor. Aaron had other things to be worrying about right now, but he couldn’t help staring at the man’s computer; it was one of the nicest and most powerful laptops you could buy, certainly one of the most expensive. These things had only been on the market for a couple of months. This one was already worn and battered around the edges.

  The southerner hit the on button, hollering “BOOM!” so loud that Bristol actually startled a little bit. Then he laughed.

  The screen came alive with windows and icons. From a distance, Aaron recognized about half of the icons. He knew what this soft­ware did. He could guess that the southerner did a lot of statistical analysis, desktop publishing, and even desktop video production.

  “Sir, would this do the trick?” Bristol was saying.

  “Yo!” said the southerner, giving Aaron a dig on the arm. “He’s talking to you!”

  “Huh?” Aaron said.

  “Would this computer be capable of talking to your machine there?” Bristol said.

  “Well, yes, if it had the right software loaded on to its hard drive. Which it doesn’t.”

  “Oh, I see what’s going on,” the southerner said. Suddenly he stuck out his hand toward Aaron. “Cy Ogle,” he said. “Pro­nounced, but not spelled, like mogul.”

  “Aaron Green.”

  Cy Ogle laughed. “So you have to show this guy here that your box won’t blow up when we reach our cruising altitude. And until you hook it up to a computer, it won’t do anything except turn on that little red light.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Which don’t mean jack to him, because that light is about the size of a grain of rice, and for all he knows the rest of the box is full of black powder and roofing nails.”

  “Well…”

  “You have the software with you? On floppies? Well, load it in there, and let’s take this baby for a spin.”

  Aaron couldn’t believe the guy was serious. But he was. Aaron fished the diskette with the IMIPREM software out of his briefcase and popped it into the drive on Ogle’s machine. A single-typed command copied the files on to Ogle’s hard drive.

  In the meantime, Ogle had already figured out what to do with the cable: he ran it from the back of the IMIPREM into the corresponding port on the laptop.

  “Okay. Ready to roll,” Aaron said.

  Aaron unbuttoned his shirt cuff. He fished the plastic cuff out of the case and snapped it snugly around his exposed wrist.

  A ten-foot cable dangled from the cuff. Most of it was coiled up and held together by a plastic wire tie. Aaron plugged it into the back of the IMIPREM.

  A new window materialized on the screen of Ogle’s computer. It was a moving, animated bar graph. Half a dozen colored bars, of different lengths, fluctuated up and down. At the base of each bar was a label:

  BP RESP TEMP PERSP PULS

  GSR NEUR

  “It’s monitoring my body right now. See, the bars stand for blood pressure, respiration, body temp, and a few other things. Of course, this is its most basic level of functioning, beyond this it’s capable of an incredible number of different-”

  Ogle’s hand slammed down on Aaron’s shoulder and gripped him like a pair of barbecue tongs.

  “I’m an undercover agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms,” Cy Ogle said, “You’re under arrest for conspiracy

  to commit terrorist acts on board an airliner. Don’t move or you’ll be shot!”

  “What!?” Aaron screamed.

  “Just kidding,” Ogle said, “Haw, haw!”

  “He’s right, look at the bars,” the guard said.

  Blood pressure and just about everything else had suddenly shot way up. As they watched, and as Aaron calmed down, the bars subsided.

  “Thanks for the demonstration, sir, it was very interesting,” the guard said. “Have a nice flight.”

  Then Bristol turned to look down the concourse. Aaron and Ogle were both looking that way too; some kind of generalized disturbance seemed to have broken out. But it wasn’t hooligans or terrorists. It was businessmen in suits, stampeding out of the bars and restaurants where they had been watching the President on TV. They ran down the concourse, knocking travelers and sky caps aside, and began to scuffle over the few available pay telephones.

  Ogle chuckled indulgently. “Looks like the President made a corker of a speech,” he said. “Maybe we should hook you machine up to them.”

  As it turned out, they were on the same flight, sitting across the aisle from each other in the first row of first class. Coach was full of shuffling grannies and beefy sailors; first class was mostly empty. Ogle worked on his computer for the first hour or so, whacking the keys so rapidly that it sounded like a hailstorm on the tray table, occasionally mumbling a good-natured “shit!” and doing it again.

  Aaron pulled a blank tablet of graph paper out of his briefcase, uncapped a pen, and stared at it until they were somewhere over Pittsburgh. Then it was dinnertime and he put it away. He was trying to organize his thoughts. But he didn’t have any.

  After dinner, Ogle moved from the window to the aisle seat, right across from Aaron, and then startled Aaron a little by ordering them both drinks.

  “Big presentation,” Ogle said.

  Aaron heaved a sigh and nodded.

  “You got some kind of small hightech company.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You developed this thing, spent all your venture capital, prob­ably maxed out your credit cars to boot, and now you got to make some money off it or your investors will cash you in.”

  “Yeah, that’s about right.”

  “And the cash flow is killing you because all the parts that go into these things cost money, but you don’t actually get paid for them until, what, thirty or sixty days after you ship ‘em. If you’re lucky.”

  “Yeah, it’s a problem all right,” Aaron said. His face was getting red. This had started out interesting, gotten uncanny, and now it was starting to annoy him.

  “So, let’s s
ee. You’re going to L.A. The big industry in L.A. is entertainment. You got a device that measures people’s reactions to things. A people meter.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a people meter.”

  “Course not. But that’s what they’ll call it. Except it’s a whole lot better than the usual kind, I could see that right away. Anyway, you’re going to go meet with a bunch of executives for movie and television studios, maybe some ad agencies, and persuade ‘em to buy a whole bunch of these things, hook ‘em up to man-on-the­street types, show ‘em movies and TV programs so they can do all that test audience stuff.”

  “Yeah, that’s about right. You’re a very perceptive man, Mr. Ogle.”

  “What I get paid for,” Ogle said.

  “You work in the media industry?”

  “Yeah, that’s a good way to put it,” Ogle said.

  “You seem to know a lot about what I do.”

  “Well,” Ogle said. All of a sudden he seemed quiet, reflective. He pushed the button on his armrest and leaned his chair back a couple of inches. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, curled one hand around his drink. “Hightech has its own biorhythms.”

  “Biorhythms?”

  Ogle opened one eye, turned his head a bit, peered at Aaron.

  “Course you probably don’t like that word because you are Mr. High Tech, and it sounds to you like cocktail-party pseudoscience.”

  “Exactly.” Aaron was beginning to think that Ogle knew him better than he knew himself.

  “Fair enough. But I have a legitimate point here. See, we live under capitalism. Capitalism is defined by competition for capital. Would-be businessmen, and existing businesses seeking to expand, fight for the tiny supply of available capital like starving jackals around a zebra leg.

  “That’s a depressing image.”

  “It’s a depressing country. It’s not like that in other countries where people save more money. But it’s like that here, now, because we don’t have values that encourage savings.”

  “Okay.”

  “Consequently you are starved for capital.”