Neal Stephenson - Interface

Cozzano finally collapsed a stone's throw from the microwave relay tower. The patrolmen rushed inward, converged on him, hoisted him into the air, and began to hustle him back.

By the time they got him back to the car he was thrashing around again, but the spittle and blood around his mouth told Zeldo that he'd had a seizure and probably bitten his tongue. "Let's get out of here!" Zeldo said.

Zeldo had already folded down the rear seat of Cozzano's sport/utility vehicle and opened the tailgate. They threw him in back like a heavy roll of carpet. "Go! Go!" Zeldo shouted, and the driver pulled off the shoulder and down the road, all four tires burning rubber.

Cozzano relaxed and, apropos of nothing, quoted a lengthy passage, verbatim, from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades. Then he was silent for a while.

Then he said, "Why the hell is the tailgate open? You want us to end up like Bianca Ramirez?"

Floyd Wayne Vishniak wanted to sleep but his thoughts would not let him. He lay on his mattress having an imaginary discussion inside of his head, moving his lips and gesturing with his hands in the air as he debated politics with William A. Cozzano and Tip McLane. The more he went over the discussion in his head, the clearer his thoughts became, and he kept finding ways to explain them. Finally he decided that he would write them down.

The light over the kitchen table hurt his eyes. He held one hand over his face as a visor and tripped around the kitchen looking for something to write with. Eventually he located the stub of a pencil on top of the fridge. Back next to his mattress was his weight bench and underneath that was a box full of weights and dumbell parts. In the bottom of that, under all the weights, was an old spiral note­book with half the pages missing, which he had used to record his progress when he was sticking to his weight-lifting program. He turned it to a fresh page and tossed it on to the kitchen table; directly under the light, the white page was very bright and made him squint. He grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat down to collect his thoughts.

He took the address from the videotape, as Aaron Green had told him to do.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak

RR. 6 Box 895

Davenport, Iowa

Aaron Green

Ogle Data Research

Pentagon Towers

Arlington, Virginia

Dear Mr. Green:

I am writing this letter to you to express my additional thoughts and opinions, which you said you wanted to hear all about. Maybe you have already forgotten about me since I am just a nobody who lives in a trailer. But we have seen each other face-to-face once, and maybe we will again. This is about the Debate that was tonight in Decatur, Illinois, not so very far from where I live.

It is real interesting that one hundred years ago people were thinking the same things they are now about the Wall Street financial kingpins running the country. How ironic that still nothing has changed. I wonder why that is. Maybe it is because all of the politicians run on money, money, money.

McLane is power-grubbing scum and you can see it in his face and in how he acts, like a stiff. That is because if he acts natural and tells the truth he will probably offend someone who is feeding him money.

But Cozzano is an honest man and he tells it straight. He is the only honest man up there because he is the only one who is not running for anything. To me, the favorite part of the debate was when he invited McLane to step outside. I felt good when I heard Cozzano speak words of righteousness, like out of the Bible, and I truly wanted to see his fist smashing into McLane's face.

I bet that you got some good reactions off my wristwatch at that moment. I bet the readings all went off the scale. Now you probably think that I am some kind of a violent person.

But in my heart that is not the real truth. When I lay in bed I felt ashamed to think that I had felt such violent thoughts. Even if Tip McLane is a shithead it would not be OK to punch him out because that is not the basis of our democratic system. So I think that I would not vote for Cozzano after tonight's debate, no matter what your computer system said about me. Please make a note of it.

You will be hearing again from me soon, I am sure.

Sincerely, Floyd Wayne Vishniak

Dr. Mary Catherine Cozzano finished her neurology residency during the last week of June. She spent a couple of days in Chicago celebrating with her fellow graduates, but during the past four years they had forgotten how to goof off, and it took a positive effort to have fun. Then she moved back into her old bedroom in Tuscola. She wasn't crazy about moving back home at the age of thirty, but she needed a quiet place in which to study for the board exams. She didn't have a job lined up yet, and probably wouldn't, at least until things settled down, which would not be until Election Day.

Besides, the house was still partly occupied by technical personnel from the Radhakrishnan Institute, their computers were all over the place, and so she could almost convince herself that she was actually living in an advanced neurological research center. She spent an hour or two each day going over the records of Dad's recovery, learning about the therapy and how it worked. As Dad had gotten the basic rehab out of the way - learning to walk, learning to talk - his staff of therapists had withered away to a hand­ful who helped him with things like writing. In the same way, the hard-tech people had dwindled, going back to the Radhakrishnan Institute and leaving high-bandwidth communications links in their place, so that they could monitor the biochip from the other side of the country. Zeldo had told her at the beginning of June that he too would be leaving soon, but he was still here, sleeping on the floor of James's old bedroom, which had become a weird mixture of James's adolescent decor (ILLINI pennants and Michael Jordan posters) with appallingly pricey, high-powered computer gear. When Mary Catherine asked Zeldo why he was still here, he broke eye contact and muttered some hacker aphorism about how hard it was to chase down the last few bugs.

She wasn't sure what to make of the fact that her father was now right-handed.

On the night of the State of the Union address, the blood clot had shot up Dad's aortal arch, the giant superhighway that carried almost all of the heart's output. It had spun off into two separate fragments. One had gone up each of the carotid arteries, left and right. The one on the right had caused paralysis on the left side of his body, and the one on the left had nailed that hemisphere's speech centers, causing aphasia.

Then, a couple of months later, in the den, the second stroke had caused more damage to the left side of his brain, causing paralysis on the right side of his body.

Dad's soul could make the decision to move, and his brain could issue the order to his arm or leg, but the order never got there because the links had been severed by the stroke. Dr. Radhakrishnan had implanted two chips, one on each side of the brain. Their function was to replace those broken links so that the orders to move could get out to his body again. Now that the chips had been trained to convey messages to the correct body parts, Dad's paralysis was gone.

But aphasia was a different thing. It wasn't just paralysis of the tongue. It went deeper than that. And you couldn't stimulate it with baboons. It was uncanny that this therapy had worked so well the first time out. Dad sounded like Dad, and said the things that Dad would say, but sometimes when he was talking, she suddenly became disoriented, stopped listening to him, and began to wonder where his words were coming from, whether they were passing through the biochip. Dad could tell when Mary Catherine was doing this; he called it "going neurologist" and it drove him crazy.