Neal Stephenson - Interface

It was easy enough to reach the convention center, but difficult to park in its vicinity; the lots were jammed. Not making it any easier was Vishniak's own extreme nervousness. He was afraid to slow down, so he just orbited the target zone like an Indian circling a wagon train. He shot right past a few perfectly good spots. McCormick Place was the southern end of a whole chain of big civic projects, including Soldier Field, some museums, and Grant Park, and parking lots were strung for several miles up the shore of the lake. Vishniak ended up parking way the hell and gone up in the vicinity of Grant Park and then walking for half an hour, which was fine because it helped him burn off adrenaline.

Grant Park, he realized, must be named after General Grant. As in Grant and Sherman. Vishniak had learned all about those two guys on TV. One was drunk and one was crazy, he could never remember which, but the thing was that both of them kicked ass for their country. When the war started Grant was living in Galena, which was just a few miles up the river from where Vishniak lived. And he was working in a livery stable, which was equivalent to working in a car wash nowadays, or detasseling.

He walked south past Soldier Field, where William A. Cozzano had attained glory in an earlier life, and then took a pedestrian overpass across Lakeshore Drive into the extreme northern end of the McCormick Place parking lots. The first thing he encountered was a line of portable toilets. On the theory that you should never pass up a chance to make water or take water, he went into one of these, wiped the seat with a wad of toilet paper, and sat down. All he really had to do was take a leak - the series of thirty-two-ounce coffees he had picked up at various Chicagoland 7-Elevens was having an effect - but as long as he was here he flicked his Bic and had one last good look at the Fleischacker. He popped the magazine loose from the grips, checked it, shoved it in.

Someone pounded on the fiberglass door of the portable toilet. "Is anyone in there?"

"Fuck you," said Floyd Wayne Vishniak reflexively. His heart was pounding; he was afraid it was a cop. But it wasn't. Just another Cozzano supporter. Vishniak reholstered his gun under his wind-breaker and started getting himself together, wondering whether this rude person had any friends, whether he was big, whether he would be worth picking a fight with. But when he came out he saw it was just a little man in a suit, accompanied by a little kid who was holding his crotch and jumping up and down.

Fuck it anyway, Vishniak realized. He had abandoned his trailer and hit the road with a pocket of cash, a pickup truck, and a plastic gun. He had to get used to the idea that he was a different kind of man now, a man who had risen above the common crowd, who could not trouble himself with meaningless hassles over toilet access.

McCormick Place was a huge rectangular black thing with a much larger black slab of a roof that overhung the building quite a bit on all sides. As Vishniak walked toward it through the parking lot, Lakeshore Drive was on his right and a little backwater of Lake

Michigan on his left; beyond that was a peninsula with a private airport on it, small planes taking off and landing and taxiing. The yachts of the rich and powerful were tied up in the water only yards away from the private jets of the even more rich and powerful, and Vishniak could plainly see that if you were the right kind of person, you didn't have to waste your time with parking lots, or even cars.

All the way from Grant Park southward, the pedestrian traffic had been getting heavier. At the southern end of the parking lot, all the people were funneled down a wide staircase and into McCormick Place's subterranean entrance. The floor was backed up a little bit, the crowd milled rather than streamed down the stairs. Working his way slowly down the steps, Vishniak was able to get a clear view of the metal detectors bracketing the doors.

He immediately got scared shitless. His heart was going so fast it was more of a vibration, like an idling truck engine, than a beat, and he was sweating like a pig. But it was a warm humid night and he was wearing a windbreaker, so he had every excuse to sweat.

Looking up, he could see into the underside of McCormick Place's huge flat overhanging roof, which was supported and stiffened by a latticework of black girders. Laced through the structural members was a barely perceptible network of thin red lines - a system of pipes carrying water to the automatic sprinkler system. As Vishniak worked his way down the steps, swept along by the eager Cozzano supporters, he wondered whether anyone else ever bothered to look up in the air and take notice of these things, these hidden connections and networks that were laced imperceptibly through the structure of everything.

Then he was there, confronted with the metal detector, people pushing him from behind, and all he could do was give himself up to the force of the crowd, the pressure of history, and walk on through.

Nothing happened. As he kept on walking with the crowd now filling the main floor of William A. Cozzano's National Town Meeting, becoming invisible and anonymous, he was overcome with relief, which showed up as a vivid green on the monitors in the Eye of Cy and ODR headquarters in Pentagon City.

The National Town Meeting was a political convention in all but name, and it followed some of the same protocols. One of these was the hierarchy of introductions. It wouldn't do just to have the nominee stroll out on stage and start talking. He had to be intro­duced by someone. Preferably by someone very, very important. And anyone who was important enough to make that introduction was, likewise, too important to step out in front of an ice-cold audience and just start talking. He would have to be introduced by someone else. That person had to be important enough that his role as introducer did not seem to belittle the stature of the introduced...

Suffice it to say that the first person who stepped out in front of the microphones that evening was as completely anonymous as any person could be. His job was to get the attention of the crowd. To sever all of the conversations that had sprung up among the people standing shoulder to shoulder on the convention floor. Then he introduced an alderman, who introduced a former mayor of Chicago, who introduced a former Governor of New York, who introduced a movie star, who introduced a former Secretary of State, who introduced Governor William A. Cozzano. At each stage of the hierarchy, the dull roar of bored conversation diminished and the excitement of the crowd built.

Twenty thousand people were in the hall. The original roster of the National Town Meeting had been ten thousand but these people were just statistical abstracts who had been snatched off the streets and transported into town to spout their opinions and represent their demographic groups. Many of them supported Cozzano, many didn't, and the ones that did, did so in the same moderate, reasonable way that most average people supported political candidates. Which was to say that, while they might vote for Cozzano, they would not be willing to paint his name across their foreheads and jump up and down screaming at every mention of his name.

Consequently, Cy Ogle had brought in an additional ten thousand people who would do exactly that. They tended to stand closer to the dais, crowding the National Town Meeting partici­pants into the back of the hall. The fact that these riotous supporters were not the same as the ten thousand average Americans who had been appearing on TV all week was not, of course, explained to the nationwide television audience, which was watching on no fewer than eight networks.

This was a good thing for Floyd Wayne Vishniak, because, until tonight, you couldn't have gotten into the convention center with­out a special National Town Meeting photo ID. Vishniak didn't have one. But neither did any of the other ten thousand fanatical Cozzano supporters who had packed the hall tonight.