Interface (66 page)

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 note
book 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

39

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 hand
ful 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.

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."