Neal Stephenson - Interface

The TV set went dark. Mary Catherine was sitting up in bed, holding the remote control, aiming it at the screen like a gun. She was frozen in place.

The man she had been watching on the TV set wasn't her dad. Everything he'd just said was an out-and-out fabrication. And Dad would never tell a lie. Mel was right.

A familiar feeling came back. It was the clammy fear that had gripped her on the night of her father's first stroke. For weeks she had thought it would never go away. Then it had begun to relax its hold over her mind and her heart, and as Dad had recovered after the operation, it had gone away completely. She had thought that she and her family were out of the wood.

She'd been wrong. They weren't out of the woods. They had just walked through a little clearing. Now she found herself in the heart of a deeper and vaster forest than she'd ever imagined.

The party noise downstairs had faded to a low murmur. She could hear a new sound from the next room. James's old room. It was the sound of fingers whacking a keyboard with the speed and power of a drumroll.

Zeldo was sitting at his workstation. He had turned off the lights and inverted the screen so that it was showing white letters on a black background. He had a huge high-resolution monitor with at least a dozen windows open on it, each one filled with long snaking lines of text that Mary Catherine recognized, vaguely, as computer code.

"Hi," she said, and he almost jumped out of his skin. "Sorry to startle you."

"That's okay," Zeldo said, taking a deep breath and spinning his chair around to face her. "Too much Jolt. You can turn on a light if you want."

"It's okay," she said. She grabbed another swivel chair and sat down.

"Thanks. I'm running in blackout mode here," Zeldo said, "been on this damn machine too long and my eyes won't focus anymore."

"What's going on?" she said. She had to assume, from what Mel had told her, that they were probably being listened to right now. For that matter, Zeldo himself was presumably part of the Network, though he seemed like a nice enough guy. And today, in the football game, she had seen a side of Zeldo that he didn't normally show. She could tell that, whatever devious schemes Zeldo might be involved in, he genuinely liked William A. Cozzano.

"We've had interference problems when your father goes near microwave relay stations," Zeldo said. "We're going to keep him away from those things, maybe work up some kind of a hat with EM shielding in it."

"But TV trucks use microwaves, don't they?"

"Exactly. And he spends a lot of time around TV trucks. So as a last line of defense, I'm building some safeguards into the software so that when the chip starts getting stray signals; it'll be smart enough to realize that there's a problem."

"Then what?"

"It'll go into Helen Keller mode until the interference goes away."

"What happens then? Dad goes into a coma?"

"Not at all," Zeldo said. "The chip will keep doing what it's supposed to do, filling in for the damaged parts of his brain. It's just that it won't be able to send or receive data anymore."

"That's not an important function anyway, is it?" Mary Catherine said. "You only send signals into his brain when you are fixing a bug in the software. Right?"

There was a long pause, and Mary Catherine wished that she had turned on the room lights. She suspected that she might be able to read some interesting things on Zeldo's face right now.

"As we mentioned before the implant," Zeldo finally said, "the biochips do more than just restore his normal capabilities."

This struck Mary Catherine as evasive. "You hackers aren't very good at playing these kinds of games, are you?" she said.

"No comment," Zeldo said. "I didn't spend half my life learning what I know so that I could get tangled up in politics."

The snappy technical patter had been replaced by a completely different sort of conversation. Both of them were now speaking elliptically with long pauses between sentences. Suddenly, Mary Catherine realized why: both of them knew that they were being listened to. Both of them had things to hide.

She had said something to Mel earlier in the day: Zeldo was in the Network but not of the Network. His fear of speaking freely in the bugged room was confirmation.

"As Ogle may have told you, I'm the campaign physician," she said.

"Yes," Zeldo said. "Congratulations. It's going to be a grind."

"Nothing like residency, I'm sure," Mary Catherine said.

"Because of... because of these pesky bugs and glitches," Zeldo said, framing the words carefully, "I've been assigned to travel with the campaign, at least for a while. So let me know if there's anything I can do to help you out."

"For starters you could tell me exactly what happens when he goes near a microwave relay station."

Zeldo answered without hesitation. Now that they had gotten away from dangerous topics he had relaxed again. "He has a seizure."

"That's all?"

"Well... before that there are other symptoms. Disorientation. A flood of memories and sensations."

"When these memories and sensations enter his mind, can he tell that they are just hallucinations from the chip?"

This question made Zeldo pause for a long time.

"You shouldn't grind your teeth. Bad for the enamel," Mary Catherine said, after at least sixty seconds had gone by.

"That's a profound question," Zeldo said. "It gets us into some heavy philosophical shit: if everything we think and feel is just a pattern of signals in our brain, then is there an objective reality? If the signals in Argus's brain happen to include radio transmissions, then does that mean that reality is a different thing for him?"

Mary Catherine held her tongue, for once, and did not ask why Zeldo was referring to her father as Argus. It was most definitely a slip of the tongue, a glimpse into something that Mary Catherine hadn't been allowed to see yet. If she got inquisitive, Zeldo would just clam up again.

Another, more interesting, possibility occurred to her: maybe Zeldo had slipped the word in deliberately.

"And if so," Zeldo continued, "who are we to say that one form of reality is preferable to another form?"

"Well, if he says things that simply aren't true, and seems to believe them, I would say that that was a problem," Mary Catherine said.

"Memory is a funny thing," Zeldo said. "None of our memories are really accurate to being with. So if he's got a memory that works a little differently from ours, and is otherwise healthy and happy, is that better than being aphasic in a wheelchair? Who's to say?"

"I guess it's up to Dad," Mary Catherine said.

Clearly she had to find the GODS envelope. The events of the day had convinced her beyond doubt that Mel was right: there was a Network, and it was up to something. Mary Catherine went back to her room, changed out of her daughter costume, put on a bathrobe, and walked downstairs. The caterers were at work in the kitchen, cleaning up the aftermath of the party; all of the guests had gone home except for a few old Vietnam buddies of Cozzano's who sat around the coffee table in the living room having a few drinks and reminiscing about the war, alternately laughing and crying.

Mary Catherine avoided them and went out on to the back porch. A row of black plastic garbage bags were lined up against the wall, waiting to be collected. She opened one of the bags, sorted through a few loose pieces of paper, and found the brightly colored enveloped, still intact except for the broken seal. The mailing label was a bewildering panoply of numbers, code words, and bar codes; the inscrutable mutterings of the Network. Mary Catherine folded the envelope, stuffed it into her bathrobe, closed up the burn bag, and called it a day.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak