Neal Stephenson - Interface

Floyd grabbed the PIPER watch. The two halves of the watchband were spread wide apart. He put it on his wrist, wrapped his other hand around it, and the watchband tightened down firmly but comfortably.

"To take it off, just push that little button right there and the ratchet will be released," Green said.

"We got a deal," Floyd said. "Where's my thousand?"

"Ths is it, baby," Cyrus Rutherford Ogle said, sitting in the big chair and twiddling the joysticks. "This is the moon shot. T minus half an hour and counting." That is what Aaron Green saw as he was climbing into the back of the big GODS truck out in back of the Decatur Civic Center in Decatur, Illinois. It was 7.30 p.m. on Flag Day.

"My god," Aaron said. That was all he could force past his lips for the first several minutes.

It looked just like a plain flatbed semitrailer truck with a shipping container on the back. The shipping container, a steel box about the size of a mobile home, was brand new and slickly painted with the three-colored logo of Global Omni-present Delivery Services. These days, as the U.S. Postal Service continued to go the way of Greyhound, the logo had become as ubiquitous as a mailbox. Most people wouldn't notice this thing unless it was parked in their driveway. Out behind the Decatur Civic Center, sandwiched in between a food delivery truck and a video truck from Television North America, it was invisible. The only indications that it carried something other than mail were a soft humming noise and a glassy twist of heat waves coming from a small opening on its top. It carried its own power plant.

Aaron entered through a door in the rear, passing directly into a narrow aisle, some ten feet in length, between racks of electronics and heavier equipment that stretched from floor to ceiling. Nuclear submarines must be like this, Aaron thought, as he peered into the racks, picking out the familiar shapes and logos of various top-of-the-line Pacific Netware computer systems.

The aisle finally opened up into sort of an office and com­munications center. Countertops ran along both walls for several yards and a couple of desks sat in the middle. These surfaces were strewn with telephones, scrawled yellow notes, staplers, laptop computers, a miniature photocopier. Higher up, at head level, heavy shelves and racks were mounted to the walls, loaded with video stuff: three-quarter-inch and half-inch tape machines, monitors, and other rack-mounted goodies that Aaron recognized as being parts of a television editing suite.

The front third of the trailer belonged to Cy Ogle. It looked totally different. The other parts of it were nice, high-tech expen­sive, but they hadn't even started to spend money until they'd reached this part.

The trailer was eight feet wide. They had built a hollow sphere eight feet in diameter, put Cy's big chair in the center, and then paneled the inner surface of the sphere with monitors. Each monitor was about the size of the ones used in notebook com­puters. They were in full color and they were very sharp. The only feature that broke this sweep of tiny little color monitors was a twelve-inch television screen, dead center, right in the middle of everything.

"Welcome to the Eye," Ogle said. "Welcome to the Eye of Cy."

Now that he mentioned it, it did look as though Cy Ogle were sitting in the center of an eight-foot eyeball, lined with computer monitors, with the TV screen in the middle serving as the pupil.

Aaron already knew the answer, but he had to do it anyway: he started counting the monitors. There were exactly one hundred of them. Each one of those monitors was running the software that Aaron Green had spent the last couple of months developing. All of the experience they had gathered from all of those focus groups at Pentagon Towers - all of the mock shootings, fire drills, movie clips, hunchbacked janitors, staged marital disputes, and every other scenario that had come from the fevered imagination of Shane Schram - had been distilled into the animated graphs and charts and colored bars on those hundred screens.

By examining those graphs in detail, Ogle could assess the emotional status of any one of the PIPER 100. But they provided more detail than Ogle could really handle during the real-time stress of a major campaign event. So Aaron had come up with a very simple, general color-coding scheme. The background color of each screen fluctuated according to the subject's general emo­tional state. Red denoted fear, stress, anger, anxiety. Blue denoted negative emotions centered in higher parts of the brain: disagree­ment, hostility, a general lack of receptiveness. And green meant that the subject liked what they saw. Green was good. Regardless of color, the brightness went up with the intensity of the emotion.

Stepping a little closer and scanning the screens, Aaron could see that a good eighty or ninety of the PIPER 100 were wearing their wristwatches, as per their agreement with Ogle Data Research. There were a few stragglers. Almost all of them were women. One of the problems that had come up with the PIPER program was that the bulky watches looked clumsy on a woman's wrist, and most women didn't want to wear them all the time. Hopefully, they were carrying them around in their purses, and would take them out and put them on as soon as the program started.

If they didn't, they'd forfeit the rest of their money, and their wristwatches would be given to someone a little more reliable. For this, the first test of PIPER, a 90 percent compliance rate would be pretty decent.

"So, what's the mood of America?" Aaron said. He couldn't resist asking. He stepped as far forward as he could and stood right next to Ogle's chair, so that the panorama of screens completely filled his peripheral vision. The effect was like hanging in outer space, in the center of a dynamic young galaxy: against a backdrop of velvety black, bursts of colored light flared unpredictably in every direction, in hues of red, green, blue, and mixtures thereof.

"Hard to say, since we don't know what any of these people are reacting to," Ogle said. "I been keeping an eye on this poor guy right here." He pointed to a screen that had been consistently red ever since Aaron had come into the room. "I think this guy must be right in the middle of a bar fight or something."

Aaron leaned closer to the red screen and squinted to read the label at the bottom. It read, TRADE SCHOOL METAL HEAD/KENT NISSAN, MT. HOLLY, N.J.

"His blood pressure is through the roof," Aaron said. "Maybe you're right."

He couldn't help checking out his five participants. Floyd Wayne Vishniak seemed to be in a quiescent state, probably sacked out on his couch watching television. Chase Merriam was in an excellent mood; probably getting lubricated at a cocktail party in the Hamptons.

"Hey, this looks great!" another voice exclaimed. "Jesus! Look at this thing! It's virtual reality, man!"

It was a tall man in early middle age, with a neatly trimmed beard and a ponytail: the controlled hippie look. He was wearing shorts and sandals and a Hawaiian shirt, and was just tossing a weather-beaten leather satchel on to one of the counters.

"Evening, Zeldo," Ogle said.

Zeldo's gaze was fastened upon the Eye of Cy. "This thing is killer," he said. "Does it work?"

"The input side works," Ogle said, "as you can see for yourself. Now that you're here, we can run some tests on the output side."

"What's the output side?" Aaron said.

"Okay, I'm up for it," Zeldo said. He ran over to the nearest Calyx workstation and started to sign in. "I just came over from Argus's dressing room. He's waiting."

"Who's Argus?" Aaron said.

A faint beeping noise sounded from the direction of Cy Ogle. His big chair, in the middle of the Eye of Cy, had a telephone built into it, and he was punching in a number.