Interface

2

The State of the Union was never a big event in Cacher, Oklahoma. Forty-eight-year-old Otis Simpson yawned and looked at the wall clock, just for the record. It was 02:46:12 Greenwich Mean Time. He turned the sound off. The speech had devolved into endless waves of applause. Commentators were beginning to break into the sound track in hushed, solemn tones, stating the obvious: "the President shaking hands with congressional leaders as he makes his way out of the room." Soon the analysts would come on and tell Otis what he had just watched, and Otis definitely didn't need that. The only opinions that mattered would be coming in via fax and modem during the next few hours. His job was to stay awake in the meantime. So he triggered the other monitor and began to keep one eye on an HBO flick, already in progress.

Otis had inherited his mother's tendency toward bulk, his father Otho's awkward looks, and a light regard for basic hygiene. The many folds in his ample frame contained an inexhaustible supply of sweat-blackened lint balls, and his thinning hair failed to conceal the skin ailments that plagued his scalp. He had never married. His mother had died giving birth to him. He served as a trusted assistant on his father's work, the full extent of which he never fully understood.

Otho Simpson, eighty-six, had, as was his pattern, gone to bed at 00:00:00 Greenwich Mean Time. This time was as good a bedtime as any other and was easy to remember. Otho and Otis lived belowground, in a former lead mine, and did not pay much attention to the diurnal cycle upstairs. Their job was to gather and respond to information from all over the world, from all twenty-

four time zones, and so there was not much point in trying to hew to a particular schedule. Otho was spare and gaunt, hampered by persistent urinary tract infections that filled whatever room he was in with a disconcerting odor and caused continual pain. Unlike his son, Otho had a mind that, had he chosen, could have earned him a Nobel Prize in economics or physics or at least made him a very rich man in a more conventional sense. Instead, he had become an accountant of sorts, and spent his life looking after a body of investments with a total cash value in the neighborhood of thirty trillion U.S. dollars.

These assets did not belong to any one specific person or entity, as far as Otho could tell. They belonged to a coordinated inter-national network of investors. Otho didn't know who these people were. He wasn't supposed to know and he probably wasn't supposed to think about it. But he did think about it from time to time, and he had drawn some conclusions based on circumstantial evidence. Most of them were individuals, many were families; some were corporations. Their net worths varied from a few million dollars up to tens of billions. Judging from the hours when they liked to do business, most of them must be living in American and European time zones, with a few in the time zones that were used by Japan, Hong Kong, and Australia. He only knew one member of this organization by name, one Lady Guenevere Wilburdon; she was his contact and his boss.

In the last half century, especially after the death off his wife in 1948, Otho had rarely left Cacher. Several times a week he would hobble on to the lift, ride it several hundred feet straight up to the surface and go for a stroll through the ruins of the town, taking in what passed for fresh air in Cacher and feeling the sun on his skin. But he felt most comfortable down below, in the subterranean capsule that was his home, surrounded by twenty feet of solid reinforced concrete, breathing filtered air and drinking distilled water.

The capsule had been built during the early fifties by a huge international contractor called Maclntyre Engineering. It was built to exactly the same set of specifications used for the control capsules of Minuteman silos - easy enough, since Maclntyre had con­structed most of those. Any information that could conceivably influence the performance of the economy - public and proprietary, open and secret, from hard data to vicious gossip - was funneled into the capsule over a variety of communications links. Otho read every word of it and used it to manage the investments of the Network. His life was rather solitary and he had not seen a movie in a theater since The Sound of Music, but he did not care; the honor of being the anonymous manager of a significant fraction of the assets of what used to be called the Free World sufficed to give him a value-laden life.

Several hours after the conclusion of the State of the Union address, at 06:00:00 GMT, a digitized chord sounded from one of the workstations, waking Otis up. A window materialized on the screen and filled with columns of numbers. This was normal; it happened every day at this time.

A chorus of faint humming noises was emanating from a stainless steel rack carrying several dozen identical fax machines. Otis was surprised to note that nearly all of the machines suddenly had long strips of paper dangling out of them, and several were still active. Most of his father's clients took a hands-off approach and rarely, if ever, bothered him with specifics.

Otis went to the workstation and scanned the numbers: a statistical summary of how the Network's investments had per­formed during the last twenty-four hours, and initial responses to the State of the Union Address from the stock exchanges in Delhi, Novosibirsk, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo. All of the capital markets were sharply down. Commodities, especially gold, were soaring uncontrollably.

The digital clock on the wall clicked to 06:10. Otis went in to wake up Otho. Otho and Otis slept in steel-framed bunk beds in a small room just off the communications center.

"Daddy, the figures for yesterday are in."

Otho sat up in bed without hesitation, as if he'd never been asleep. Another workstation was next to him on a bedside table. He reached out with one withered hand, grabbed a mouse, and chose

a few commands from the menus on the screen. A copy of the financial tables materialized. He put on a pair of extremely thick glasses that made his eyes look the size of baseballs.

The numbers for the first part of the day weren't bad. But the State of the Union address had changed all that.

"We got a lot of faxes too," Otis said, handing his father a thick sheaf of slick, curly paper, covered with notes from all over the world, many handwritten.

"Jesus Christ," Otho said, "what did that son of a bitch say?"

"Daddy, I turned the sound off on him and watched an HBO movie."

"Probably not a bad idea. Pull up the CNN monitor tape and rerun the speech for me - no, hold it, I can't stand the thought of watching him. Download a transcript off the news wire."

"Okay, Daddy."

Ten minutes later, Otis brought back the transcript. Otho scanned through it, looking for a few key words, and went almost instantly to the concept of forgiveness. Deep vertical crevices appeared in the middle of his brow and he let out a feeble stream of air through pursed lips.

By this time Otis knew he was in for a long night, so he turned on the bedside TV set and punched up CNBC.

"That bastard has just got every bull and bear in the world going insane." Otho set the faxes down on his bedside table and slipped his feet into a pair of slippers by the bed. "But he's half right. This country has problems. Someone needs to do something or all of its investors will get screwed."

"Investors?"

"Yup. America used to have citizens. Then its government put it up for sale. Now it's got investors. You and I work for the investors."

Otis regarded his father with the mixture of respect, fear, and awe that he had shown since he was a child. "What's going on, Dad?"

"It was just a matter of time before some politician actually became stupid enough to mention forgiving the national debt."

"Like Senator Wright?"

"Yeah. Who died in a plane crash. But obviously the President thought it sounded like a catchy idea."

"How are you going to handle this, Daddy?"

"Crank up the word-processing software. I'm going to do the first round-robin report since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is too big for me to just fly off the handle - I have to provide the Network some options."

Otho's joints creaked and ground audibly in the nearly perfect silence of the capsule as he made his way out of bed, over to a stainless steel toilet, and from there into the control center. He sat down in front of a large high-resolution monitor and began jotting down a few options, as they came into his head. Later, he could rework them into deathless prose:

a. Pull investment out of the U.S. national debt - absorbing the

loss immediately - and explore new areas, such as purchasing the

larger part of the former Soviet Union;

b. Do nothing and hope that the American political structure

will muddle through;

c. Intervene directly in American politics in order to return it to

a certain sort of stability and to insure our long-term investment in

the debt;

d. Suggestions?

He then directed his system to send out the message in encrypted burst-mode fax transmissions. Beyond vague geographical indi­cations, he did not know to whom the faxes would go. When he had taken control of the Network's finances fifty years ago, it had been stipulated that all communication would be to code-identified participants.

The returns came in remarkably quickly. In the aftermath of the President's speech, everyone important was awake right now, regardless of time zone.

With the exception of a few Middle Easterners who wanted the Network to invest massively in the Muslim-dominated republics of the former Soviet Union, most of the Network liked the third option. The clincher was a fax from Lady Wilburdon, the acting

chairperson, who noted, "You have done well for us, and we place our trust in you. Put your country back in working order."

He spent a few minutes doodling with an old, well-worn slide rule. Back in the early seventies he had purchased a couple of the first pocket calculators and, as a mathematician, been horrified by their illusive precision. The slide rule was a far more trustworthy and illuminating guide to the numerical world.

The United States had borrowed ten trillion dollars since the onset of Reaganomics. A significant fraction of that debt was now owned by the Network. Those loans were supposed to bring in a certain fixed amount of interest every year. The cap proposed by the President would reduce that income by an amount on the order of a few tens of billions of dollars per year - possibly even more, if the country went into a deeper crisis and made further cuts.

In the long run, then, the Network stood to loose hundred of billions of dollars from the measures that the President had just proposed. Otho was therefore justified in spending real money here - easily in the tens of billions. This was more than enough to throw an election. Perot had nearly done it for just a few hundred million.

Otho knew perfectly well that his Network was not the only organization of its type in the world, and that he was not the only person running through this sort of a calculation tonight. It wasn't enough just to mess around with an election; everyone would be getting into that game during the next few months. The important thing was to do it well, and not just on an ad hoc basis but as part of a coherent long-range strategy.

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."