Neal Stephenson - Interface

It was Mary Catherine's turn to laugh. "Either way is not fine," she said. "We're talking about Dad."

"No, we're not," Mel said gently, "we're talking about what your dad became when that chip went into his head. And I'm not sure it's the same thing."

This was such a disturbing comment that Mary Catherine decided not to let it sink in just now. "Well, even if he were just another presidential candidate - one way I'm doing good and one way I'm doing evil."

"Leave it to a farmer to see things in those terms," Mel said. "Okay, are you going to do good or evil?"

"Good," Mary Catherine said.

"That's a nice girl," Mel said.

"I think that Dad wants to do good also - whatever you might think," Mary Catherine said.

Mel turned and looked at her face. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"You know," she said, "there are many cases of people who have had strokes and recovered from them."

"I thought the brain tissue was dead. How can you recover from being dead?"

"The dead tissue doesn't recover. But in some cases, other parts of the brain can take over for the parts that died. It takes a lot of work. A lot of therapy. And some luck. But it's been known to happen. There are people who had half of their brains blown out in Vietnam who are walking and talking normally today."

"You don't say. Why didn't you try this with Willy?"

"We did," Mary Catherine said, "but when the chance of a quick fix arose, he opted for that. There's no telling where he would have gone with normal therapy."

"You think he might have come back?"

"The chances are very low," she said. "But remember, he's mixed-brain dominant. People like that have a knack for recovering from these injuries."

"So what are you saying exactly - about Willy wanting to do good?"

"I'm saying that the Network may be able to exert great influence over him through the biochip," she said, "but that under­neath, his brain may be struggling to reassert control. And that if he pursues the proper therapy, we can increase the chances that this will eventually happen."

"What kind of therapy?" Mel said.

"He just has to use his head. That's all," Mary Catherine said. "He has to exercise his brain and his body, in a lot of different ways, and retrain his neural pathways."

"Hell," Mel said, "a presidential campaign's not exactly the place for that."

"Granted," she said, "unless the candidate travels with, dines with, and rooms with a neurologist."

She and Mel locked eyes for a moment.

"You sure?" Mel said.

"Of course I'm sure."

"Last year at about this time I accepted an invitation from the chairman of my party to deliver the keynote speech at their convention, a couple of weeks from today," William A. Cozzano said. "Last night, I telephoned him from my home here in Tuscola and expressed my regrets that I would be unable to participate in that convention in any way, shape, or form - as a keynote speaker, a delegate, or a nominee. And he was gracious enough to accept my apology for this sudden change of plans."

Cozzano finally paused long enough to allow the crowd to detonate - something that they were primed to do, since they had been practicing it under the eye of Cy Ogle's crowd handlers for the last hour and a half. When he finally paused for breath, the freshly painted bleachers surrounding the Tuscola High School football field suddenly bloomed with signs, banners, balloons, confetti, and all the other bright insubstantialities of a political campaign.

"It's not that I bear a grudge against my party, because I don't. In fact, I am still a card-carrying member and expect to remain one, assuming they'll still have me after today."

This line triggered a laugh that developed into a cheer, which built into another flag-waving crescendo.

It looked great. It looked great to Cozzano, to his close friends and family seated around him on the field, and to the three dozen camera crews that had come in from all the networks, major urban markets, and several European and Asian networks.

Until about a month ago, this field had only had one rank of low-rising bleachers, on one side of the field. That was adequate for just about any crowd that the Tuscola Warriors were likely to draw. Then a big donation had come in from the Cozzano family and the bleacher space had been quadrupled, with brand-new ranks installed on both sides of the field. The lighting system had been beefed up to the point where it lit up half the town. Tuscola now boasted the best football field of any town of its size in Illinois.

For today's festivities, a huge podium had been built straddling the fifty-yard line, raised about six feet off the ground. There was enough space for a couple of hundred folding chairs, heavy media support, and one great big red-white-and-blue lectern, massively constructed but nevertheless groaning under the weight of nearly a hundred microphones. Amazingly enough, most of those mikes had arrived preattached to the lectern, were not actually connected to anything, and bore the logos of networks and TV stations that were imaginary or defunct.

Mary Catherine was especially interested to note that Dad now rated a Secret Service detail. Half a dozen of them were clearly visible on and around the podium, which probably meant more circulating through the crowd.

Ogle had arranged the thing in concentric circles. The inner circle consisted of VIPs, friends and family in the folding chairs up on the podium. A few select camera crews and photographers had also been allowed to circulate up here, getting closeup shots. Surrounding the podium was an inner circle of especially hysterical Cozzano fans, sort of an all-American cross section, spiced with a few dozen astonishingly beautiful young women who were not wearing very much in the way of clothing but who were careful to hold up their Cozzano signs and point to their Cozzano skimmers whenever photographers and cameraman pointed lenses in their direction, which was constantly. Banks of high-powered bluish-white floodlights, similar to stadium lights but only a couple of yards off the ground, had been erected on the edges of this crowd, pointed inward so that their light grazed the heads of the Cozzano supporters. At first Mary Catherine had thought that this must be a mistake, and that the technicians would turn the lights toward the podium. But then the Cozzano supporters had held their white COZZANO FOR PRESIDENT signs up above their heads and the light had caught them brilliantly, making them glow like snowflakes in a car's headlights.

Beyond was a broad sweep of open turf where most of the media were stationed, including a raised platform for the TV crews, arranged so that every time they aimed their cameras at the lectern they had to shoot over the unnaturally brilliant field of waving signs, flags, soaring skimmers, mylar balloons, and pumping fists.

The outermost circle, surrounding everything, was a vast sweaty crowd consisting of all the population of Tuscola and then some. Their function here was to hurl up a barrage of noise whenever Cozzano said something mildly interesting, and to provide a colorful backdrop rising up behind him. In fact, the geometry of the bleachers, the lectern, and the main media area was such that it was impossible to get a shot of Cozzano without taking in several hundred supporters in the bleachers behind him, all waving hankies and signs, just like fans seated behind the goalposts at a football game. To make sure that the level of enthusiasm never dropped, the Tuscola High School cheerleading squad had been deployed, in full uniform, in front of one set of bleachers, and the squad from Rantoul was egging on the opposite set of bleachers. Cy Ogle had promised a free set of new uniforms to whichever squad elicited the most noise from their half of the crowd. The Tuscola High School marching band was lined up behind the podium, primed to burst into music whenever the mood seemed right. All of this, combined with the reckless Cozzano supporters setting off strings of fire­crackers amid the crowd; the giant vertical Cozzano banner hanging from the soaring sign of the Dixie Truckers' Home; the circling airplanes trailing more banners; the hovering choppers; the team of three precision skydivers who had skimmed over the podium in formation just before Cozzano was introduced, trailing plumes of red-white-and-blue smoke; and the appearance of William A. Cozzano himself, landing in the home team's end zone in a National Guard chopper and jogging -jogging - across the field, through a tunnel of supporters, slapping hands on either side the whole way - it all added up to a show the likes of which had never been seen in downstate Illinois, and which Guillermo Cozzano could not have imagined when he first came down to toil in the coal mines.