Interface

35

"Floyd Wayne Vishniak," said the digitized voice from the computer, and an array of fresh windows popped into life on Aaron Green's high-resolution video screen. One of the windows was a photograph, a head shot of a white man with lank blond hair, not short enough to be short and not long enough to be long, sticking out from beneath a blue baseball cap that were turned down at the corners, giving him a sad and bedraggled appearance, and his skin was flushed and glossy under the blaze of an electronic flash. This was not a posed shot. It had been taken from a low angle as Floyd Wayne Vishniak rode down an escalator at a shopping mall some­where. He was staring down into the camera with a blank and baffled expression that had not yet developed into surprise. He was wearing a tightly stretched, inside-out, navy blue T-shirt with a couple of holes in it and he had the ropy muscles of a man who got them by doing physical labor and not by working out at any health club.

This image was not the only window on the computer screen. There was a small one next to it, this one showing a brief video clip that kept looping back and replaying. It showed Floyd Wayne Vishniak sitting in the cheap seats at a sports arena somewhere, leaping to his feet along with all of the other people in his vicinity to shout abuse at some miscreant down below. In this clip, Vishniak was wearing a tremendously oversized, bright yellow foam rubber hand over his real hand. The long finger of the hand was extended. Just in case this message was not clear, it had been printed with the words FUCK THE REF. And in case the ref did not happen to be looking in his direction, Vishniak could clearly be seen mouthing the same words - chanting them over and over - in unison with all of the other sports fans in his section. In Vishniak's other hand he was holding a plastic beer cup the size of the Louvre. While he was waving his giant yellow digit in the air, beer sloshed over the rim and splashed down on the shoulders of the fan in front of him, who reacted, but either did not care or was afraid to make a big deal out of it. Floyd Wayne Vishniak was not a person that most people would consider picking a fight with. He was not especially big, but he was tightly wound in the extreme.

Other people were waving giant foam rubber hockey sticks and other hockey-related paraphernalia. Though the action below - the source of the controversy - was not shown on this video clip, it was evidently a hockey game, and at least one of the teams was apparently named the Quad Cities Whiplash.

Another window, below the video loop, showed a map of the fifty states with a blinking red X superimposed on the Mississippi River, between western Illinois and eastern Iowa. Under the blinking X was the label DAVENPORT, IOWA (QUAD CITIES).

There were two other windows on the screen, both of them carrying textual information. One of them was a brief c.v. of Floyd Wayne Vishniak. He had grown up in the Quad Cities, straddling the Illinois-Iowa border, dropped out of high school to get a job in a tractor factory, and been laid off and rehired six times in the intervening fifteen years. During the past year he had barely managed to earn his weight in dollars.

The remaining window was a tall narrow one that ran down the side of the computer screen. It was a list containing exactly one hundred items. Each item consisted of a phrase describing a subset of the American population, followed by a person's name.

As this presentation - this computerized dossier - proceeded from one name to the next, the corresponding item on the list was highlighted, a bright purple box drawn over it so that the user could see which category he was dealing with at the moment. The hundred categories and names on the list were as follows:

IRRELEVANT MOUTH BREATHER

400-POUND TAB DRINKER

STONE-FACED URBAN HOMEBOY

BURGER-FLIPPING HISTORY MAJOR

SQUIRRELLY WINNEBAGO JOCKEY

BIBLE-SLINGING PORCH MONKEY

ECONOMIC ROADKILL

PENT-UP CORPORATE LICKSPITTLE

HIGH-METABOLISM WORLD DOMINATOR

MIDAMERICAN KNICKKNACK QUEEN

SNUFF-HAWKING BASEMENT DWELLER

POSTADOLESCENT ROAD WARRIOR

DEPRESSION-HAUNTED CAN STACKER

PRETENTIOUS URBAN-LIFESTYLE SLAVE

FORMERLY RESPECTABLE BANKRUPTCY SURVIVOR

FROSTY-HAIRED COUPON SNIPPER

CYNICAL MEDIA MANIPULATOR

RETICENT GUN NUT

UFOS ATE MY BRAIN

MALL-HOPPING CORPORATE CONCUBINE

HIGH-FIBER DUCK SQUEEZER

POST-CONFEDERATE GRAVY EATER

MANIC THIRD-WORLD ENTREPRENEUR

OVEREXTENDED YOUNG PROFESSIONAL

APARTMENT-DWELLING MALL STAFF

TRADE SCHOOL METAL HEAD

ORANGE COUNTY BOOK BURNER

FIRST-GENERATION BELTWAY BLACK

80'S JUNK-BOND PAR VENUE

DEBT-HOUNDED WAGE SLAVE

ACTIVIST TUBE FEEDER

TOILET-SCRUBBING EX-STEEL WORKER

NEO-OKIE

SHIT-KICKING WRESTLEMANIAC

SUNBELT CONDO COMMANDO

RUST-BELT LUMPENPAOL

and others...

Aaron hit the space bar on the Calyx workstation's keyboard. All of the windows disappeared except for the long skinny one with the list of categories. The next item on the list was highlighted and spoken aloud by the digitized computer voice: RETICENT GUN NUT - JIM HANSON, N. PLATTE, NEBRASKA.

Another set of windows appeared, just like the last set but carrying different images and information. The photo was in black and white this time, reproduced from a newspaper, showing Jim Hanson, a lean-faced man of about fifty, wearing an adult Boy Scout uniform and standing out in the woods somewhere. As before, there was a short loop of videotape. It showed him standing by a picnic table in a backyard somewhere, tending a barbecue and acting as eminence grise to a crowd of small children, presumably his grandkids. The map window was the same except that now the red X had moved to the middle of one of those states in the middle of the country; apparently this was Nebraska.

Jim Hanson didn't look very interesting. Aaron hit the space bar again, moving on to the next item on the list: HIGH-METABOLISM WORLD DOMINATOR CHASE

MERRIAM, BRIARCLIFF MANOR, N.Y. This time, the photo was a glossy color studio shot. The video clip showed Chase Merriam teeing off at a very nice golf course somewhere along with three other high-metabolism world dominators.

Aaron started whacking the space bar, paging through the list, flashing up the hundred photos one at a time. When it worked its way down to the bottom, it cycled back up to the top again, so he could keep it up forever if he wanted to. The red X on the map hopped back and forth across the country, tracing out a perfectly balanced demographic profile of the United States.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak was sitting in his trailer, watching Wheel, when he heard the sound of tires on gravel. He went to the front door, glancing over to make sure that his sawed-off shotgun was sitting in its secret place; it was there all right, craftily concealed in the narrow gap behind three stacked cases of beer, right next to the door. Having thus established his parameters, he looked out the window to see who had come all the way out here to pay him a visit. If it was another bill collector, he was not going to get a very friendly reception.

From initial appearances, it could very well be a bill collector. It was a little skinny dark-haired man with glasses and he got out of the car wearing a button-up shirt and a tie. First thing he did was open the back door of his gray Ford LTD Crown Victoria and unhook his suit jacket from the little hook that was above the back door.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak had been driving around in cars since he was tiny, of course, and he had seen those little hook thingies above the doors and someone had told him a long time ago that they were to hang coats off of. But this very moment was the first time in his entire life that he had actually seen one used.

A seed of resentment was germinated in his mind. Garment hooks in the back seats of cars. Always there, never used. A mysterious vestige of other times and places, like spittoons. Nobody used them; that's how it was. Nobody wore suits to begin with, unless they were going to a wedding or a funeral. When they did wear suits, if they absolutely had to take off the jacket for some reason, they would toss it out flat on the backseat. To hang it up that way - what was this little geek trying to say, exactly? That the lint or whatever on the backseat of his fancy luxury car (which was spotless) could not be allowed to touch the fabric of his fancy suit jacket?

It was a nice car all right, brand new and probably costing in excess of fifteen thousand bucks. Its beautiful gray finish had been streaked, below the beltline, with dark brown mud thrown up by the wheels as it had come up the gravel road from the highway. Floyd had been kicked out of his apartment in Davenport so that the landlord could rent it out to a big family of African-Americans come from Chicago to steal away a few more of Davenport's non­existent jobs. Fortunately he knew someone who had this farm just outside of town, and was willing to let him live here in this trailer.

The man put his suit jacket on. The satin lining flashed in the horizontal sunlight of the early evening. He shrugged his shoulders

a couple of times so that the jacket would fall into place and look pretty on him. The jacket had padding in the shoulders that made the man look bigger than he really was. He reached into the backseat and pulled out a briefcase.

As soon as he saw that briefcase, Floyd opened the door of his trailer and stood there leaning against the doorframe and smoking his cigarette and looking down the full height of the jury-rigged, mud-tracked staircase at this little man.

"Hello, Mr. Vishniak," the man said, looking up at him.

"That's funny, I ain't introduced myself yet. How'd you know my name? I don't know you. I don't know anyone like you. All my friends drive pickup trucks with a lot of rust on 'em. Who the hell are you?"

The visitor seemed taken aback. "My name's Aaron Green," he said. He looked like he really didn't want to be here. That actually made Floyd more sympathetic to the man because Floyd didn't want him to be there either. So that was a start anyway.

"What do you want?" Floyd said.

"I want to give you ten thousand dollars."

"You got it with you?"

"No, but I have a down payment of one thousand."

Floyd stood there in the doorway for a while and smoked his cigarette and pondered this unusual situation. A man, very likely a Jew from Chicago, had just driven up to his trailer and offered him ten thousand dollars.

"This a Publishers Clearinghouse thing? You a friend of Ed McMahon or something?"

"No, it's not a sweepstakes. I represent ODR, which is a poll-taking organization based in Virginia. We've identified you as being a typical representative of a particular part of the United States population."

Floyd snorted derisively. He could just imagine.

"We would like to keep track of your reactions to the current presidential campaign. What you think of the different candidates and issues."

"So you want me to go to Virginia?"

"No. Not at all. We want you to change your lifestyle as little as possible. That's crucial to the system."

"So you're going to call me up every couple days and ask me questions."

"It's even easier than that," Green said. "Can I step inside and show you?"

Floyd snorted again. "My little abode ain't much to look at."

"That's okay. I'll only take ten or fifteen minutes of your time."

"Come on in then."

Aaron Green and Floyd sat down in front of the TV. Floyd turned the volume down a little bit and offered his visitor a beer, which he declined. "I have to drive to Nebraska tonight," he said, "and if I have a beer now I'll be pulling over to urinate all night long."

"Nebraska? What, you taking one guy from each state?"

"Something like that," Aaron Green said. Obviously he did not believe that Floyd Wayne Vishniak, a dumb uneducated factory worker, would ever be smart enough to understand the details.

"You ever read Dick Tracy comics?" Aaron Green asked.

"They don't have it in the paper here," Floyd said. "You ever read Prince Valiant?"

Again, Aaron Green stumbled. He was having a hard time building up his momentum. "Well, you might have heard of the wristwatch television set."

"Yeah, I heard of that."

"Well, here's your chance to have a look at one." Aaron Green pulled something out of his briefcase.

It looked like a super high-tech watch or something. Like some kind of secret military thing that a commando in a movie would wear.

The band of the watch was not just a strip of leather or anything like that. It was made of hard black plastic ventilated with lots of holes. It was huge, about three inches wide. It consisted of several plates of this hard black plastic stuff hinged together so that it would curve around the wrist.

Instead of having just one clockface on the top surface, it had a whole little screen type of thing, just like on a digital watch except that it wasn't showing anything right now, just gray and blank. And in addition to that there were a few other raised black containers molded to the outer surface of the watchband, but they didn't have any screens or buttons or anything like that, they were just blank, and must have contained batteries or something.

"Shit," Floyd said, "what the hell is it?"

"Most of the time it's a digital watch. Part of the time, it's a television set, complete with a little speaker for sound."

"Can I get Whiplash games on it?"

"I'm afraid not. The TV will only show one type of program and one type only, and that is political programming having to do with the election."

"Shit, I knew there was a catch."

"That's why we're offering you the money. Because this is not all fun and games. Some responsibility falls on your shoulders as part of this deal."

Floyd Wayne Vishniak thought that if Aaron Green were not trying to pay him ten thousand dollars, he might throw him down the stairs and jump on him out in the yard and mess him up a little bit. He did not appreciate the fact that this little man, who was about the same age as him, and maybe a bit younger, was lecturing him about responsibility. It was the kind of thing his dad used to say to him.

But for now he was going to be cool. He put his feet up on the table next to the briefcase, sat back, raised his eyebrows, peered at Aaron Green through the smoke of his cigarette. "Well, for ten thousand bucks I guess I could be responsible."

"Think of it as a part-time job. It'll take maybe ten minutes of your time every day. It doesn't prevent you from having other jobs. And it pays very, very well."

"What do I got to do in this job?"

"Watch TV."

Floyd laughed. "Watch TV? On this little wristwatch thing?"

"Exactly. Now, most of the time, it'll just act like a digital watch." Green pressed a button on the face of the wristwatch and the screen began to show black numerals on a gray background, giving the current time and date. "This is just a convenience for you," he explained. "But from time to time, something like this will happen."

The watch emitted a piercing beep. The numerals on the tiny screen disappeared and were replaced by a color-bar test pattern.

"Whoa, it's in color!" Floyd said.

"Yeah. Of course, you can't see any color when it's pretending to be a wristwatch. But in TV mode, it's just like a small color television set."

After a couple of seconds, the test pattern was replaced by a videotape of John F. Kennedy giving his "Ask not what your country can do for you" speech.

"This is just a little canned demonstration. Once the program gets underway, it'll show you coverage of campaign events. Debates, new conferences, and so on."

"Why don't I just watch 'em on my own TV set?"

"Because we're going to pipe our own coverage directly to you, through this watch. We might want you to see some events that the networks wouldn't cover, so we have to generate the programming ourselves. Besides, we think we'll get better compliance this way."

"Compliance?"

"Suppose you're out of the house. Like maybe going to a Whiplash game. You wouldn't be able to watch normal TV. But with this PIPER watch, you can watch it wherever you are."

"PIPER?"

"That's the name of this program."

"How much of this stuff do I have to watch?"

"Many days there won't be anything at all. We might show you fifteen minutes or half an hour of programming a few times a week. Sometimes it'll be a little more intense. The only time when we'll really give you a lot of stuff to watch will be during the conventions in July and August."

"What else do I gotta do? You call me up and ask me questions about this stuff, or what?"

"That's it. Just watch the TV programs."

"That's it?"

"Yes."

"Then how do you know what my opinion is? I thought the whole idea was to get my opinion."

"It is. But we can do that electronically."

"How?"

"Through the PIPER watch." Green reached into his briefcase and pulled out a videotape. "I see you have a VCR in here. You should watch this tape. It'll explain how everything works."

"I don't get it."

"The PIPER watch does more than just show you campaign events. It also monitors your reactions. You ever go to a mall or an amusement park and see one of those machines where you drop in a quarter and it gives you your biorhythms, or your emotional state, or something like that?"

"There's one down at Duke's Tavern that gives you your sex rating."

"Oh." Green seemed embarrassed. "How does that work?"

"You grab this big rod sticking out of the top and it measures your sex quotient and flashes it up on the screen. I always get a real high score."

"Okay, it's probably a galvanic skin response device."

"Say what?"

"This PIPER watch has the same kind of thing built into it as your sex quotient machine. So it could provide a twenty-four hour a day readout of your sex quotient, if that was what we wanted."

"Why would you want my sex quotient?"

"We probably wouldn't to tell you the truth - no offense!" Green laughed nervously. "But by using the same type of detectors, we can get a sense of how you are reacting to the programming shown on the TV screen. That information is piped directly back to us over the radio."

"So, it gives you my emotions. Tells you what my body's thinking."

Green smiled. "That's a good way to describe it. What your body is thinking. I like that."

"What about my opinions, though?"

Green shook his head and frowned. "I'm not sure quite what you mean."

"Well, this tells you how my emotions respond, right?"

"Yes."

"But that's not the same as an opinion, is it?"

Green seemed to be baffled, lost. "It's not? I'm not sure what you're getting at."

"Well, maybe I watch some guy giving a speech. Maybe he's real good at giving speeches and so my emotions are good. Then, I'm lying awake in bed in the middle of the night, thinking about what he said, and suddenly it doesn't seem so logical any more, and I can see all kind of holes in his argument and I change my mind and decide he's just another pencil-neck, media-slick son of a bitch out to take my money and send the jobs to Borneo. So my final opinion of the guy is that he's a bastard. But all you know is that I had a good emotional response to his speech."

Floyd knew that he had Green now. Clearly Green, the big-city, high-paid intellectual, had never thought about this. He had never anticipated that someone might make this objection. He did not know what to say. "We don't have the technology to read that sort of thing," he finally said, speaking very slowly and carefully. "We don't have any way to read your mind in the middle of the night and find out that you think Senator So-an-so is going to send your job to Borneo."

"Humph," Floyd said, shaking his head.

"But PIPER is just one way we have of getting information," Green said, picking up momentum now. Floyd had the distinct impression that he was just trying to talk his way out of the tight corner that Floyd had backed him into. "Needless to say, we are receptive to any kind of input that you might want to give us. So if you have these thoughts in the middle of the night-"

"I do," Floyd affirmed, "all the time. They come to me like a thief in the night."

"-in that case, you would be more than welcome to provide those to us."

"My phone service got cut off," Floyd said. "But I could write you letters.

"That would be absolutely fine," Green said. "Our address is printed right there on the videotape. You go ahead and send us as many letters as you like. We'd like to hear your opinions on any subject."

"So I gotta wear this thing twenty-four hours a day?"

Green shrugged. "Just when you're awake."

"And what else do I gotta do to get this ten thousand bucks?"

"Absolutely nothing."

"Absolutely nothing?"

"Just get up in the morning and put it on, every day from now until Election Day. If you agree to this, I give you a thousand dollars right here and now. We'll be able to tell, by monitoring the signals from the watch, whether you're wearing it or not. As long as you keep it on during all of the programming segments that we broadcast, we will continue to send you a thousand dollars a month. On Election Day, we send you the remainder of the ten thousand."

Floyd grabbed the PIPER watch. The two halves of the watchband were spread wide apart. He put it on his wrist, wrapped his other hand around it, and the watchband tightened down firmly but comfortably.

"To take it off, just push that little button right there and the ratchet will be released," Green said.

"We got a deal," Floyd said. "Where's my thousand?"