Neal Stephenson - Interface

She had a lot of free time. Part of it she spent hanging around with her old high-school friends and driving up to Champaign or over to Decatur for Christmas shopping. She also took up a new hobby: electronics.

She had purchased a book on the subject months ago in Boston and had been reading it in free moments, learning about all the mysterious hieroglyphs that made up a circuit diagram: resistors, capacitors, and inductors. She didn't reckon she could design her own circuits now, but she could certainly put one together from a diagram.

The week before Christmas she made a stop at the Tuscola Radio shack, which doubled as an Ace Hardware store. She picked up a set of gloves and some tools for her father, and then she went into the little nook where all of the resistors, capacitors, and inductors hung in bubble packs. Reading part numbers from a wrinkled sheet of paper she'd taken from her wallet, she selected a couple of do/en items and paid for everything in cash.

Her father already had a soldering iron, of course; he had every tool known to the industrialized world. Mary Catherine let it be known that she was going into Dad's workshop to assemble a secret Christmas present and that her privacy had better not be disturbed. She locked the door, pulled down the windowshades, and cranked up the cast-iron stove that Dad used to heat the place up. When it was warm enough that her fingers worked again, she plugged in the soldering iron and went to work, soldering the little bits and pieces from Radio Shack on to a breadboard - a slab of plastic with holes punched through it. When it was finished the whole thing fit into a black plastic box about the size of a paperback book. A toggle switch and a red light protruded from one end.

President-elect Cozzano himself seemed to blossom under the period of rest and relaxation. Aside from receiving his daily CIA briefing and eyes-only presidential briefing, he was basically on vacation. He evinced no desire to have a hand in collecting names for his cabinet, being content to work with the same corps of advisers that had brought him here. Football season blended into basketball season at Tuscola High School, and periodically Cozzano would slip out to the football field or into the gym to watch the town's young student-athletes compete.

Cozzano had developed a new passion in the last months of the campaign: Scrabble. It had been his idea that they start playing the game, but Mary Catherine encouraged it because (as she explained to her father's curious handlers) it was a great form of therapy. Because it was a word game, it helped to exercise the parts of Cozzano's brain that handled verbal communication. But because no speech was involved, it bypassed the speech centers of his brain - which were now partly silicon. Mary Catherine insisted that Cozzano play it with his left hand. At first, Cozzano had found it surprisingly difficult to persuade his left hand to spell words; the necessary neural connections had been severed by the stroke.

Mary Catherine mocked him for being so inept. That was all Cozzano needed. He started playing to win. He was tenacious, and over the months, became good. He played once a day with Mary Catherine. He played it so often that even the Secret Service folks and the people at control stopped noticing it.

Cozzano's cabinet members were announced. They were mostly youthful and in good physical shape, their names indicated a pleasing and politically correct distribution of ethnic groups and genders, they had gone to the best schools, they had outstanding records. They were all perfect.

A day later, Mary Catherine got a Christmas card from Zeldo. It included several photos: a couple of Zeldo riding his mountain bike on the bluffs above the Pacific and a few of Zeldo at work.

One of the photos showed Zeldo sitting in the courtyard of the Radhakrishnan Institute, enjoying caffé latte and typing away on his laptop. In the background, seated at another table, was one of the institute's patients. Mary Catherine recognized the man: he was the secretary-designate of Defense.

She went through the other photos very carefully, and saw three more patients "accidentally" caught in the background: the secretaries-designated of State, Treasury, and Commerce, and the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Early on the afternoon of December eighteenth, Mary Catherine went cross-country skiing. Three inches of new snow had fallen the night before. By the standards of post-greenhouse effect Illinois, it was a winter wonderland. She tossed her skis and poles into the back of the family's four-wheel-drive pickup truck, checked her arsenal of waxes, and took off. A few minutes' drive took her to the old Cozzano farm. She got out, locked the front hubs, shifted into four-wheel-drive, pulled on to a dirt lane between fields, and drove for half a mile or so. Then she put her skis on and took off.

After a mile or so she was able to coast down into the gentle cleft of a river valley, lightly forested with skinny ironwood trees. She followed the river for another half mile until she came upon a beat-up, ramshackle old cabin, really more of a glorified duck blind than a dwelling. Parked beside it was a big Chevy pickup truck, and as she approached from downwind she could smell cigar smoke and hear subdued conversation.

Mel Meyer, ludicrously clad in a heavy insulated farmer's coverall, emerged from the building, walked up to Mary Catherine, and ran a bug detector over her body. This time he got a faint radio signal from one of the buttons on her shirt. Mary Catherine skiied a couple of hundred feet away from the shack and left the button under a log. Then she came back and gave Mel a long hug.

Inside the shack were a bulky, round-shouldered black man in his fifties, and a huge white guy with bushy eyebrows and a salt-and-pepper hair and beard. Mary Catherine knew them both already. Respectively, they were Rufus Bell, USMC Retired, and Craig ("the Crag") Addison, Chicago Bears, Retired. "How's he doing?" Bell asked.

"He's doing great," Mary Catherine said, "this is all boy adventure stuff. Just the kind of thing he likes."

Mel, Rufus, and Craig ("the Crag") all looked slightly embarrassed.

"Okay," Mel said, "now listen carefully, because I'm freezing my ass off, and because this is important. These two guys Rufus and Crag can provide the bodies we need. With a little help from some of Eleanor's friends and supporters in D.C., we can even make it legal. And I can provide the paperwork. Mary Catherine?"

"I've got the black box ready. And I've got some information for you. The secretaries-designate of Defense, Treasury, Commerce, and State, and the Speaker of the House, have all spent time at the Radhakrishnan Institute in the last few months."

Mel shook his head. "Tragic," he said. "A tragic epidemic of strokes. Anyone else?"

"Not that I know of."

"Well, that will be useful knowledge," Mel said. "Now, Mary Catherine, there's only one thing we need from you."

"My father," Mary Catherine said.

"Right. Can you give me Willy?"

"I have a plan, Mel," she said. "I have a scam."

That night after supper, Cozzano called Mary Catherine in for another game of Scrabble. She'd had two or three glasses of Chianti, she was in a good mood, and she spoke without restraint. "Dad, it's the most boring game ever invented."

"If only you would play it right," he groused, "and not cheat."

They went into the study and sat down at the desk in front of the works of Mark Twain.

Mary Catherine always started the same way: she reached into the heap of tiles and spelled out ARE YOU STILL THERE. They had a fancy Scrabble board mounted on a turntable and so when she was done, she spun it around so he could read it.

Cozzano frowned. "Stop playing around," he said. "You know the rules." Both of his hands were active. It was a bizarre sight: with his left hand he was breaking up the sequence that she had spelled out, rearranging the letters, plucking more of them out of the overturned box top. With his right hand, he was picking seven tiles at random and placing them neatly on his little rack. He continued to speak at the same time. He seemed genuinely annoyed and appeared not to notice what his own left hand was doing. "You have to pick seven tiles. And you can only spell one word at once.