Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  It wasn’t just any old phone line. This was a special line that Ogle had agreed to keep open. The only person who had this phone number was Buckminster Salvador. Cy Ogle’s boss. Rarely heard from, rarely seen, but always there.

  “Ogle,” Ogle said.

  “Hold everything!” said the voice of Mr. Salvador, which was barely recognizable; his throat was tense to the point of strangula­tion. “Don’t move! Don’t push any buttons or make any phone calls or let anyone do anything!”

  “I am alone. Alone and powerless,” Ogle said. “You have my undivided attention.”

  “Thank god I reached you in time,” Salvador said. “I knew there was something wrong with that whole Eleanor Richmond thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Salvador spent most of his time hanging out in ODR’s fake headquarters in the office tower above Pentagon Plaza, so that he could monitor all of the PIPER 100 data at the same time as Ogle did. And he did so constantly, as Ogle had learned; scarcely a single campaign event went by that Bucky Salvador didn’t phone him up right in the middle of it and provide his own commentary on how the PIPER 100 were reacting. He fancied himself something of an expert. And, dilettante that he was, he completely failed to grasp the mediagenic advantages of Eleanor Richmond.

  “Chase Merriam called me just a few minutes ago. He just got out of the hospital.”

  Ogle laughed. “Haw, haw, haw,” he said, “don’t tell me. He had an operation. He was on laughing gas or something during the debate.”

  “Worse than that. He was in a car crash. Wednesday night. Some hoodlum stole his watch. We have no idea who’s wearing that thing!”

  “A late-middle-aged black female homeless person with good education and traditionalist values,” Ogle said.

  Salvador was caught off guard. “Oh. You’ve found the watch, then?”

  “Nope,” Ogle said, “just an educated guess.”

  “Well,” Salvador said. “Well.”

  “Well what?”

  “This changes everything!” Salvador said, shocked by Ogle’s seeming indifference. “The statistics are completely fouled up!”

  “If all the PIPER 100 got together and traded watches, that would foul up the statistics,” Ogle said. “One person doesn’t foul them up too bad.”

  Deep in his heart, Ogle knew Salvador had a point. But he didn’t want to agree with him. He did not really get along with Salvador very well.

  “That’s ridiculous!” Salvador said. “You told me yourself last night that the single strongest thing in Richmond’s favor was the fact that Chase Merriam loved her. You said it was a key factor in making your decision.”

  “Hey,” Ogle said, “try to keep this in perspective. We’re talking about the goddamn vice presidency here. It just doesn’t matter.”

  “So you admit that Richmond is the wrong choice. Salvador said triumphantly.

  “From here on out, she’s the right choice. She’s a brilliant choice. A daring, incisive, masterstroke of leadership on Cozzano’s part,” Ogle said, “because she’s a choice we already made.”

  “Not true,” Salvador said, “the formal announcement doesn’t happen for another hour.”

  “The formal announcement doesn’t mean diddly,” Ogle said. “We already unleashed the cascade. Stories have already been filed. Hell,” Ogle said, grabbing a remote control and clicking channels on a nearby TV monitor, “I got Koppel on screen right now with a picture of Eleanor Richmond over his shoulder. And when Eleanor’s peering over Ted Koppel’s shoulder on national TV, and Koppel’s got that smirky know-it-all look on his face, it’s just too goddamn late.”

  “Good lord.” Salvador sighed, sounding quiet and defeated.

  “When I got into this thing, I never realized how complicated it was going to be.”

  “Cheer up,” Ogle said, turning his attention back toward the Eye of Cy. “Look at the screens. I am seeing a generally green color this evening. The electorate is mellow and satisfied. If Richmond turns out to be a wrong choice, we’ll just send her to kiss babies in Guam.”

  “I see a case of measles,” Salvador said. “I see a lot of red screens. Look at Economic Roadkill! Economic Roadkill is a key bloc. And tonight, Economic Roadkill is frightened.”

  Ogle looked at the screen labeled FLOYD WAYNE VISHNIAK. As Salvador had pointed out, it was bright red. “It’s nothing,” Ogle said. “He does that all the time. He’s in another bar fight.”

  Suddenly, Vishniak’s screen turned bright green. Ogle and Salvador both laughed. “Ha ha!” Salvador said, I’ll wager his opponent is out cold on a barroom floor in Davenport, Iowa!”

  46

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak strode into McCormick Place and heaved a tremendous sigh of relief. A cascade of sweat fell out of his hair and showered his face. He had made it through the metal detectors!

  The Fleischacker had performed as advertised. It was a ceramic-and-plastic gun, made in Austria, that didn’t trigger metal detectors. After cashing in his latest check from Ogle Data Research, picking up his paycheck from detasseling, and pawning all of his other weapons, he had finally raised the capital he needed to purchase the Fleischacker at a gun store in Davenport and to top his truck’s fuel tanks. That done, he had made the trip across northern Illinois in two hours flat, blasting across the nearly empty pavement of I-88 at an average velocity of eighty-five miles per hour. He had wanted to leave himself an adequate time cushion upon reaching Chicago, because he wasn’t sure how to locate McCormick Place. But that turned out to be a snap. He just took the interstate into town and, to his astonishment, began to see signs for the damn place. A whole series of big signs that took him straight where he wanted to go.

  This kind of thing did not happen to Floyd Wayne Vishniak very often, because usually he went places where no one else wanted to go: cornfields that needed detasseling, riverfront bars, and defunct factories. He had been forced to develop a certain amount of navigational cunning over the years. He had assumed that once he trespassed upon the borders of Chicago, he would, as usual, spend a considerable amount of time idling on the shoulder of various roads and in the parking lots of convenience stores, pouring over his Chicago map collection.

  But it wasn’t like that. All he had to do was pay the tolls and follow the signs. And as he was doing so, it dawned on him that this was natural and logical, because if he had the correct understanding of it, a convention was a thing where a whole lot of people came together at once for a purpose. Which meant that a whole lot of people were having to find their ways to McCormick Place all the time, every day.

  Like most of the other new ideas that entered Floyd Wayne Vishniak’s head, this one came in the form of a pang of bitter resentment. It hit him straight between the eyes and made him grind his teeth and mumble indistinct profanities.

  The whole world was set up for the benefit of the rich folks. That interstate, four beautiful lanes of pavement cutting straight across the state of Illinois, had been put there just to ferry the wealthy and privileged into Chicago so that they could go to conventions and meet with others of their kind and plot new conspiracies to keep the common man in his place: on the bottom. Far be it from these people to find their own way to McCormick Place. Oh no, these people were too busy and dignified and important to actually buy maps and find their own way. No, they had to have special signs.

  It was easy enough to reach the convention center, but difficult to park in its vicinity; the lots were jammed. Not making it any easier was Vishniak’s own extreme nervousness. He was afraid to slow down, so he just orbited the target zone like an Indian circling a wagon train. He shot right past a few perfectly good spots. McCormick Place was the southern end of a whole chain of big civic projects, including Soldier Field, some museums, and Grant Park, and parking lots were strung for several miles up the shore of the lake. Vishniak ended up parking way the hell and gone up in the vicinity of Grant Park and then walking for half an hour, which was fine because it helped him burn off adr
enaline.

  Grant Park, he realized, must be named after General Grant. As in Grant and Sherman. Vishniak had learned all about those two guys on TV. One was drunk and one was crazy, he could never remember which, but the thing was that both of them kicked ass for their country. When the war started Grant was living in Galena, which was just a few miles up the river from where Vishniak lived. And he was working in a livery stable, which was equivalent to working in a car wash nowadays, or detasseling.

  He walked south past Soldier Field, where William A. Cozzano had attained glory in an earlier life, and then took a pedestrian overpass across Lakeshore Drive into the extreme northern end of the McCormick Place parking lots. The first thing he encountered was a line of portable toilets. On the theory that you should never pass up a chance to make water or take water, he went into one of these, wiped the seat with a wad of toilet paper, and sat down. All he really had to do was take a leak - the series of thirty-two-ounce coffees he had picked up at various Chicagoland 7-Elevens was having an effect - but as long as he was here he flicked his Bic and had one last good look at the Fleischacker. He popped the magazine loose from the grips, checked it, shoved it in.

  Someone pounded on the fiberglass door of the portable toilet. “Is anyone in there?”

  “Fuck you,” said Floyd Wayne Vishniak reflexively. His heart was pounding; he was afraid it was a cop. But it wasn’t. Just another Cozzano supporter. Vishniak reholstered his gun under his windbreaker and started getting himself together, wondering whether this rude person had any friends, whether he was big, whether he would be worth picking a fight with. But when he came out he saw it was just a little man in a suit, accompanied by a little kid who was holding his crotch and jumping up and down.

  Fuck it anyway, Vishniak realized. He had abandoned his trailer and hit the road with a pocket of cash, a pickup truck, and a plastic gun. He had to get used to the idea that he was a different kind of man now, a man who had risen above the common crowd, who could not trouble himself with meaningless hassles over toilet access.

  McCormick Place was a huge rectangular black thing with a much larger black slab of a roof that overhung the building quite a bit on all sides. As Vishniak walked toward it through the parking lot, Lakeshore Drive was on his right and a little backwater of Lake

  Michigan on his left; beyond that was a peninsula with a private airport on it, small planes taking off and landing and taxiing. The yachts of the rich and powerful were tied up in the water only yards away from the private jets of the even more rich and powerful, and Vishniak could plainly see that if you were the right kind of person, you didn’t have to waste your time with parking lots, or even cars.

  All the way from Grant Park southward, the pedestrian traffic had been getting heavier. At the southern end of the parking lot, all the people were funneled down a wide staircase and into McCormick Place’s subterranean entrance. The floor was backed up a little bit, the crowd milled rather than streamed down the stairs. Working his way slowly down the steps, Vishniak was able to get a clear view of the metal detectors bracketing the doors.

  He immediately got scared shitless. His heart was going so fast it was more of a vibration, like an idling truck engine, than a beat, and he was sweating like a pig. But it was a warm humid night and he was wearing a windbreaker, so he had every excuse to sweat.

  Looking up, he could see into the underside of McCormick Place’s huge flat overhanging roof, which was supported and stiffened by a latticework of black girders. Laced through the structural members was a barely perceptible network of thin red lines - a system of pipes carrying water to the automatic sprinkler system. As Vishniak worked his way down the steps, swept along by the eager Cozzano supporters, he wondered whether anyone else ever bothered to look up in the air and take notice of these things, these hidden connections and networks that were laced imperceptibly through the structure of everything.

  Then he was there, confronted with the metal detector, people pushing him from behind, and all he could do was give himself up to the force of the crowd, the pressure of history, and walk on through.

  Nothing happened. As he kept on walking with the crowd now filling the main floor of William A. Cozzano’s National Town Meeting, becoming invisible and anonymous, he was overcome with relief, which showed up as a vivid green on the monitors in the Eye of Cy and ODR headquarters in Pentagon City.

  The National Town Meeting was a political convention in all but name, and it followed some of the same protocols. One of these was the hierarchy of introductions. It wouldn’t do just to have the nominee stroll out on stage and start talking. He had to be intro­duced by someone. Preferably by someone very, very important. And anyone who was important enough to make that introduction was, likewise, too important to step out in front of an ice-cold audience and just start talking. He would have to be introduced by someone else. That person had to be important enough that his role as introducer did not seem to belittle the stature of the introduced…

  Suffice it to say that the first person who stepped out in front of the microphones that evening was as completely anonymous as any person could be. His job was to get the attention of the crowd. To sever all of the conversations that had sprung up among the people standing shoulder to shoulder on the convention floor. Then he introduced an alderman, who introduced a former mayor of Chicago, who introduced a former Governor of New York, who introduced a movie star, who introduced a former Secretary of State, who introduced Governor William A. Cozzano. At each stage of the hierarchy, the dull roar of bored conversation diminished and the excitement of the crowd built.

  Twenty thousand people were in the hall. The original roster of the National Town Meeting had been ten thousand but these people were just statistical abstracts who had been snatched off the streets and transported into town to spout their opinions and represent their demographic groups. Many of them supported Cozzano, many didn’t, and the ones that did, did so in the same moderate, reasonable way that most average people supported political candidates. Which was to say that, while they might vote for Cozzano, they would not be willing to paint his name across their foreheads and jump up and down screaming at every mention of his name.

  Consequently, Cy Ogle had brought in an additional ten thousand people who would do exactly that. They tended to stand closer to the dais, crowding the National Town Meeting partici­pants into the back of the hall. The fact that these riotous supporters were not the same as the ten thousand average Americans who had been appearing on TV all week was not, of course, explained to the nationwide television audience, which was watching on no fewer than eight networks.

  This was a good thing for Floyd Wayne Vishniak, because, until tonight, you couldn’t have gotten into the convention center with­out a special National Town Meeting photo ID. Vishniak didn’t have one. But neither did any of the other ten thousand fanatical Cozzano supporters who had packed the hall tonight.

  Tables had been set up at the back of the hall and piled high with Cozzano paraphernalia: signs, bumper stickers, skimmers, buttons. Vishniak scored an armful of stuff and festooned himself like the hard-core Cozzano supporter that he, in fact, was. He even filled out a little COZZANO FOR PRESIDENT stick-on name tag: HELLO, MY NAME IS Sherman Grant. He was amid relatively glum, drab National Town Meeting participants who had now been relegated to the outer darkness. As the hierarchy of introductions rose toward its peak, he shouldered his way through them, working toward center stage.

  Like a lot of other secretaries of state, the one who introduced Cozzano had not been allowed to die a natural political death. He had resigned or been forced out, or something like that, in the middle of a term. Everyone concerned had agreed that it was over a question of principle on which reasonable people could honestly disagree, which gave this man the image of a person who was willing to stake his job on a matter of principle. As such, he was exactly the right guy to introduce Cozzano.

  He delivered a lengthy and somewhat less than thrilling address a
bout his career in big-time Washington politics and how disgusted he had been by the decadence and corruption of it all. He talked about the need for change. Finally, his voice began to rise in pitch, he started to pump the crowd back up out of the comatose state into which he himself had placed them, to pull them back in from the lines at the rest rooms, and by the time he bent forward to shout the name of William A. Cozzano into his microphone, he was completely inaudible, even to himself: thousands of people were screaming the name.

  Cozzano appeared on the stage, holding hands with Eleanor Richmond. Behind them were four younger people: Mary Catherine and James Cozzano, and Clarice and Harmon Richmond, Jr., all holding hands.

  The screaming, and the sound of the air horns, seemed loud enough to split the molecules in the hot sweaty air from the convention hall. The candidates and their families stood in a pool of blue carbon-arc light that set them apart from everything else, which now looked dim and yellowish by comparison, like a TV screen blaring in the middle of an antique living room.

  It was just like when the Quad Cities Whiplash scored a winning goal with one second remaining in a playoff game, thought Floyd Wayne Vishniak, standing just below the dais, a stone’s throw from William A. Cozzano.

  He had a clear shot from here. But shooting him was not really part of the plan. The idea was not to hurt Cozzano, but to protect him.

  Cozzano was a great man. A hero. The only honest politician in the United States. But even a great man could be led astray by the forces of evil, and Vishniak had been forced to the conclusion that it was happening to Cozzano right now.

  Why couldn’t anyone else figure it out? It was so obvious. They were all stupid. The world was full of morons. In all of the United States, only a tiny number were capable of seeing the truth.

  They knew, of course. The people who were manipulating Cozzano had access to all kinds of secret FBI and CIA files. They could use their computers and satellites to pry into people’s school records, police records, and bank accounts. They had figured out that Floyd Wayne Vishniak, and a few other people around the country, would see through the charade and would represent a threat to their conspiracy.