Neal Stephenson - Interface

Aaron grabbed the mouse attached to his Calyx workstation and chose a couple of items from menus. A graphic flashed up on his screen and he bounced a copy of it to one of Ogle's screens.

"What this tells me is that everyone dislikes Tip McLane just about equally," Ogle said.

"That's about right. Which is interesting, coming from the upper income brackets."

"Yeah," Ogle said. He held one index finger up in the air. "I am about to make a prediction," he said.

"Shoot," Aaron said.

"I predict that we are going to see a whole lot more data to the effect that people think Tip McLane is too rough. Too coarse to dance with the Queen of England."

The Eye of Cy grew brighter and took on a decidedly greenish tinge. "Hot damn," Ogle said. "Now just hold it, baby, don't squander this." As he spoke, he was pressing a couple of buttons on the pad that he used to communicate with Cozzano.

Cozzano looked great on TV. The stroke had aged him somewhat. He had lost some weight without becoming gaunt. It had brought out his features, which were worth bringing out. He had a serious, thoughtful, rock-solid look about him now. He could probably win a lot of votes simply by doing what he was doing now: sitting in front of a camera and not saying anything.

This was new behaviour for him. Cozzano loved to argue. He loved competition in any form. He had always been the first to show up for football practice. Whenever he appeared in one of these debates he always leapt into the fray as soon as his turn came up.

But you didn't become president by seeming eager. Ogle under­stood this perfectly well, and so, as soon as Cozzano's name came up, he began to stroke that keyboard, sending calm, solid, quite images into Cozzano's brain. Cozzano just sat there, quite, solid, contemplative. The longer he sat there, the brighter, and greener, the Eye of Cy became.

"Getting good results here," Zeldo said, looking at the readouts of Cozzano's blood pressure. "He's calming down. He was a little nervous before."

"Perfect," Ogle said. "I just invented a new form of political rhetoric: don't say a damn thing."

It was perfect, Aaron realized, sitting there staring at Cozzano on the TV. He had seen a lot of these debates. The candidates always came off as high-strung, bickering game show contestants. But Cozzano had a solid dignity that was way above all that. He gave the impression of a man who had been deeply absorbed in thinking profound thoughts, not paying any attention to his surroundings, who had suddenly been interrupted by the nervous, carping moderator of the debate. Who was now giving the matter some serious thought before he blurted anything out.

Aaron felt as though he should jump to his feet and salute Cozzano. He felt that way even though he was sitting ten feet away from Ogle and knew damn well this was a manipulated image.

"I have certain values that I am not willing to play games with," Cozzano said. Then he paused for quite a while, thinking. The audience was dead silent. Even the inside of Ogle's trailer was dead silent. The whole universe seemed to be revolving around Cozzano. "One of the things I value is dignity and self-respect. These things are our birthrights. Some squander them. Once you have lost them, you can't get them back. And one way to squander your dignity and self-respect is to whine and carp and beg." Cozzano pronounced these words with almost palpable disgust. "My attitude is that I don't care how unlevel the playing field is. I'm going to play by the rules anyway." At this point Cozzano seemed to become visibly pissed off. He leveled his gaze directly into the camera for the first time, held up his meaty right hand, pointed into the lens. "I will never crawl on my knees to Japan or any other country and cry uncle, the way George Bush did in 1992. I'd rather die." Cozzano sat back in his chair, held his gaze on the lens for a few more seconds, then looked away.

The Eye of Cy had become blindingly bright: America was feeling strong, conflicting emotions.

There was silence and then confusion. He had only used up a small portion of his allotted time. Dr. Lawrence wasn't sure what he should do. The TV feed cut uncertainly back and forth between Governor Cozzano and Dr. Lawrence.

"You still have thirty seconds," Dr. Lawrence said. "Would you like to elaborate?"

"What's to elaborate?" Cozzano said.

A definite pattern was now noticeable when the feed cut between Dr. Lawrence and Cozzano. People had generally made up their minds that Dr. Lawrence was a jerk.

"That was wild," Ogle said. He sounded a bit uncertain. He grabbed the POPULIST-ELITIST joystick and shoved it a little closer to POPULIST. "That took balls. Aaron, don't we have a toilet-scrubbing ex-autoworker?"

"Yeah," Aaron said, choosing a line of the same name from a menu on the computer screen. A graphic came up summarizing the way that this particular member of the PIPER 100 had reacted to Cozzano's speech.

It was all jaggedy contrasts and mood swings. Clearly this man's feelings had been hurt. But it wasn't all negative either. Toward the end of Cozzano's statement, the ex-autoworker's emotional state had swung sharply upward.

"Huh. That's interesting," Ogle said. "The appeal to pride seems to work. But it's not old-fashioned jingoism. It's a question of personal, individual pride. Core values."

On TV, Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence was explaining that the candi­dates could now rebut each other's statements.

McLane flashed up on the screen with a bit of a stunned, nervous, beady-eyed look, as if he wanted to stare at Cozzano but couldn't. "Well, it seems to me that, uh, the best ticket to self-esteem and dignity is to have a steady job. Everything else follows from that. Under my administration, I'll be pursuing policies that will stimulate the vigor of our free enterprise system and lead to job growth in general. After all, it's hard to be dignified when you're living on welfare."

The Eye of Cy pinkened briefly as the word "welfare" was spoken. "Cheap shot," Ogle mumbled.

"It's easy to scoff at the concept of the unlevel playing field when you have been born into an affluent family and haven't suffered from massive layoffs the way our auto workers have," McLane continued. "But for those people in Detroit-"

The Eye of Cy displayed a few brief flashes of green as several people took pleasure in McLane's personal attack on Cozzano. But most people didn't like it. They didn't like it at all.

Cozzano had turned slightly in McLane's direction. He looked like a great man, alone in his study, busy with important matters, who has to get up and discipline a puppy who has just piddled on the rug.

"My family is affluent because we love each other and we work hard," Cozzano said. "And I can promise you, Tip, that if you seek to gain the esteem of the American public by running my family into the ground, I will make you regret it on many levels. When a man makes cracks about my family, my natural response is to invite him to step outside. And I'm not above doing that here and now." Ogle rocketed half out of is chair and started screaming. "CUT TO TIP! CUT TO TIP! CUT TO TIP!" Aaron could hardly see anything; the Eye of Cy had become blindingly intense, like a parabolic dish pointed directly into the sun. But the image in the middle changed and Tip came on the screen; his mouth was half open, his eyebrows somewhere up in the middle of his forehead, his eyes darting back and forth nervously. The Eye of Cy turned blue (people who, as of three seconds ago, hated Tip McLane), with a few angry red screens (people who wanted Cozzano to punch McLane right here and now).

"Knockout punch," Ogle said. "Tip's out of the race." But just in case, he shoved the KIND/GENTLE-BELLIGERENT joystick toward KIND/GENTLE. Then he moved the MATERIAL-ETHEREAL joystick a lot closer to ETHEREAL.