Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  “Right!”

  “You had to get capital from venture capitalists - or vulture capitalists, as we call them - who are like the vultures that feed on the jackals when they become too starved and weak to defend themselves.”

  “Well, I don’t think my investor would agree.”

  “They probably would,” Ogle said, “they just wouldn’t do so in your presence.”

  “Okay.”

  “Venture capitalism is risky and so the vulture capitalists hedge their bets by pooling funds and investing in a number of start-ups at once - backing several horses, as it were.”

  “Of course.”

  “But what they don’t tell you is that at a certain point a couple of years into its life cycle, the start-up suddenly needs to double or triple its capitalization in order to survive. To get over those cash flow problems that occur when orders suddenly go from zero to more than zero. And when that happens, the vulture capitalists look at all of their little companies and they cull out the weakest two-thirds and let them starve. The rest, they provide with the capital they need in order to continue.”

  Aaron said nothing. Suddenly he was feeling tired and depressed.

  “That’s what’s happening to your company right now,” Ogle said. “You’re, what, three years old?”

  “How’d you know that!?” Aaron said, twisting around in his seat, glaring at Ogle, who remained quiescent in his big fat chair. He was almost expecting to see a crew from Candid Camera filming him from the galley.

  “Just a lucky guess. Your logo,” Ogle said, “you designed your logo yourself.”

  Again Aaron’s face reddened. He had, in fact, designed it himself. But he thought it was fairly professional, a lot more so than the typical home-brewed logo. “Yeah, so what?” he said. “It works. And it was free.”

  “Okay, this is ridiculous,” Aaron said. “How did you know that?”

  “If you were old enough to have made the cut - if you had passed through the capitalization barrier - you would have immediately gone out and hired professional designers to spiff up your corporate image. The vultures would have insisted on it.”

  “Yeah, that was going to be our next step,” Aaron said.

  “That’s okay. That speaks well of you, as a scientist, if not as a businessman,” Ogle said. “A lot of people start with image and then try to develop substance. But you are a techie and you hate all that superficial crap. You refuse to compromise.”

  “Well, thank you for that vote of confidence,” Aaron said, not entirely sarcastically.

  The flight attendant came through. They each ordered another drink.

  “You seem to have this all figured out,” Aaron said.

  “Oh, no, not at all.”

  “I don’t mean that to sound resentful,” Aaron said. “I was just wondering-”

  “Yes?” Ogle said, raising his eyebrows very high and looking at Aaron over his glasses, which he had slid down his nose.

  “What do you think? You think I have a chance?”

  “In L.A.?”

  “Yeah.”

  “With the big media moguls?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. You don’t have a chance.”

  Aaron heaved a big sigh, closed his eyes, took a gulp of his drink. He had just met Ogle but he instinctively knew that everything that Ogle had said, all night long, was absolutely true.

  “Which doesn’t mean that your company doesn’t have a chance.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “Course not. You got a good product there. It’s just that you don’t know how to market it.”

  “You think I should have gone out and gotten a flashy logo.”

  “Oh, no, I’m not saying that at all. I think your logo’s fine. It’s just that you have a misconception in your marketing strategy.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re aiming at the wrong people,” Ogle said, very simply and plainly, as if he were getting annoyed at Aaron for not figuring this all out on his own.

  “Who else can I aim at with a product of this type?”

  Ogle squeezed his armrest again, leaned forward, allowed his seat to come upright. He put his drink on his tray table and sat up straight, as if getting down to work. “You’re right in thinking that the media need to do people-metering kinds of stuff,” he said. “The problem is that the kinds of people who run media companies are not going to buy your product.”

  “Why not? It’s the best thing like it. It’s years ahead.”

  Ogle cut him off with a dismissive wave of the hand. “Doesn’t matter,” he said flatly, and shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t matter how good my product is?”

  “Not at all. Not with those people. Because you are selling to media people. And media people are either thugs, morons, or weasels. You haven’t dealt very much with media people, have you?”

  “Very little.”

  “I can tell. Because you don’t have that kind of annoying, superficial quality that people get when they deal for a living with thugs, morons, and weasels. You are very earnest and sincere and committed to certain principles, as a scientist, and thugs and morons and weasels do not understand that. And when you give them an explanation of how brilliant your machine is, you’ll just be putting them off.”

  “I have spent a hell of a lot of time finding ways to explain this device in terms that almost anyone can understand,” Aaron said.

  “Doesn’t mater. Won’t help. Because in the end, no matter how you explain it, it comes down to fine, subtle technicalities. Media people don’t like that. They like the big, fabulous concept.” Ogle pronounced “fabulous” with a mock-Hollywood gush.

  Aaron laughed rather hotly. He had seen enough media people to know this was true.

  “If you come to a media person and you want to do a miniseries about the Civil War, or Shakespeare, or the life of J.S. Bach, they will laugh in your face. Because nobody wants to watch that stuff. You know, intelligent stuff. They want pro wrestling. Media people who try to do Shakespeare get fired or go broke. The only ones who survived long enough to talk to you are the ones who backed pro wrestling. And when you come up to them talking about the fine points of your brilliant technology, it makes them think of Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci, which they hate and fear.”

  “So I’m dead.”

  “If you rely on selling to media people, you’re dead.”

  “But who else needs a device like this one except for media people?”

  “Well,” Ogle said softly, sounding almost surprised, as if he hadn’t gotten around to considering this question. “Well, actually, I could use it. Maybe.”

  “You said you were in media,” Aaron said.

  Ogle held one finger up. “Not exactly. I said I worked in the media industry. But I am not a media person, per se.”

  “What are you?”

  “A scientist.”

  “And what is your field of study?”

  “You, Aaron, are a biophysicist. You study the laws that determine the functioning of the body. Well, I am a political biophysicist. I study the laws that govern the functioning of the body politic.”

  “Oh. Could you be a little more specific?”

  “People call me a pollster,” Ogle said. “Which is like calling you a palm reader.”

  4

  Eleanor Boxwood Richmond heard the State of the Union address on the radio, but she didn’t really listen to it. She was driving a borrowed car down abandoned streets in Eldorado Highlands, an aborted suburb ten miles north of Denver. She had borrowed the car from Doreen, who lived in the trailer next to hers, several miles to the east, in the town of Commerce City.

  In case the police tried to phone with any news of her husband, Eleanor had dropped her football phone out her kitchen window, pulled it across the gap between her trailer and Doreen’s, and fed it through the window of Doreen’s bedroom. Eleanor’s husband, Harmon, for whom she was searching, had obtained the football
phone free of charge by subscribing to Sports Illustrated some years ago. Now the Sports Illustrated were still showing up on time, every week, while Harmon himself, depressed by unemployment and bankruptcy, had become more and more erratic. Some things you could at least count on.

  Eleanor felt foolish and humiliated every time she spoke on the football phone. It did not make looking for a job in the banking industry any easier. She would sit there in her trailer, which would be baking hot or freezing cold according to the outside tem­perature. She kept the windows closed even in summer so that the screaming of Doreen’s kids, and the heavy metal from the trailer on the other side, would not be audible to the person she was speaking to. She would telephone people wearing dark suits in air-conditioned buildings and she would hold the little plastic football to the side of her head and try to sound like a banker. So far she had not gotten any jobs.

  Back in the old days, when the whole family had lived together, happily, in their big house in this suburban development in Eldorado Highlands, they had had a phone in every room. In addition to the football phone they had had a sneaker phone; a cheap little Radio Shack phone that would always go off the hook unless you set it down firmly on a hard surface; and a couple of solid, traditional AT&T telephones. All of these phones had disappeared during the second burglary of their trailer and so they had been forced to get the football phone out of storage and use that instead.

  Eleanor Richmond had not seen her husband, Harmon, in two days. For the first day, this had been more of a relief than anything else, because usually when she did see him, he was half-reclined on their broken-backed sofa in front of the TV set, drinking. From time to time he would go out and get a Mcjob, work at it for a few days, quit or get fired, and then come back home. Harmon never lasted very long at Mcjobs because he was an engineer, and flipping burgers or jerking Slurpees grated on his nerves, just as talking on the football phone grated on Eleanor’s.

  The neighborhood that Eleanor was driving through had been built on a perfectly flat high plains ranch in the early eighties. All of the houses were empty, and three-quarters of them always had been; as you drove down the curvy streets, you could look across yards that were reverting to short-grass prairie, in through the front windows of the houses, all the way through their empty interiors, out the back windows, across a couple of more yards, and through another similar house on another similar street.

  Eleanor and Harmon Richmond had purchased their house brand new, before the carpet was even installed. It was early in the Reagan administration. Harmon worked for a medium-sized aerospace firm that sold avionics to the Defense Department. Eleanor had just finished raising their two children to school age and had reentered the workforce. She had started out as a teller for a bank in Aurora and been promoted to customer service representative in fairly short order. Soon she would be branch manager. Eleanor’s mother, a widow, had sold the ancestral town house in Washington, D.C., and moved out to a fairly nice retirement community a short distance away.

  They were doing pretty well for themselves. So, when the houses around them remained empty, for a month, then six months, then a year, and the value of their house began to fall, they didn’t get too worried about it. Everyone makes a bum investment now and then. They were well compensated, the mortgage pay­ments weren’t that bad, and they could easily cover their expenses, including the monthly payment to Mother’s retirement community.

  Times had actually been good for several years. They should have taken advantage of that to squirrel some money away. But the Richmonds were the only people in their respective families who had managed to make the breakthrough to the middle class, which meant that each one of them had a coterie of siblings, nephews, nieces, and cousins living in various ghettos up and down the East Coast, all of whom felt they had a claim on what they all imagined was the family fortune. They wired a lot of money back East. It didn’t come back.

  They broke even until the early nineties, when Harmon’s company got LBO’d, and the financiers in New York who had bought it began to break it up and sell off the little parts to various people. The particular part of it that Harmon worked for got sold to Gale Aerospace, a defense contractor based in Chicago. They gave him a choice: move to Chicago or move to Chicago. But they couldn’t move to Chicago without selling their house, which now was worth half what they had paid for it. Harmon got fired.

  They following year, the bank that Eleanor worked for was bought out by a huge California bank that already had millions of branches all over the area - including one that was directly across the street from the one where Eleanor worked. They closed her branch and she lost her job.

  The foreclosure on their house had not been long in coming. They had bounced around from one big apartment complex to another for a few years and finally wound up in the trailer park in Commerce City, next to Doreen. They still had two cars, a 1981

  Volvo wagon that they had bought used, and a rather old Datsun that did not work anymore and -was parked, permanently, in front of the trailer. Harmon had taken the Volvo with him when he disappeared, stranding Eleanor in the trailer.

  She had sought him everywhere else. Now, just for the sake of being complete, she was back in the old neighborhood.

  It was amazing how quickly you forgot the street patterns. It was almost as if the people who laid these things out wanted you to get lost. She drove for a quarter of an hour down the winding lanes, courts, and terraces, flipping U-turns in circles. The voice of the President of the United States continued to whinny from the radio. The words seemed almost devoid of meaning and the rhythm of the speech was constantly broken up by outbursts of applause and cheering. The pale, desiccated prairie grass, dusted with powdery snow, reflected the moonlight through the windows of the empty houses. Many of the streets had never been finished, the asphalt would simply terminate and become a hard-packed arroyo lined with uncompleted houses, their naked studs and unconnected plumbing lines projecting into the dry air like the rib cages of dead animals.

  Finally she saw some landmarks that reminded her of where she was, and her old reflexes took over, guiding her automatically through the twists and turns.

  Their house sat up on a little rise at the end of a cul-de-sac, a lollipop-shaped street that broadened into a circle at the end. Their house was right at the top of the lollipop, looking down the length of the street and out over a nice view of the Rockies rising into the night sky with the lights of Denver lapping up against them.

  The house shone tonight in the moonlight. The “White House.” They had called it that partly because it was white, and partly because moving into it had made them feel like they white people.

  It was meant ironically. Feeling like a white person had been one of Eleanor Richmond’s big goals in life. She had grown up in the heart of Washington, D.C., and had often gone for weeks at a time without seeing a single white face. People would come in from other parts of the country and complain about how the system was stacked against them; the cops and the judges and the juries were all white. But in D.C., the cops and judges and juries were all black. As were the teachers and the preachers and the nuns who had educated Eleanor. She had never gotten the sense that being black singled her out in any way. In some ways that had actually made it easier for her and Harmon to settle down in a predominantly white middle-class area.

  Still, moving into a white house in a suburban development in Colorado had made her feel like a pioneer on the edge of the wilderness. She had often longed to jump into the Volvo and drive back to D.C. It felt better if she joked about it, and so she called it the White House. And when her relatives from D.C. came out to visit and bum money off of them, she laughed and joked about the White House all the way from the airport, so that by the time they got there, and saw just how white it was, they were ready for it, and they didn’t take her for some kind of traitor.

  When she pulled into the old cul-de-sac, the White House was dead ahead, sitting up on its little hill, and it was all lit u
p from within. The only house within a mile that was lit up. Someone must have broken into it and turned all the power back on at the circuit panel.

  Someone named Harmon.

  Eleanor braked Doreen’s little car to a halt, there in the handle of the little lollipop street, and sat for a couple of minutes, staring through the windshield, up the hill, at the White House full of light and good cheer.

  The Volvo was not visible anywhere. But the light inside the garage was turned on. Once he’d gotten the power restored, he must have used it to open the garage door, and parked the Volvo inside, just like in the old days.

  Eleanor was trying to make up her mind what she should do now. Because her husband had clearly gone crazy. Either that, or gotten so drunk that he might as well be crazy.

  She was tired of having crazy relatives. Her mother had Alzheimer’s. They had moved her to a much cheaper nursing home and might have to move her into the trailer any day now. She was basically crazy. Her kids were both teenagers, hence crazy by definition. Now her husband was crazy.

  Eleanor Richmond was the only person in the whole family who was not crazy.

  Not that she wasn’t tempted.

  Eventually she reasoned that, crazy or not, it wouldn’t do her husband any good to wind up in jail. He might think, in his own crazy, drunk mind, that he still owned this house. But he didn’t. The Resolution Trust Corporation owned it; they had taken it over from the defunct savings and loan that had foreclosed on it. Eventually the RTC would probably sell it to speculators who would come and strip out the usable wiring and carpets, or maybe just bulldoze the whole thing down to its floor slab and turn the neighborhood into a dirt-bike track or a toxic waste dump. Eleanor knew that this house was walking dead, a real estate zombie, and that it was going to be wasted. But that didn’t change the fact that they didn’t own it anymore and Harmon could go to jail for having broken into it.

  Maybe going to jail would do Harmon some good. Shame him a little, snap him out of his depression.

  But she kept saying that to herself every time something bad happened to them and it never worked; he just got more depressed and bitter. He didn’t need any more shame.