Interface

3

"Look, it's not like this is some kind of a-" aaron green said. Then a cautious instinct took control and he brought himself up short. He was looking over the epaulets of the security guard at a large red sign on the wall: DO NOT MAKE JOKES OR COMMENTS REGARDING WEAPONS OR EXPLOSIVE DEVISES.

"It's not a what?" said the guard in front of Aaron, a wiry older white man. Aaron was still trying to decide where to begin when the guard spoke the dreaded words: "Step over here with me, sir."

Aaron followed the guard over to a table, just beyond the picket line of metal detectors, still within the dreaded security zone. Beyond it lay the concourse, a pacifist Utopia full of weaponless citizens streaming in an orderly fashion toward their gates. In the overpriced bars and overpriced restaurants, business-suited travelers stood, drinks in hand, below television sets, watching the President deliver his State of the Union address.

"What do we have there, sir?" said the guard behind the table, the chief of this beady-eyed, polyethnic truth squad. He was a very wide, convex black man with a deep voice and he was trying to sound open-minded and jolly. He was wearing an ID flasher with the name BRISTOLS, MAX.

"It's a piece of electronic equipment," Aaron said, setting the case on the table.

"I see. And you can open this up and show it to me?" Bristol said.

The case was largely full of gray foam rubber. A rectangular cavity the size of a couple of shoe boxes had been excavated from

the center. Filling this cavity was a white steel box with ventilation slots cut into the top. The box was exactly the right width to fit into a standard electronics rack.

The plan was that one day, a whole lot of these things would be sacked together in racks, racks lined up next to each other, hundreds in a single room. The room and the equipment would be owned by big media companies in L.A. They would buy all of the stuff from Green Biophysical Systems, of which Aaron Green was the founder, chief technologist, president, and treasurer.

With the lid of the case open, the upper half of the faceplate was visible. It had no controls, knobs, or anything, just a single red LED with the word power printed underneath it, and, in big letters, the Green Biophysical Systems logo, and the acronym IMIPREM.

The power cord was coiled up in a separate niche in the gray foam rubber. Yet another niche contained an item that Aaron hoped they wouldn't notice: a cuff. Hard plastic shell lined with black foam, for comfort. He wondered what the guards would think of that.

"Looks interesting," the guard said. His insincerity was palpable. "What is it?"

Aaron took a deep breath. "An instantaneous, multiplexing, integrating, physiological response evaluation and monitoring device."

"What does it do?"

It doesn't blow up. "Well. It's a little bit like a polygraph."

"I need to see it work."

"What?'

"I need to see your IMIPREM work," Bristol said.

Aaron pulled the IMIPREM out of its foam rubber nest and set it on the table. Then he uncoiled the power cord, fit one end into a three-pronged recessed socket on the back of the unit, and plugged the other end into a wall outlet near the table. The little LED came on. "There," he said.

Bristol raised his eyebrows and looked extremely dubious. "That's all it does?"

"Well, it does a lot more than that, naturally," Aaron said, "but it has no interface, per se, except through a computer. See, if I could hook this up to a computer, it would produce all kinds of meaningful output."

"But the only thing it'll do right now, here, for me, is turn on this little red light," Bristol said.

Aaron was trying to come up with a diplomatic way to say yes when they were interrupted by another person. He was carrying a laptop computer. He was holding the device out at arm's length.

"Tick, tick, tick, tick!" the man was saying. But he pronounced it "teeuhk, teeuhk." He was one of those southerners who could add syllables to words and make it sound good. "And then somewhere over Newark - BOOM! Haw, haw, haw!"

The old guard grinned and guided him to the table.

"Sir," Bristol said.

"Howdy," the man with the computer said. "This is a Compaq - more bang for the buck than IBM! Haw haw!"

As Aaron watched in disbelief, Bristol exchanged a friendly, knowing grin with the big southerner.

"Got a Gamma Prime CPU, a gigabyte drive, and three pounds of Semtex," the southerner said.

He had a smooth, trombonelike voice that could be heard for miles. All of the metal detector guards were looking at him and chuckling. The businessmen filing through the metal detectors, picking their pocket change out of the plastic buckets, were looking at the southerner with appreciative grins, shaking their heads.

He was tall, probably a couple of inches over six feet, had love handles, an unexceptional suit, a high forehead, the beginnings' of jowls, a florid complexion, eyebrows raised up in a perpetually surprised or skeptical expression, a tiny little pursed mouth. "Whoa, looks like I got some competition here!" he blurted, eyeing the IMIPREM in mock wonder.

Then his whole face changed; suddenly his eyes were narrowed and darting, he had become secret and conspiratorial, shooting sidelong glances at Bristol, Max. "Abu Jihad!" he hissed at Aaron. "Praise be to Allah! We have perfected a nuclear device capable of fitting under an airline seat!"

The big guard and the southerner joined together in loud, booming laughter. "I got a glass of bourbon with my name on it in that bar by the gate," the southerner finally said, "so let me crank this thing up for you and get on out of here. If you don't mind, sir," he added to Aaron, courteously enough.

"Not at all."

The man snapped the computer open and folded back the top; to reveal its screen, a flat, high-resolution, color monitor. Aaron had other things to be worrying about right now, but he couldn't help staring at the man's computer; it was one of the nicest and most powerful laptops you could buy, certainly one of the most expensive. These things had only been on the market for a couple of months. This one was already worn and battered around the edges.

The southerner hit the on button, hollering "BOOM!" so loud that Bristol actually startled a little bit. Then he laughed.

The screen came alive with windows and icons. From a distance, Aaron recognized about half of the icons. He knew what this soft­ware did. He could guess that the southerner did a lot of statistical analysis, desktop publishing, and even desktop video production.

"Sir, would this do the trick?" Bristol was saying.

"Yo!" said the southerner, giving Aaron a dig on the arm. "He's talking to you!"

"Huh?" Aaron said.

"Would this computer be capable of talking to your machine there?" Bristol said.

"Well, yes, if it had the right software loaded on to its hard drive. Which it doesn't."

"Oh, I see what's going on," the southerner said. Suddenly he stuck out his hand toward Aaron. "Cy Ogle," he said. "Pro­nounced, but not spelled, like mogul."

"Aaron Green."

Cy Ogle laughed. "So you have to show this guy here that your box won't blow up when we reach our cruising altitude. And until you hook it up to a computer, it won't do anything except turn on that little red light."

"Exactly."

"Which don't mean jack to him, because that light is about the size of a grain of rice, and for all he knows the rest of the box is full of black powder and roofing nails."

"Well..."

"You have the software with you? On floppies? Well, load it in there, and let's take this baby for a spin."

Aaron couldn't believe the guy was serious. But he was. Aaron fished the diskette with the IMIPREM software out of his briefcase and popped it into the drive on Ogle's machine. A single-typed command copied the files on to Ogle's hard drive.

In the meantime, Ogle had already figured out what to do with the cable: he ran it from the back of the IMIPREM into the corresponding port on the laptop.

"Okay. Ready to roll," Aaron said.

Aaron unbuttoned his shirt cuff. He fished the plastic cuff out of the case and snapped it snugly around his exposed wrist.

A ten-foot cable dangled from the cuff. Most of it was coiled up and held together by a plastic wire tie. Aaron plugged it into the back of the IMIPREM.

A new window materialized on the screen of Ogle's computer. It was a moving, animated bar graph. Half a dozen colored bars, of different lengths, fluctuated up and down. At the base of each bar was a label:

BP RESP TEMP PERSP PULS

GSR NEUR

"It's monitoring my body right now. See, the bars stand for blood pressure, respiration, body temp, and a few other things. Of course, this is its most basic level of functioning, beyond this it's capable of an incredible number of different-"

Ogle's hand slammed down on Aaron's shoulder and gripped him like a pair of barbecue tongs.

"I'm an undercover agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms," Cy Ogle said, "You're under arrest for conspiracy

to commit terrorist acts on board an airliner. Don't move or you'll be shot!"

"What!?" Aaron screamed.

"Just kidding," Ogle said, "Haw, haw!"

"He's right, look at the bars," the guard said.

Blood pressure and just about everything else had suddenly shot way up. As they watched, and as Aaron calmed down, the bars subsided.

"Thanks for the demonstration, sir, it was very interesting," the guard said. "Have a nice flight."

Then Bristol turned to look down the concourse. Aaron and Ogle were both looking that way too; some kind of generalized disturbance seemed to have broken out. But it wasn't hooligans or terrorists. It was businessmen in suits, stampeding out of the bars and restaurants where they had been watching the President on TV. They ran down the concourse, knocking travelers and sky caps aside, and began to scuffle over the few available pay telephones.

Ogle chuckled indulgently. "Looks like the President made a corker of a speech," he said. "Maybe we should hook you machine up to them."

As it turned out, they were on the same flight, sitting across the aisle from each other in the first row of first class. Coach was full of shuffling grannies and beefy sailors; first class was mostly empty. Ogle worked on his computer for the first hour or so, whacking the keys so rapidly that it sounded like a hailstorm on the tray table, occasionally mumbling a good-natured "shit!" and doing it again.

Aaron pulled a blank tablet of graph paper out of his briefcase, uncapped a pen, and stared at it until they were somewhere over Pittsburgh. Then it was dinnertime and he put it away. He was trying to organize his thoughts. But he didn't have any.

After dinner, Ogle moved from the window to the aisle seat, right across from Aaron, and then startled Aaron a little by ordering them both drinks.

"Big presentation," Ogle said.

Aaron heaved a sigh and nodded.

"You got some kind of small high-tech company."

"Yeah."

"You developed this thing, spent all your venture capital, prob­ably maxed out your credit cars to boot, and now you got to make some money off it or your investors will cash you in."

"Yeah, that's about right."

"And the cash flow is killing you because all the parts that go into these things cost money, but you don't actually get paid for them until, what, thirty or sixty days after you ship 'em. If you're lucky."

"Yeah, it's a problem all right," Aaron said. His face was getting red. This had started out interesting, gotten uncanny, and now it was starting to annoy him.

"So, let's see. You're going to L.A. The big industry in L.A. is entertainment. You got a device that measures people's reactions to things. A people meter."

"I wouldn't call it a people meter."

"Course not. But that's what they'll call it. Except it's a whole lot better than the usual kind, I could see that right away. Anyway, you're going to go meet with a bunch of executives for movie and television studios, maybe some ad agencies, and persuade 'em to buy a whole bunch of these things, hook 'em up to man-on-the­street types, show 'em movies and TV programs so they can do all that test audience stuff."

"Yeah, that's about right. You're a very perceptive man, Mr. Ogle."

"What I get paid for," Ogle said.

"You work in the media industry?"

"Yeah, that's a good way to put it," Ogle said.

"You seem to know a lot about what I do."

"Well," Ogle said. All of a sudden he seemed quiet, reflective. He pushed the button on his armrest and leaned his chair back a couple of inches. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, curled one hand around his drink. "High-tech has its own biorhythms."

"Biorhythms?"

Ogle opened one eye, turned his head a bit, peered at Aaron.

"Course you probably don't like that word because you are Mr. High Tech, and it sounds to you like cocktail-party pseudoscience."

"Exactly." Aaron was beginning to think that Ogle knew him better than he knew himself.

"Fair enough. But I have a legitimate point here. See, we live under capitalism. Capitalism is defined by competition for capital. Would-be businessmen, and existing businesses seeking to expand, fight for the tiny supply of available capital like starving jackals around a zebra leg.

"That's a depressing image."

"It's a depressing country. It's not like that in other countries where people save more money. But it's like that here, now, because we don't have values that encourage savings."

"Okay."

"Consequently you are starved for capital."

"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."