Neal Stephenson - Interface

"MOMMY HAS TO GO, BIANCA!"

graced the newsstands the next morning, accompanied by a photo of the tearful Anna bidding farewell to her daughter, who was bottled up inside the giant pressurized chamber where she had been receiving her treatment. A photographer had been present in the room when Anna and Carlos received the warning from Pilar and had snapped pictures of them bidding a hasty farewell.

None of which made the Powers That Be look especially good to the public. Which is why social workers from Health and Human services started paying very close attention to Bianca at the same time, and a motion was filed in court for the state of Colorado to become Bianca's legal guardian. The gist of this legal document was that Carlos and Anna Ramirez, by driving their kids around in a truck full of lethal gases and killing three of them, had clearly demonstrated their unfitness as parents and should not be allowed to take care of Bianca anymore. The district attorney let it be known that his staff was actually investigating the possibility of filing charges against the Ramirezes and that, with every fibre of his being, he was refraining himself from issuing an arrest warrant for Carlos and Anna. It was all well and good to put public service announcements on TV begging people not to drive their kids around in the back of pickup trucks, but what would really put a stop to this sort of thing was punitive legal action against parents who did it. So the headline for Wednesday morning was

"STATE: BIANCA IS OURS!"

But all of this legal squalor was obscuring an interesting medical story. When Bianca arrived in the hyperbaric chamber she had been in a deep coma and totally unresponsive. But in the photo accompanying the "BIANCA IS OURS" story, a state social worker stood outside the hyperbaric chamber, smiling and waving through its thick pressure-proof window at the unseen Bianca inside. And there wasn't much point smiling and waving to a vegetable. It seemed that Bianca had staged a miraculous recovery. She was far from being back to normal, but she was awake, alert, responsive to verbal communication, and mumbling a few words.

This gave Arapahoe Highlands Medical Centre's new PR Director the ammunition he needed to thunder into the media fray. His predecessor and former boss had been sacked with astonishing dispatch as soon as "LET HER DIE!" had hit the streets. The new man had spent the first few days just trying to get on his feet. By the time Wednesday rolled around, he was ready. He brought in a select troop of journalists to videotape and photograph Bianca through the window of the chamber; she obliged by smiling and waving to them. Since she had all but been written off as a vegetable a few days earlier, this was certainly going to have an electrifying effect on the public.

There followed a news conference in a hospital meeting room, where all of Bianca's doctors, nurses, therapists, and court-appointed guardians stepped up to the microphone to deliver a few bright, upbeat sound bites praising Bianca's plucky nature and emphasising the incredible nature of her recovery. A few cynical journalists tried to spoil the day by asking difficult questions, e.g.: "Does Bianca know that the INS is trying to deport her parents?" But the new PR Director was standing by the mike at all times, trying to anticipate any line of questioning that might lead to another headline along the lines of "LET HER DIE!," and when­ever these issues came up he would do something about protecting the patient's privacy and then point to some other journalist with a less acute critical facility. In general, the PR Director was finding that bald, middle-aged print journalists with nicotine stains on their fingers were troublesome, and beautiful twenty-five-year-old TV journalists who had arrived at the hospital carrying stuffed bunnies for Bianca were good people to call on. So the headline for Thursday morning was:

"BIANCA: MIRACLE GIRL!"

accompanied by a picture of her smiling her gap-toothed kid's grin through the window of the chamber, cuddling a bunny to her chest.

Anyone who bothered to read the complete news story about Bianca, all the way to the end, could find out that her treatment in the chamber was essentially complete, and that Arapahoe Highlands Medical Centre was going to release her the following day, on Friday.

Which meant that by the time the "MIRACLE GIRL" headline began to circulate on Thursday morning, all of the participants of the Ramirez affair, from Denver to the Lazy Z Ranch to Washington, D.C., were gearing up for the end-game.

Most of Friday would be taken up with logistics: getting all the players to the hospital on time and keeping in touch with everyone on the phone. So Thursday was the last day for actually making moves. Ray del Valle kicked off the final round by arranging a press conference, in a "safe house" somewhere in greater Denver, in which Carlos and Anna Ramirez stepped before the court of Public Opinion to defend themselves from charges that they were illegal aliens and bad parents.

The illegal alien part was difficult, because they were, in fact, illegal aliens. But in America, no issue was so clear-cut that it could not be obfuscated beyond recognition by a talented lawyer. The Ramirezes now had one: a nationally famous hell-raising San Francisco lawyer who liked to do pro-bono work if lots of TV cameras were present; he insisted that he was going to get these people green cards real soon.

The part about being bad parents was different. The Ramirezes were actually known in their community as very good parents. Carlos was a teetotaler who spent every minute of his free time with his children, and Anna was a domestic saint. Ray had arranged for character witnesses to show up at the safe house and say as much.

Eleanor Richmond's part in the endgame was a different matter. She snuck into, and ransacked, the office of her young colleague Shad Harper. This was easily enough to get her fired and possibly even enough to get her thrown into jail. She understood this clearly and had already typed up a letter of resignation for Senator Marshall. She had been working at this job for exactly one month and had received exactly one pay check.

It was completely insane for her to be doing this. If she had been looking for snippets of information that she could have kept to herself and used discreetly, that would have been one thing. But her entire goal was to dig up some dirt that she could turn around and release to the media. Eleanor Richmond had gone native. She was out of control.

She had lost it sometime over the weekend. The realisation that Sam Wyatt, her boss' main man, had triggered this whole chain of events was bad enough by itself. For a day or two she had wavered, mostly because she was turned off by Ray's tactic of planting toys in the grass for photographers. When the INS had come around looking for Carlos and Anna, she had been annoyed. But when the state had tried to take Bianca away from her parents, Eleanor Richmond had gone nuts. That was no fair. She'd rather be a bag lady than a conspirator in an affair that involved breaking apart a family.

So on Thursday, whenever Shad Harper left his office for more than ten minutes, Eleanor went in and made herself at home. It would be worth destroying her own career if she could find anything to bring Shad down along with her. It would have been nice to find something on Sam Wyatt, or on the aide in D.C. who had made the fateful phone call to the Forest Service, or even on Senator Marshall himself. But she was willing to settle for Shad Harper's head on a platter.

Somewhat to her own astonishment, she didn't get caught. Once or twice, someone poked their head into Shad's office while she was there, and she explained that she was looking for a stapler that Shad had borrowed. This explanation worked because Shad was always borrowing stuff, including money, and not returning it.