Neal Stephenson - Interface

He picked up Merriam's left arm and moved it out of the way, gently and firmly. Then he lay down on his belly and crawled forward, shoving his arms, head, and shoulders in through the crumpled window frame, shoving Merriam back against the set, and began to feel around on the ceiling of the car, now the floor.

"Damn!" he said. "It ain't anywhere. You sure you had a wallet?"

"Positive. Maybe it was thrown out of the car."

"Shit!" the guy said. He crawled into the car even farther, all the way up to his waist, the bulk of his body pinning Merriam tightly back. To judge from his breath, it had been a few decades since this guy had laid hands on dental floss.

The insides of Chase Merriam's eyelids glowed a warm pinkish-orange color.

"Shit!" the guy said again, and began to thrash around wildly, trying to extricate himself from the car. In the process he did a little bit more damage to Chase Merriam, but by now it was all kind of superfluous. "They never come this fast!"

"Freeze!" shouted a nearby voice that could only belong to a cop. "You are under arrest!"

After that it was all footsteps. The man ran away. A cop followed him; they crashed into some brush and then receded into the distance. And then another set of footsteps approached the over­turned car. Slowly, calmly.

"Nice car," the cop said. "Didn't know these babies were four-wheel-drive."

The debate would be starting in less than five minutes. In addition to the cavernous exhibition space where most of the Town Meeting was happening, McCormick Place had its own theater, which was currently filling up with audience members chosen at random from Ogle's ten thousand typical Americans.

Eleanor Richmond, sitting in a dressing room backstage, having her face fixed by a professional makeup artist, was startled to realize that she wasn't nervous at all.

That was strange because she was about to go on national television. She had been on national television quite a bit recently, but this time she was going to engage in verbal combat with three other people who were better at this kind of things than she was. Had she become so jaded that she didn't even care anymore?

Someone knocked on the door and pushed it open before Eleanor could tell them to get lost. It was Mary Catherine Cozzano. She slipped quickly into the room, glancing nervously behind her, and leaned back against the door, pushing it shut. She was carrying a bouquet of blue flowers.

"Sorry, I didn't want to be seen coming in here," she said. "People would say I was playing favorites."

"Did you get those from a boyfriend, or just some political weasel?" Eleanor said, eyeing the flowers. "They're nice."

"I got them from a florist," Mary Catherine said. "They're for you."

"Well, how nice! Thank you!"

"I got blue ones, to symbolize the truth," Mary Catherine said, "because you always tell the truth."

"Well, not always," Eleanor said, "but often enough to give people the willies."

"You look great," Mary Catherine said. "I hope you knock 'em dead."

Eleanor didn't figure out the real reason for her lack of nervousness until she went out and sat down on the set. She was the last one to get there. The other debaters were a white man; a somewhat Anglicized Hispanic man; and a middle-aged woman, blond and blue-eyed. And all of them were perfect. They were good-looking, with large, clear features that looked good on television. They were poised, coiffed, made-up, dressed, prepped. She felt like she had blundered into the Academy Awards.

She was here as a token. Nothing more. She didn't have a chance of becoming William A. Cozzano's vice-presidential candidate, even if she and Mary Catherine did have a mutual admiration society. That's why she wasn't nervous.

Less than a hundred yards away from the debate set, Cyrus Rutherford Ogle was settling into the comfy swivel chair at the center of the Eye of Cy. For purposes of the National Town Meeting, the GODS container had been driven into the very heart of McCormick Place and everything else constructed around it; the platform where Cozzano and his guests stood every night was directly above his head.

Compliance was good tonight. Ninety-eight of the hundred screens were lit up. The PIPER 100 had started out as a somewhat disorganized and unreliable group and, through practice, had now become steady and disciplined.

That was comforting, because Cy Ogle was scared. The v.p. thing was the hardest of all. Practically everyone screwed this up. For the last week, Ogle had not been able to close his eyes at night without seeing the ghostly faces hanging before him. Nixon, Agnew, Eagleton, Bush, Quayle, Stockdale.

The best that Ogle could do was round up the four best people he knew of- that is, the four people who made the best impression on television - put them up on the tube, side by side, and chart people's reactions to them. Of course, he would have to bring in a moderator to ask them some questions. What kinds of questions didn't really matter. Neither did the answers. The important thing was just to get their faces up on the tube, get their voices working. The hard part was going to be interpreting the data. Because the deeper he got into this, the more weird little angles he began to notice inside the minds of the PIPER 100.

Mae Hunter was sitting not far from the banks of the Hudson River, applying lipstick and watching the sun go down on New Jersey. She had discovered the lipstick earlier today, in a wastebasket in the women's room at the New York Public Library, and decided that it was a good shade for her. It was a pretty nice one, and brand new; some fickle shopper must have picked it up in one of the nice stores on Fifth Avenue, ducked into the library to touch herself up, and decided that under that light, it didn't look so hot.

Mae Hunter admired that decisiveness, the ability to fire a brand-new lipstick directly into the wastebasket because it was the wrong shade. Most women would have taken it home and put it on their dresser and left it there for the next twenty years. But here in New York, you met all kinds. People had higher standards. They did not tolerate imperfections quite so easily. This lipstick had obviously been thrown away by a woman of breeding.

She had found a lot of interesting things in the restrooms of the New York Public Library. They didn't let you bring food into the building, so the wastebaskets were cleaner. Almost everything that was in there was paper. Actual merchandise like the lipstick stood out prominently.

Mae Hunter spent a great deal of time in the library because she didn't have a job, family, or home to distract her from her real mission in life, which was to improve her mind. For the past few months she had been working her way through Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. She was halfway through the fifth of seven volumes.

Reading was the most important thing in her life. She had found, over the year and a half since her husband died, that she could handle sleeping out of doors and dumpster-diving for food. She could handle the uncertainty and fear. She had been raped twice and she could even handle that. But the one thing that drove her nuts was the ignorance. She saw these people all around her, sleeping in the parks, spare-changing at Port Authority, checking themselves in to those awful homeless shelters, and none of them made any effort to improve their minds. You could hardly walk ten paces in New York City without coming across a discarded copy of The New York Times, the world's finest newspaper, but none of these people bothered to avail themselves. As a former elementary-school teacher, she found that this really irked her. All that wasted brainpower.

Another thing that annoyed her was people's failure to take care of themselves, which is why she was being so exquisitely careful to get this lipstick on correctly. That done, she found a comfortable place and settled in against the base of a small embankment with some shrubs growing on top of it.