Interface (61 page)

"Yeah, I heard of that."

"Well, here's your chance to have a look at one." Aaron Green
pulled something out of his briefcase.

It looked like a super high-tech watch or something. Like some
kind of secret military thing that a commando in a movie would
wear.

The band of the watch was not just a strip of leather or anything like that. It was made of hard black plastic ventilated with lots of holes. It was huge, about three inches wide. It consisted of several
plates of this hard black plastic stuff
hinged together so that it would curve around the wrist.

Instead of having just one clockface on the top surface, it had a
whole little screen type of thing, just like on a digital watch except that it wasn't showing anything right now, just gray and blank. And
in addition to that there were a few other raised black containers
molded to the outer surface of the watchband, but they didn't have any screens or buttons or anything like that, they were just blank,
and must have contained batteries or something.

"Shit," Floyd said, "what the hell is it?"

"Most of the time it's a digital watch. Part of the time, it's a
television set, complete with a little speaker for sound."

"Can I get Whiplash games on it?"

"I'm afraid not. The TV will only show one type of program and one type only, and that is political programming having to do with
the election."

"Shit, I knew there was a catch."

"That's why we're offering you the money. Because this is not
all fun and games. Some responsibility falls on your shoulders as part
of this deal."

Floyd Wayne Vishniak thought that if Aaron Green were not trying to pay him ten thousand dollars, he might throw him down
the stairs and jump on him out in the yard and mess him up a little
bit. He did not appreciate the fact that this little man, who was
about the same age as him, and maybe a bit younger, was lecturing
him about responsibility. It was the kind of thing his dad used to
say to him.

But for now he was going to be cool. He put his feet up on the
table next to the briefcase, sat back, raised his eyebrows, peered at
Aaron Green through the smoke of his cigarette. "Well, for ten
thousand bucks I guess I could be responsible."

"Think of it as a part-time job. It'll take maybe ten minutes of
your time every day. It doesn't prevent you from having other jobs.
And it pays very, very well."

"What do I got to do in this job?"

"Watch TV."

Floyd laughed. "Watch TV? On this little wristwatch thing?"

"Exactly. Now, most of the time, it'll just act like a digital
watch." Green pressed a button on the face of the wristwatch and
the screen began to show black numerals on a gray background,
giving the current time and date. "This is just a convenience for
you," he explained. "But from time to time, something like this
will happen."

The watch emitted a piercing beep. The numerals on the tiny
screen disappeared and were replaced by a color-bar test pattern.

"Whoa, it's in color!" Floyd said.

"Yeah. Of course, you can't see any color when it's pretending
to be a wristwatch. But in TV mode, it's just like a small color
television set."

After a couple of seconds, the test pattern was replaced by a
videotape of John F. Kennedy giving his "Ask not what your
country can do for you" speech.

"This is just a little canned demonstration. Once the program
gets underway, it'll show you coverage of campaign events.
Debates, new conferences, and so on."

"Why don't I just watch 'em on my own TV set?"

"Because we're going to pipe our own coverage directly to you,
through this watch. We might want you to see some events that the
networks wouldn't cover, so we have to generate the programming
ourselves. Besides, we think we'll get better compliance this way."

"Compliance?"

"Suppose you're out of the house. Like maybe going to a
Whiplash game. You wouldn't be able to watch normal TV. But
with this PIPER watch, you can watch it wherever you are."

"PIPER?"

"That's the name of this program."

"How much of this stuff do I have to watch?"

"Many days there won't be anything at all. We might show you
fifteen minutes or half an hour of programming a few times a week.
Sometimes it'll be a little more intense. The only time when we'll
really give you a lot of stuff to watch will be during the conventions
in July and August."

"What else do I gotta do? You call me up and ask me questions
about this stuff, or what?"

"That's it. Just watch the TV programs."

"That's it?"

"Yes."

"Then how do you know what my opinion is? I thought the
whole idea was to get my opinion."

"It is. But we can do that electronically."

"How?"

"Through the PIPER watch." Green reached into his briefcase
and pulled out a videotape. "I see you have a VCR in here. You should watch this tape. It'll explain how everything works."

"I don't get it."

"The PIPER watch does more than just show you campaign
events. It also monitors your reactions. You ever go to a mall or an
amusement park and see one of those machines where you drop in
a quarter and it gives you your biorhythms, or your emotional state,
or something like that?"

"There's one down at Duke's Tavern that gives you your sex
rating."

"Oh." Green seemed embarrassed. "How does that work?"

"You grab this big rod sticking out of the top and it measures
your sex quotient and flashes it up on the screen. I always get a real
high score."

"Okay, it's probably a galvanic skin response device."

"Say what?"

"This PIPER watch has the same kind of thing built into it as
your sex quotient machine. So it could provide a twenty-four hour
a day readout of your sex quotient, if that was what we wanted."

"Why would you want my sex quotient?"

"We probably wouldn't to tell you the truth - no offense!"
Green laughed nervously. "But by using the same type of detectors,
we can get a sense of how you are reacting to the programming
shown on the TV screen. That information is piped directly back to us over the radio."

"So, it gives you my emotions. Tells you what my body's
thinking."

Green smiled. "That's a good way to describe it. What your
body is thinking. I like that."

"What about my opinions, though?"

Green shook his head and frowned. "I'm not sure quite what
you mean."

"Well, this tells you how my emotions respond, right?"

"Yes."

"But that's not the same as an opinion, is it?"

Green seemed to be baffled, lost. "It's not? I'm not sure what
you're getting at."

"Well, maybe I watch some guy giving a speech. Maybe he's real
good at giving speeches and so my emotions are good. Then, I'm
lying awake in bed in the middle of the night, thinking about what
he said, and suddenly it doesn't seem so logical any more, and I can
see all kind of holes in his argument and I change my mind and
decide he's just another pencil-neck, media-slick son of a bitch out
to take my money and send the jobs to Borneo. So my final opinion
of the guy is that he's a bastard. But all you know is that I had a good emotional response to his speech."

Floyd knew that he had Green now. Clearly Green, the big-city, high-paid intellectual, had never thought about this. He had never
anticipated that someone might make this objection. He did not
know what to say. "We don't have the technology to read that sort
of thing," he finally said, speaking very slowly and carefully. "We
don't have any way to read your mind in the middle of the night
and find out that you think Senator So-an-so is going to send your
job to Borneo."

"Humph," Floyd said, shaking his head.

"But PIPER is just one way we have of getting information," Green said, picking up momentum now. Floyd had the distinct
impression that he was just trying to talk his way out of the tight
corner that Floyd had backed him into. "Needless to say, we are
receptive to any kind of input that you might want to give us. So if you have these thoughts in the middle of the night-"

"I do," Floyd affirmed, "all the time. They come to me like a
thief in the night."

"-in that case, you would be more than welcome to provide
those to us."

"My phone service got cut off," Floyd said. "But I could write
you letters.

"That would be absolutely fine," Green said. "Our address is printed right there on the videotape. You go ahead and send us as
many letters as you like. We'd like to hear your opinions on any
subject."

"So I gotta wear this thing twenty-four hours a day?"

Green shrugged.
 
"Just when you're awake."

"And what else do I gotta do to get this ten thousand bucks?"

"Absolutely nothing."

"Absolutely nothing?"

"Just get up in the morning and put it on, every day from now
until Election Day. If you agree to this, I give you a thousand
dollars right here and now. We'll be able to tell, by monitoring the
signals from the watch, whether you're wearing it or not. As long
as you keep it on during all of the programming segments that we
broadcast, we will continue to send you a thousand dollars a month.
On Election Day, we send you the remainder of the ten thousand."

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?"

36

"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.