Neal Stephenson - Interface

She felt flaccid and out of shape after four years of residency. Every morning she would rise at five and go for a run. Any later in the day, and it would get so warm and sticky that she couldn't really get a good workout. Besides, she had done much worse things to her sleep schedule during residency and so she didn't mind getting up early to do something she felt good about.

Her usual route took her down the street to the city park, where she would take a couple of laps around the Softball diamond and do some stretching on the infield. Then she would head out of town, crossing U.S. 45 and the Illinois Central, and run along one of the farm roads, measuring her distance by counting the crossroads, which came at one-mile intervals. Central Illinois in July was stiflingly humid, and as often as not she found herself running through fog and mist. The early morning sunlight, shining in low, threw a clammy metallic haze over the landscape.

On the morning of the Fourth of July, a shape materialized in front of Mary Catherine as she jogged down the country road. At first she thought it was a car coming toward her in the wrong lane, but then she realized that it was not moving. She thought it must be a car that had broken down. As she got closer she could see a dark shape standing next to the car, motionless, waiting. She unzipped her belt pack and reached into it, making sure that that the stun gun was in there.

It was a small car, low to the ground. A sporty little Mercedes. A big hand-lettered sign was leaning against the rear bumper, printed on a square of poster board. It said, MARY CATHERINE - DON'T MAKE A SOUND!

The figure leaning against the car was Mel Meyer. As Mary Catherine approached, Mel straightened up and turned to face her, holding one finger up to his lips, shushing her.

It was not exactly a warm and affectionate reunion. Mel pulled a small black box from the pocket of his black raincoat. He walked toward Mary Catherine, clicked a switch on the box, and then waved it up and down the length of her body, watching an LED graph built into its top. Every time the box passed near her midsection, the graph shot up to its peak level. Mel moved the little box in a narrowing orbit until he finally zerowed in on her belt pack.

The pack was still unzipped. Mel pulled it open and peered into it, his bald head grazing Mary Catherine's bosom. He nudged the stun gun out of the way and carefully pulled her key chain out. The world's largest keychain had shed a couple of pounds since Mary Catherine had left the hospital, but it was still formidable. Mel turned it over in his hand, waving his little black box over it, and finally zeroed in on the miniature Swiss Army knife.

He disconnected it from the keychain and held it right up next to his black box. The LED graph was pinned at its highest reading.

Then he walked across the road, wound up, and flung the knife off into the middle of a cornfield. He made one more pass over Mary Catherine's body with the little black box. This time the LED meter did not flicker.

"Okay," Mel finally said. He spoke quietly, but it was easy to hear him in the absolute silence of predawn. "You're clean."

"What-"

"If anyone asks, tell them that, uh- " Mel closed his eyes and stood motionless for a few seconds, "you noticed a dog that had broken away and gotten its collar tangled up in a barbed wire fence and you had to take out your knife and cut through his collar to get him loose. In the process you dropped your knife on the ground and forgot to pick it up."

"Hardly plausible."

"It doesn't have to be plausible. Just good enough that no one can call bullshit on you without bring down the wrath of the Governor."

"What was in the knife?"

"A listening device."

"Must have been a small one."

Mel was disappointed. "Are you kidding? Don't be a sap. They can make them the size of fleas now."

"Oh. Sorry."

"Mary Catherine, some heavy shit is going on, and we need to talk. What time you usually get back to the house?"

"Around six."

"Okay, I'll drop you off by the park about then," Mel said. "Hop in."

The passenger door of the Mercedes was already ajar. Mary Catherine, a little shell-shocked, climbed into it. Mel sat down behind the wheel, started the engine, drove thirty feet up the road and turned on to a gravel farm road, a tunnel into the corn. He drove for a quarter of a mile, until the main road was shrouded in the mist.

"Where are we going?"

"Partly we're just getting off the road so people won't see us," Mel said. "Partly I want to show you something." Mel let the Mercedes coast to a stop, set the hand brake, and popped his door open.

A short distance away from the lane was a tree, one of the magnificent, solitary oaks that sprouted from the cornfields every few miles and that was allowed to remain there by the farmers, just because it was beautiful.

"Now I'm totally lost," Mary Catherine said, getting out of the car. She faced Mel over the hood. "You're acting kind of paranoid, Mel, if I can offer a professional opinion."

"I'm fully aware of that," Mel said. "Now, check this out. You might be surprised to know that I have become quite the observer of nature on my little drives down here."

"Nature? I didn't know there was any nature left in downstate."

"Well, you have to look for it, but it's there. Watch the tree." Mel turned toward the oak, cupped his hands around his face like a megaphone, and then did something incredibly un-Mel-like: he made a high-pitched screeching sound, three sharp falsetto cries.

The tree rose into the sky. That's what it looked like, for a moment. A thousand black birds rose from its branches in unison and soared across the cornfield, holding for a moment the shape of the tree, then forming into a tightly organized cloud that twisted around itself, turned inside out, changing directions and leaders but always staying together.

Mel was grinning at her. "You didn't know those birds were there, did you?"

Mary Catherine shook her head no.

"Look at 'em," Mel said. "I've been watching them from my car. Watch how the flock can vanish."

Every bird in the flock snapped into exactly the same banking turn. At a certain point they were all coming directly toward Mel and Mary Catherine, and the flock became nearly invisible as each bird was viewed edge-on. Then Mel made his screeching noise again and they all turned sideways, the hidden flock snapping back into existence, much closer to them, almost merging into a solid wall.

"You know, Mary Catherine, that I have spent my career as an integral part of the military-industrial complex. Whatever the hell that is." Mel waved his arm toward a patch of mist at about three o'clock. "Right over there is Willy's nylon factory, where they made parachutes for the Army. You can't get much more military, or industrial, than that. So I have always scoffed at people who blamed all the world's troubles on the military-industrial complex. But I can't escape the idea that something very big is going on involving our Willy. Something that involves spending an ungodly amount of money."

"The biochip implant is definitely a big deal," Mary Catherine said. She was still mystified by the business with Mel's little black box, and the bird thing made no sense at all, but she decided to play along for now. "The Radhakrishnan Institute definitely has a lot of money behind it. We knew that from the beginning. And we've always been realistic enough to understand that there's an economic dimension to this therapy. If it goes well, the institute and its backers will have a gold mine on their hands."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Mel said, waving his hand dimissively, "that is all a given. That's the Invisible Hand argument - that we're seeing free enterprise in action here. I've been thinking about that argument ever since you came back from your inspection trip. It doesn't hold up under scrutiny."