Interface

36

"Ths is it, baby," Cyrus Rutherford Ogle said, sitting in the big chair and twiddling the joysticks. "This is the moon shot. T minus half an hour and counting." That is what Aaron Green saw as he was climbing into the back of the big GODS truck out in back of the Decatur Civic Center in Decatur, Illinois. It was 7.30 p.m. on Flag Day.

"My god," Aaron said. That was all he could force past his lips for the first several minutes.

It looked just like a plain flatbed semitrailer truck with a shipping container on the back. The shipping container, a steel box about the size of a mobile home, was brand new and slickly painted with the three-colored logo of Global Omni-present Delivery Services. These days, as the U.S. Postal Service continued to go the way of Greyhound, the logo had become as ubiquitous as a mailbox. Most people wouldn't notice this thing unless it was parked in their driveway. Out behind the Decatur Civic Center, sandwiched in between a food delivery truck and a video truck from Television North America, it was invisible. The only indications that it carried something other than mail were a soft humming noise and a glassy twist of heat waves coming from a small opening on its top. It carried its own power plant.

Aaron entered through a door in the rear, passing directly into a narrow aisle, some ten feet in length, between racks of electronics and heavier equipment that stretched from floor to ceiling. Nuclear submarines must be like this, Aaron thought, as he peered into the racks, picking out the familiar shapes and logos of various top-of-the-line Pacific Netware computer systems.

The aisle finally opened up into sort of an office and com­munications center. Countertops ran along both walls for several yards and a couple of desks sat in the middle. These surfaces were strewn with telephones, scrawled yellow notes, staplers, laptop computers, a miniature photocopier. Higher up, at head level, heavy shelves and racks were mounted to the walls, loaded with video stuff: three-quarter-inch and half-inch tape machines, monitors, and other rack-mounted goodies that Aaron recognized as being parts of a television editing suite.

The front third of the trailer belonged to Cy Ogle. It looked totally different. The other parts of it were nice, high-tech expen­sive, but they hadn't even started to spend money until they'd reached this part.

The trailer was eight feet wide. They had built a hollow sphere eight feet in diameter, put Cy's big chair in the center, and then paneled the inner surface of the sphere with monitors. Each monitor was about the size of the ones used in notebook com­puters. They were in full color and they were very sharp. The only feature that broke this sweep of tiny little color monitors was a twelve-inch television screen, dead center, right in the middle of everything.

"Welcome to the Eye," Ogle said. "Welcome to the Eye of Cy."

Now that he mentioned it, it did look as though Cy Ogle were sitting in the center of an eight-foot eyeball, lined with computer monitors, with the TV screen in the middle serving as the pupil.

Aaron already knew the answer, but he had to do it anyway: he started counting the monitors. There were exactly one hundred of them. Each one of those monitors was running the software that Aaron Green had spent the last couple of months developing. All of the experience they had gathered from all of those focus groups at Pentagon Towers - all of the mock shootings, fire drills, movie clips, hunchbacked janitors, staged marital disputes, and every other scenario that had come from the fevered imagination of Shane Schram - had been distilled into the animated graphs and charts and colored bars on those hundred screens.

By examining those graphs in detail, Ogle could assess the emotional status of any one of the PIPER 100. But they provided more detail than Ogle could really handle during the real-time stress of a major campaign event. So Aaron had come up with a very simple, general color-coding scheme. The background color of each screen fluctuated according to the subject's general emo­tional state. Red denoted fear, stress, anger, anxiety. Blue denoted negative emotions centered in higher parts of the brain: disagree­ment, hostility, a general lack of receptiveness. And green meant that the subject liked what they saw. Green was good. Regardless of color, the brightness went up with the intensity of the emotion.

Stepping a little closer and scanning the screens, Aaron could see that a good eighty or ninety of the PIPER 100 were wearing their wristwatches, as per their agreement with Ogle Data Research. There were a few stragglers. Almost all of them were women. One of the problems that had come up with the PIPER program was that the bulky watches looked clumsy on a woman's wrist, and most women didn't want to wear them all the time. Hopefully, they were carrying them around in their purses, and would take them out and put them on as soon as the program started.

If they didn't, they'd forfeit the rest of their money, and their wristwatches would be given to someone a little more reliable. For this, the first test of PIPER, a 90 percent compliance rate would be pretty decent.

"So, what's the mood of America?" Aaron said. He couldn't resist asking. He stepped as far forward as he could and stood right next to Ogle's chair, so that the panorama of screens completely filled his peripheral vision. The effect was like hanging in outer space, in the center of a dynamic young galaxy: against a backdrop of velvety black, bursts of colored light flared unpredictably in every direction, in hues of red, green, blue, and mixtures thereof.

"Hard to say, since we don't know what any of these people are reacting to," Ogle said. "I been keeping an eye on this poor guy right here." He pointed to a screen that had been consistently red ever since Aaron had come into the room. "I think this guy must be right in the middle of a bar fight or something."

Aaron leaned closer to the red screen and squinted to read the label at the bottom. It read, TRADE SCHOOL METAL HEAD/KENT NISSAN, MT. HOLLY, N.J.

"His blood pressure is through the roof," Aaron said. "Maybe you're right."

He couldn't help checking out his five participants. Floyd Wayne Vishniak seemed to be in a quiescent state, probably sacked out on his couch watching television. Chase Merriam was in an excellent mood; probably getting lubricated at a cocktail party in the Hamptons.

"Hey, this looks great!" another voice exclaimed. "Jesus! Look at this thing! It's virtual reality, man!"

It was a tall man in early middle age, with a neatly trimmed beard and a ponytail: the controlled hippie look. He was wearing shorts and sandals and a Hawaiian shirt, and was just tossing a weather-beaten leather satchel on to one of the counters.

"Evening, Zeldo," Ogle said.

Zeldo's gaze was fastened upon the Eye of Cy. "This thing is killer," he said. "Does it work?"

"The input side works," Ogle said, "as you can see for yourself. Now that you're here, we can run some tests on the output side."

"What's the output side?" Aaron said.

"Okay, I'm up for it," Zeldo said. He ran over to the nearest Calyx workstation and started to sign in. "I just came over from Argus's dressing room. He's waiting."

"Who's Argus?" Aaron said.

A faint beeping noise sounded from the direction of Cy Ogle. His big chair, in the middle of the Eye of Cy, had a telephone built into it, and he was punching in a number.

"Good evening, this is Cy Ogle," he said. "Is there any possibility that I could speak to the Governor? Thank you so very much." Ogle was actually capable of delivering this kind of dialogue as though he meant it.

"I have acquired Argus," Zeldo said. The screen of his Calyx system had come alive with a multiple-window display showing the status of some incredibly complicated system.

"Evening, Governor. You mind if I put you on the speaker-phone?"

One of the windows on Zeldo's screen was a rapidly fluctuating bar graph. It had been dead for a little while, but now it put on a burst of colorful activity.

"Okay," Ogle said, and punched a button on his phone.

"I hate these speakerphones," said a deep voice. When he spoke, the bar graph on Zeldo's screen came alive.

"They make me feel like I'm in a box," the voice continued. Aaron had finally recognized it: it was the voice of Governor William A. Cozzano.

"We want to test our communications link," Ogle said.

"That's what Zeldo told me," Cozzano said. "Go ahead and do something."

The armrests of Ogle's chair were huge, like the captain's chair on the bridge of the Enterprise. The right one was covered with small keys, like on a computer keyboard. Each key was labeled in small letters.

The left armrest contained a row of several joysticks or sliders that could individually be moved back and forth, left to right, between two extremes. Aaron stepped forward, leaned over Ogle's shoulder, and read the labels on the joysticks:

LIBERAL 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 CONSERVATIVE

LIBERTARIAN 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 AUTHORITARIAN

POPULIST 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ELITIST

GENERAL 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 SPECIFIC

SECULAR 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 RELIGIOUS

MATERIAL 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ETHEREAL

KIND/GENTLE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 BELLIGERENT

Right now, all of the joysticks were set close to the middle except for GENERAL/SPECIFIC which had been set to 1 (GENERAL) and stuck in place with a piece of duct tape.

Ogle punched a button on his armrest.

"Bullet whizzing past my head," Cozzano said.

"Correct," Ogle said. "That means that you're under attack and you'd better take cover and defend yourself."

"Got it," Cozzano said. "Do another one."

Ogle punched another button.

"Apple pie," Cozzano said. "Which means American values."

Ogle punched another button.

"Ice cubes. Which means I should cool it."

Ogle punched another one.

"A B-52. A strong national defense."

They went on in this vein for several minutes. Ogle had a few dozen buttons on his armrest.

"Argus is Cozzano," Aaron said.

"Right," Zeldo said. "Argus was the mythological figure who had a hundred eyes. With Ogle's help, and with the PIPER 100 feeding him their emotions, Cozzano becomes the new Argus."

At first, Floyd Wayne Vishniak didn't know what it was: a burst of tinny music with sort of a patriotic brass-band sound to it. It sure wasn't coming from his TV set, which was tuned to a fishing program. Finally a flash of red-white-and-blue color caught his eye. It was coming from his wrist. From the big fancy wristwatch that he was being paid to wear. It was showing a logo, a computerized American flag image.

Finally they were doing something. He'd been wearing the damn thing for two weeks and hadn't seen anything on it except for occasional test patterns. He turned off the TV - the fish didn't seem to be biting anyway - cracked open a beer, and sat down to watch.

Chase Merriam was out on the lawn of his brother-in-law's house in East Hampton, Long Island, savoring a mint julep and enjoying the cool night air, when his watch came to life. It didn't much bother him, since this was a dull party anyway. The sound of the music attracted the attention of several other partygoers, and by the time the program got underway, he was in the center of half a dozen people, standing on tiptoe, staring at his wrist in fascination.

"This is ridiculous," he said. "Why don't we all just watch it on C-SPAN."

Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence, pundit extraordinaire, moderator of the Washington Hot Seat, and nemesis of Eleanor Richmond, was a veteran of the Kennedy glory days. He had come down from Harvard to serve as an Undersecretary of State for Cultural Affairs, "liasing" with Ed Murrow's USIA. After putting in his three years, he had returned to Harvard to take a joint appointment in the Political Science Department and as an administrator at the Kennedy School. He had a Savile Row tattered professional elegance with a hint of dandruff around the shoulders of his dark gray pinstriped suit. His graying hair, cut long in the back to com­pensate for its gradual retreat in front, defied the best efforts of spray and gel to get it to lie down, and the backlights of the set turned them into silvery scratches against the dark blue background. As the house filled up and the media consultants fussed over their candi­dates and the technicians ran around barking into their headsets, he sat in his chair, legs crossed, flipping listlessly through some papers.

In a normal debate, tickets would have been distributed equally among supporters of each of the three candidates. But William A. Cozzano was not technically a candidate at all, even though a spontaneous ground swell had put his name on the ballot in forty-two states. The President of the United States was continuing to pursue his Rose Garden strategy and would not be in attendance tonight, though some of his handlers were already cruising the press room, buttonholing journalists and trying to apply some prespin to the event. The only "real" candidate was Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane. A reasonable number of tickets had therefore been handed out to the McLane campaign. Other than that, it was open seating; but given that the event was happening thirty miles away from Tuscola, the place was dominated by Cozzano supporters. Tip McLane was coming into the lion's den tonight, which was exactly the kind of situation in which he excelled.

Most politicians were soulless tools, windup dolls; but these two guys, Cozzano and McLane, could more than hold their own in intellectual combat. This was going to be a hell of a confrontation, and Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence was just the man to act as ringmaster and lion tamer.

As Dr. Lawrence was engaged in this rather self-satisfying series of ruminations, the voice of the set direction scratched from his earplug, "One minute to air." Lawrence set his papers down, sipped some water, did a phlegm check, walked unhurriedly to each of the debators and shook their hands warmly and firmly. At times like this, he had to consciously resist his normal tendency to apply what an overly honest colleague had referred to as his "fish kiss" handshake.

The theme of "Campaign '96" rose in the earplug, unheard by the audience, and on the monitors he could see the nifty computer graphics in which the globe segued into the United States which in turn segued into the flag which in turn blended into a rather nice establishing shot of the Decatur Civic Center, still brightly illuminated by the late evening sun of midsummer. The building was surrounded by buses and cars. People were streaming into the entrances. Most of them were students who had been bused in from local colleges and high schools.

Superimposed over these images were some credits. The logos of various sponsoring corporations were flashed up as the godlike voice of an announcer, prerecorded weeks ago in New York, intoned: "Tonight's debate is brought to you by MacIntyre Engineering, bringing American technological excellence to the world. Global Omnipresent Delivery Systems, the world leader in physical communications technology. Pacific Netware, creator of the industry-leading Calyx computer system. Gale Aerospace, providing new solutions for a changing world. And the Coover Fund, investing in America for a prosperous tomorrow.

"Tonight, from Decatur, Illinois, the presidential town forum. Joining our moderator, Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence, will be Representative Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane of California and Governor William A. Cozzano of Illinois."

Dr. Lawrence was enough of a self-consciously stodgy eccentric that he had actually armed himself with a gavel. As the voice-over began, he started to whack it. Audience members moved toward their seats and the buzzing clouds of aides and well-wishers that had surrounded the two debaters began to disperse. The noise level dropped and the house lights came down, leaving the three men down below in pools of halogen light, TV-bright. As backdrops, they had tall floor-to-ceiling banners - colorized images of turn-of-the-century politicians: Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, and William McKinley.

Dr. Lawrence loved this moment, loved the notion that millions of people were watching, loved the fact that, unlike so many other people, he performed without notes or a teleprompter, in short, he loved his own glibness - what open field running was for Barry Sanders of the Lions, extemporaneous and clever speech was for the professor. It was his chance to go and say "in your face" to the tongue-tied masses. It was as good as the first fuck with a new graduate student.

"I will be blunt: this country is on the verge of disaster."

That was good; that shut them up. Dr. Lawrence cleared his throat unnecessarily and took another sip of water.

"This may be our last free presidential election. I make this alarming statement for the following reasons.

"Our national debt has now reached the level of ten trillion dollars, the surest sign of a society in disequilibrium, even free-fall.

"Our political leaders in the past few decades have shown no ability to address the problems facing our aging, failing democracy.

"Our federal leadership works only in response to pollsters and spin doctors; the sheer mediocrity at the executive, legislative, and judicial levels has driven away the most talented civil servants.

"The only sign of life is at the level of state government, and these officials are burdened to the point of paralysis by the albatross of Washington.

"The values that made this country what it once was - hard work and honesty, or as Emerson put it, 'self-reliance' - have, like our finances, gone to hell."

Dr. Lawrence paused to allow his words to sink in. "Are any of you in this audience convinced that the picture is anything but bleak for the future? I am sorry to be so blunt, but a lifetime of study of and love for this country compels me to set the stage for this debate with these thoughts.

"One century ago, a candidate looking back on events of the last decade would have seen feverish activity in the realms of tech­nology, art, and politics. During that period, men with names such as Diesel, Benz, and Ford had been hard at work perfecting a new device called the automobile. The first telephone switchboard had been installed, the first subway system was under construction in Boston, and Thomas Edison had opened something called a kineto­scope parlor - the first movie theater. The gramophone, the rocket engine, the radio, and X rays had all just been invented. And, as if these innovations were not important enough, the first professional football game had been played in Latrobe, Pennsylvania."

A murmur ran through the crowd and gradually bloomed into laughter. Cozzano and Dr. Lawrence exchange smiles. This was typical for Dr. Lawrence: a subtle jibe that could have been inter­preted as either a dig or a compliment. Cozzano chose to treat it as the latter.

"But despite this rapid technological progress, the political picture a hundred years ago was far from rosy. Foreign interests controlled our economy; an unfeeling business class brutally exploited the people of the United States; the political structure of this country was shot through with the most shocking corruption from top to bottom; divisiveness characterized the relationship between sections of this country, and between races; foreigners newly arriving to work in our country suffered attack simply for wanting to come to this blessed land to improve themselves. Beginning in the late 1880s the poorest farmers and workers in the West and South united to form the Populist movement. They failed to reach the middle classes and the cities; their message became shrill. But out of that movement came the Progressive movement, one of whose most eloquent spokesmen was William Jennings Bryan, who spoke in this town a century or so ago. His message was simple: government is for the people. The effect was profound. The Progressive movement spread across this part of the country with the speed and fury of a prairie fire. Progressivism blended the skills of the best of this country with the ambitions of the middle 70 percent - the middle classes - to remake the system and allow this country to endure through the twentieth century.

"We need a new populism and a new progressivism and a new way to remake the system so that the values of honesty and hard work can once again have a nurturing environment in which to grow, and self-reliance can once again take its place.

"Tonight we will discuss these problems from many different directions. But I would like to begin by discussing a concrete issue: the trade imbalance.

"It is January of next year and you have just taken the oath of office. The economy remains uncertain. It seems as though the Japanese lead in the automotive sector has become insurmountable. How do you, as President, tackle that problem? Representative McLane?"