Neal Stephenson - Interface

Patricia's eyes looked down and to the left. Her mouth was slightly ajar. She was still completely nonplussed.

"Thank you," Mel said, reaching his arms far apart to grab the handles of the big sliding doors that separated the living room from the dining room. He drew them shut with a thunderclap, closing off their view of Patricia. Then he went to another door that had been propped open and kicked out the doorstop.

"In or out, Lover. Command decision!" he snapped.

Lover IV, the golden retriever, scurried into the room and got out of the way as the door swung shut.

"You gotta take a leak or anything?"

"No," Cozzano said.

"You look good, for a guy who's exhausted."

"Huh?"

"You've been working so hard thinking about the campaign that you have collapsed from exhaustion," Mel said. "You're taking a week or two off to recover. In the meantime, your able staff is filling in for you."

Mel popped down on the couch next to Cozzano. He began to rub his chin with his hand. Mel had a thick and fast-growing beard and shaved a couple of times a day. For him, chin rubbing was something he did when he was taking stock of his overall situation in the world.

"You were going to blow your brains out, weren't you?"

"Yeah," Cozzano said.

Mel thought it over. He didn't seem especially shocked. The idea did not have a big emotional impact on him. He seemed to be weighing it, the way he weighed everything. Finally he shrugged, unable to deliver a clear verdict.

"Well, I've never been one to argue with you, just offer advice," Mel said.

"Yes no."

"My advice right now is that it is entirely your decision. But there may be factors of which you are not aware." "Oh?"

"Yeah. I'm sure you're probably thinking what it would be like to spend twenty, thirty years this way."

"You win the Camaro!" Cozzano said.

"Well, it's possible that you may not have to. I'm getting, uh, shall we say, feelers, from people who may have a therapy to cure this kind of thing." "Cure it?"

"Yeah. According to these people you could get back a lot of what you lost. Maybe get back all of it." "How? The melon is dead."

"Right," Mel said, not missing a beat, "the brain tissue is toast, Kaput. Croaked. Not coming back. They can rewire some of the connections, though. Replace the missing parts with artificial stuff. Or so they say."

"Where?"

"Some research institute out in California. It's one of Coover's little projects."

"Coover." Cozzano chuckled a little bit and shook his head. DeWayne Coover was a contemporary of Cozzano's father. Like John Cozzano, he had gotten lucky with some investments during the war. He was a billionaire, one of those billionaires that no one ever hears about. He lived on some patch of warm sandy real estate down in California and he didn't get out much except to play golf with ex-presidents and washed-up movie stars. His granddaughter Althea had gone to Stanford with Mary Catherine and they had been on the fringes of each other's social circles.

John Cozzano and DeWayne Coover had had a number of dealings during and after the war and had never really hit it off. Some people liked to believe that there was some kind of rivalry Between the two men, but this was a completely off-the-wall idea. Coover's success dwarfed that of the Cozzano family. He was in an entirely different league.

"I got a call from one of Coover's lawyers," Mel said. "It was on an unrelated thing. A leukemia thing."

After Christina died of leukemia, Cozzano had founded a charitable organization to research the disease and assist victims. DeWayne Coover, who had a penchant for big medical research projects, had been a major contributor. So it was not unusual for Cozzano's people to talk to Coover's people.

"So I'm talking to the guy, and it's about some kind of trivial question relating to taxes. It comes into my head to wonder why this guy, who is a senior partner in a big-time L.A. firm, is talking to me about this issue, when it's so tiny that our secretaries could almost handle it. And then he says to me, 'So, how's the Governor doing these days?' Just like that."

Cozzano laughed and shook his head. It was incredible how word got around.

"Well, to make a long story short, he's been dumping bucks into researching problems like yours. And he's definitely putting out feelers."

"Get more phone books," Cozzano said.

"More information about it? I knew you'd say that."

Cozzano raised his right hand to his head, shaped like a pistol, and brought his thumb down like a hammer.

"Right," Mel said, "a bullet to the head is the most experimental therapy of all."

The next time Dr. Radhakrishnan heard from Mr. Salvador was ten days later, when two packages arrived in his office, courtesy of GODS, Global Omnipresent Delivery Systems. One of them was a small box. The other was a long tube. Dr. Radhakrishnan paused before opening them to marvel at their pure, geometric perfection. In India, as in most of the United States, mail was a dusty, battered, imperfect thing. Mail came wrapped up in pro­tective layers of inexpensive, fibrous brown paper, tied together with fuzzy twine that looked like spun granola; the contents burst through the wrapping at the corners, skid marks trailed along every side, and the shapes of the packages and envelopes always came just a bit short of the geometric ideal. Addresses were scrawled on it in magic marker and ballpoint pen, antique-looking stamps, fresh from the engraver, stuck to it, annotations made by various postal workers along the way.

That was not how Mr. Salvador mailed things. When Mr. Salvador mailed something, he went through GODS. The biggest name in the express-mail business. Mr. Salvador's mail was not made of any paper-based substance. No fibers in there. Nothing brown. The wrapping was some kind of unbreakable plastic sheeting with a slick teflonesque feel to it, white and seamless as the robe of Christ. Both of the packages were festooned with brilliantly colored, glossy, self-stick, plasticized GODS labels. None of the labels, nor any other parts of the packages, had ever been sullied by human hand-writing. Everything was computer-printed. Every one of the labels had some kind of bar code on it. Some of the labels contained address-related information. Some contained lengthy strings of mysterious digits. Some pertained to insurance and other legalistic matters, and others, like medals on an officer's chest seemed to be purely honorific in nature.

The color scheme consisted of three hues; every check box, every logo, every stern warning and legal disclaimer on every label was in one of these three hues. The hues all went together perfectly and they looked great, whether they were on the packages themselves or on the neatly pressed NASA-style coverall worn by the fetching young woman who had delivered the packages, obtaining Dr. Radhakrishnan's signature on a flat-screened notebook computer that beeped and squealed as it beamed his digitized scrawl back to the remote computer inside the glossy, tri-hued GODS delivery van. The woman was cheery, confident, professional, apparently taking a little time off from, her normal job as a trial lawyer, aerobics instructor, or nuclear physicist to do some life-enriching delivery work. Dr. Radhakrishnan, the world's greatest neurosurgeon, had felt small, dirty, and ignorant before her. But before he could ask her for a date, she was out the door, having more important things to do.

Dr. Radhakrishnan opened the box first. There was no tape; the magic white wrapping stuck to itself. As he pulled it apart, stickers and labels tore in half, and he got an intuition that, perhaps, part of the thrill of receiving such mail was that you got to dramatize your own importance by tearing it apart. It was like ravishing an expensive, salon-fresh call girl.