Neal Stephenson - Interface

"Okay, that's good," Zeldo said, typing all of this furiously into the computer. "Now, what happens when I stimulate this link?" He swiveled around to another keyboard and typed a command into another computer.

Cozzano's eyes narrowed. He was staring into the distance, unfocused.

"Just a very fleeting image of Christina at the age of about thirty-five," Cozzano said. "She's in the living room, wearing a yellow dress. I can't remember much more than that. Now it's fading."

"Okay, how about this one?" Zeldo said, typing in another command.

Cozzano drew a sharp breath into his nostrils and began to smack his lips and swallow. "A very intense odor. Some kind of chemical odor that I was exposed to at the plant. Possibly a pesticide."

"But you're not getting any visuals?"

"None whatsoever."

"Okay, how about this one?"

"Jesus!" Cozzano shouted. Genuine fright and astonishment had come over his face. He half-slid, half-rolled out of his chair and dropped to the floor of the bedroom, landing on his belly, and crawled on his elbows so that he was half-hidden under a bed.

"Let me guess," Zeldo said. "Something from Vietnam."

Cozzano went limp and dropped his face down on to his arms, staring directly into the floor. His back and shoulders were heaving and sweat was visible along his hairline.

"Sorry about that," Zeldo said.

"It was unbelievably realistic," Cozzano said. "My God, I actually heard the sound of a bullet whizzing past my head." He sat up and held up one hand, just above and to one side of his right temple. "It was from an AK-47. It came from this direction, right out of the jungle, and shot past me. Missed me by a couple of inches, I'd say."

"Is that a specific memory of something that happened to you?" Zeldo said.

Cozzano's eyes became distant. He was staring at the wall, but he wasn't seeing it. "Hard to say. Hard to say."

"When you saw the apple pie, it seemed very specific."

"It was specific. It really happened. This was more of a fleeting glimpse of something. Almost like a reconstruction of a generic type of event."

"Interesting," Zeldo said. "Would you like to take a break?"

"Yeah, I wouldn't mind," Cozzano said. "That one really shook me up. How many more do we have to do?"

Zeldo laughed. "We've done three dozen so far," he said, "and we could potentially do a couple of thousand. It's up to you."

By the end of the day, Zeldo had stimulated more than a hundred separate connections into Cozzano's brain. Each one elicited a completely different response.

AN ENTIRE PASSAGE FROM MARK TWAIN MATERIALIZED IN HIS HEAD.

HE SMELLED THE ROOT CELLAR AT THE OLD FARMHOUSE OUTSIDE OF TOWN.

HE FELT AN OVERPOWERING SENSE OF GRIEF AND LOSS, FOR NO REASON AT ALL.

A COLD FOOTBALL SLAMMED INTO HIS HANDS DURING A SCRIMAGE IN CHAMPAIGN.

HE BIT INTO A THICKLY FROSTED CHOCOLATE CAKE. A B-52 STREAKED OVERHEAD.

HE SAW A FULL PAGE FROM HIS WEEKLY APPOINTMENT CALENDAR, MARCH 25-31, 1991.

SNOWFLAKES DRIFTED ON TO HIS OUTSTRETCHED TONGUE AND MELTED.

HE BECAME SEXUALLY AROUSED FOR NO DISCERNIBLE REASON.

AN OLD BARRY MANILOW SONG PLAYED IN HIS HEAD.

HIS CAR SKIDDED OFF AN ICY ROAD IN WINTER 1960 AND HIT A TELEPHONE POLE; HIS FOREHEAD SLAMMED INTO THE WIND-SHIELD AND CRACKED IT.

THE TINKLING SOUND OF ICE CUBES IN A GLASS PITCHER OR ICED TEA BEING STIRRED BY ONE OF HIS AUNTS.

HE TRIMMED HIS FINGERNAILS IN A TOKYO HOTEL ROOM.

MARY CATHERINE DID SOMETHING THATMADE HIM VERY ANGRY; HE WASN'T SURE EXACTLY WHAT.

"I have to quit," Zeldo said. "I can't type any more. My fingers are dead."

"I want to keep going," Cozzano said. "This is incredible."

Zeldo thought about it. "It is incredible. But I'm not sure if its useful."

"Useful for what?"

"The whole point of this exercise was to figure out a way to use this chip in your head for communication," Zeldo said.

Cozzano laughed. "You're right. I had forgotten about that."

"I'm not sure how we use all of this stuff to communicate," Zeldo said. "It's all impressionistic stuff. Nothing rational."

"Well," Cozzano said, "it's a new communications medium. What is necessary is to develop a grammar and syntax."

Zeldo laughed and shook his head. "You lost me."

"It's like film," Cozzano said. "When film was invented, no one knew how to use it. But gradually, a visual grammar was developed. Filmgoers began to understand how the grammar was used to communicate certain things. We have to do the same thing with this."

"I should get you together with Ogle," Zeldo said.

"You should have studied more liberal arts," Cozzano said.

Eleanor made the mistake of giving out her full name. Since her name was listed in the telephone book, she was now reachable by everyone, all the time. She had the impression that her phone number must have been spray-painted in digits ten feet tall on the wall of every public housing project in greater Denver. And somehow they had all heard that Eleanor Richmond was a nice lady who would help you out with your problems.

She began to get calls from constituents in the middle of the night. When some unemployed mother of three phoned her at one o'clock one night and asked her for a personal loan of a hundred dollars, Eleanor came to her senses and decided that this had to stop. She could not be unofficial mom to all of Denver. She soon got into the habit of turning off the ringer on her phone when she went to bed.

This was a difficult step for a mother of two teenagers to take, because once she turned off that ringer, she knew that her kids would not be able to wake her up in the middle of the night and ask her advice, or request help, apologize, or simply burst into tears whenever they got themselves into a Situation. And although Eleanor's kids were reasonably smart and fairly responsible and kind of prudent, they still had an amazing talent for finding their way into Situations.

But by this point in her mothering career, Eleanor had seen enough Situations that she had begun to suspect that her kids were more apt to get into them when they knew that Mom would be there at the other end of the phone line to bail them out. And sure enough, when she got in the habit of turning her phone off at night, the incidence of Situations dropped. Or maybe she just stopped hearing about them. Either way it was fine with her.

It didn't help her sleep, though. Turning off the phones pre­vented them from ringing. But she could still hear the mechanical parts inside her answering machine clunking and whirring all night long, as people left messages for her. She put the answering machine in the far corner of her trailer and buried it under a pillow, but that didn't help. She still lay awake at night wondering, Why the hell are these people calling me?

She had never called anyone. It had never even occurred to her, when she was broke, and her husband had gone on the lam to the Afterlife, and her mother was soiling her pants in the middle of the night, and Clarice and Harmon, Jr., were out getting into Situations, to pick up the phone and contact the office of the Senator. It would not have occurred to her in a million years.

Where had these people gotten the weird idea that the government was going to take care of their problems?

The answer to that one was pretty simple: the government had told them as much. And they had been dumb enough to believe it. When it turned out to be lie (or at least a hell of an exaggeration) they didn't go out and help themselves. Instead they stewed in their own problems and they got self-righteous about it and started calling Eleanor Richmond in the wee hours to vent their outrage.

She had to stop thinking this way. She was thinking exactly like Earl Strong. Blaming everything on the welfare mothers. As if the welfare mothers had caused the savings and loan crisis, the budget deficit, the decline of the schools, and El Nino all at once.