The Media Candidate (32 page)

Could he possibly know about the secret files
I read
, she thought.
How could he? But why else would he be
here?
Her mind fogged over like the smoke that fled from
Sherwood. “I guess I have. … I remember once—”

“You, of course, do not smoke a pipe, Burns, but
you may have had such an experience with a tennis racket or some
such object from which you demand high performance. But an even
more curious thing about a pipe is that, despite its early
disappointments, it might yet turn out to be a treasure. Sometimes
a pipe is of such quality that it can actually temper itself under
the stress of heat. Maybe the low-density layer of wood carbonizes
so that the pipe actually turns out to be much finer than one that
might not have undergone the extra stress. The self healing process
under stress can be extraordinarily effective at producing quality
that might be unachievable any other way.”

A couple unresponsive draws made Sherwood aware
that his pipe had gone out. He shook his head and reached for his
tobacco pouch, then continued his slow discourse. “You have some
legitimate concerns about your party. Let me try to put these
things in perspective.

“Businesses are successful when they are
operated with careful consideration and analysis rather than with
emotion and hype. Our political process seems to have an abundance
of emotion and hype. Let me assure you that nothing could be
farther from the truth. The gimmicks and the hype are only on the
surface.

“Do you know who understands the thousands of
new laws passed every year, Burns? Not the masses; they have time
for only a few grabbers that the politicians throw them like the
zookeeper at feeding time. One might think the politicians
understand what they have created. Sound reasonable, Burns? …
Wrong. The average law has so many amendments, modifications, and
exceptions that it is a rare politician who knows anything of
substance about the document they make the law of the land, binding
everywhere and for all time. So who understands these laws? It is a
select group called lobbyists. Only they care enough to wade
through the piles to see what the law means to their employers.
They support or oppose laws based on careful analysis, as
inscrutable as the laws might be.

“It is a strange situation. Lobbyists and
politicians write the bills to satisfy the special interest groups.
But there are so many groups, and each bill has to have something
for each of them. The beauty for the politicians is that the bills
are so complex, it is easy to tell their constituents what they
think they would like to hear. The whole idea is for the
politicians to appear to be doing something, anything, to solve the
perceived problems of the day.”

This was allowed to settle in while he tended to
his pipe. Guinda thought of herself as astute, but this soliloquy
revealed the raw edges of a system that she thought she understood.
This was nothing like the explanations that graced the textbooks in
her office.
Is this really the way it is?
she thought.
But how can I believe anything this creep says?

Sherwood completed the relighting ceremony and
settled back in his chair. “The Party has made remarkable progress
with holographic virtual reality with the promise of such realism
that it may someday become impossible to tell the difference
between it and the real person. The objective is to make
politician-to-human interactions so realistic that the human will
forget he is talking to a hologram, not to the real politician.

“The next step is to totally replace the
politician person with a 3-D image and program its responses so
that all errors previously made by politicians can be eliminated.
The Party has sometimes been embarrassed by the antics of poorly
chosen politicians. Some of them do not have sufficient
intelligence to even be politicians. Those kinds of embarrassments
will be avoided in the future.

“Our final improvement will be the joint
agreement between the two major parties to work together in a more
cooperative way to preclude the dysfunctional environment of
head-to-head campaigns. COPE, of course, will continue to protect
the rights of the electorate, no matter what the environment.”

Guinda responded with disbelief, staring into
the carpet, searching it for answers while Sherwood tamped the
glowing ashes in his pipe. “You mean what Townsend said was right.
They’re going to get rid of the real politicians and replace them
with … ?” She sank back into her chair, intent on some code woven
into the carpet.

“Politics is following the evolution of other
parts of society. In previous eras, the quality of products was so
undependable that products had to be visually inspected before
purchase. With the advent of mass production and corporate images,
consumers could be assured that a quality bar of soap, not a piece
of chalk, lay within the package. Producers soon realized that the
package was what the consumer bought, not the product inside.

“Politicians also began to understand packaging.
As the candidates became more efficiently and attractively
packaged, they also seemed to become mass-produced—commoditized, as
the MBAs call it. Each one subscribed to the same basic
collectivism but with subtle differences tuned to the array of
special interests that supported them. All this focus on marketing
made doing your civic duty more fun, like shopping.

“Now we are engaged in a great transition that
will alter the form and function of politics. We have homogenized
the product by replacing its human variability with a machine
protocol. No longer will the package be marred by the iniquity that
human packages proffer. The total product is now so agreeable that
it will not even matter if the consumers wake up to the charade.
They have transmuted, and their future is our history.”

He allowed the smoke to clear between them.
Guinda’s eyes rose to meet his.

“And now there is the death of Halvorsen and how
that might relate to COPE. I can only tell you that COPE takes a
very serious view of anarchy. In COPE’s view, anyone advocating the
overthrow of our form of government with romanticism such as that
of the last century, is an anarchist. We will not allow the
progress we have made to be compromised.

“When we spoke Friday morning in your office, I
commented that you had great potential in the Party. Your
performance reports have been quite favorable, the highest ratings.
I believe you have the internal qualities to temper yourself, to
make yourself better than you were.

“I am rarely wrong in such judgments. I expect
this pipe to become my favorite because I am confident in my
ability to make such considered selections, in spite of its initial
failings. But if it ultimately disappoints me, it will become just
another ember in my fireplace, just a glow that flickers out with
the passage of time and is disposed with the residue of other
common wood.”

Sherwood rose and retreated from his cloud
toward the bay window. He didn’t notice that the wrens were gone;
he didn’t notice that the gray cat was asleep under a bush. His
consciousness had once more gone dormant. His instinct was now
concentrating on Elliott. The cat suddenly raised its head.
Sherwood’s instinct prepared to arouse his consciousness. The cat
lowered its head, embedding its nose further into the fur of its
belly. Sherwood’s instinct canceled its message.

Meanwhile Guinda turned over the mass of new
data, processing the events of the last two days, picturing how her
nipples might look on TV and how lighting might accent her feminine
subtleties, wondering if Halvorsen really was an anarchist and if
she herself would now be labeled one, picturing herself in a bright
TV studio, her teeth shining, her golden ponytail bouncing, her
other assets performing.

She and Sherwood were both surprised by his
turning about and uttering. “Now we must consider how to dispose of
Townsend. He will be expecting you shortly.”

The morning overcast thinned, and streaks of sun
escaped through the white curtain blanketing the landscape. From
his window on the third floor, Elliott could look over the lawn
down the hill and past the front gate to the street beyond. He
tried to formulate some plan among the thoughts that crowded in for
attention.

An army of professional killers was chasing him,
and even if he could evade them today, what would he do tomorrow?
Even if he were to somehow climb from the well that swallowed him,
there was another well just as deep beyond that. There seemed to be
no solutions, only optional paths toward terminating the
struggles.

“But of course,” he spoke, “those are still
solutions, aren’t they. Even if I’m dead, and Guin is dead, and the
whole world is bullshit. That’s a solution, isn’t it? … Yes,
that’ll work, and it’s the most likely outcome.”

He was relieved that he could say it. It was
refreshing for him to know that even his death at the hands of some
soulless robot, would raise him out of the well. He must put up
this last struggle, even though uncertain what he was struggling
for. But first, he had to get to Guinda to find out whether she was
dead or alive before he pushed for the final solution.

He suddenly took a step back from the window,
his face pale as he confronted his enemy again. There was another
gray car parked on the street just outside the gate. A chill
crawled up his bones. He was probably the only one in the building
looking out a window on this Sunday morning. It was therefore
likely that the robot had spotted this figure of a man and may have
identified it as Elliott. He imagined the optical sensors with
their magnification and sensitivity cranked up to maximum, staring
at him, processing images, calculating kill probabilities for
various scenarios, optimizing how it could use its sensors most
effectively.

“That’s it!” he shouted. “I think I have a
surprise for you.” All this robotic attention focused on him gave
him an idea, a way to get revenge, if revenge against an object is
possible, but more important, a way to give himself an edge in the
upcoming confrontation.

Elliott disappeared down the hall and came back
in a few minutes with a cart full of some science-fiction looking
equipment from his basement laboratory. He set up the device in
front of the window and pointed it toward the little car. He set
the MODE switch to CONTINUOUS and the POWER control to a very low
setting. Now he was prepared to engage his enemy on more favorable
terms. The enemy had blundered into a world where its diminutive
target had some leverage. If Elliott understood nothing else about
this strange world, he understood physics. And he was about to give
an introductory lesson to his surveillant.

He began whistling the Toreador Song from Carmen
as he fiddled with the cables and the controls. “This morning you
were defeated by an unarmed and unprepared bullfighter. Pardon me;
you might be erroneously programmed to call me a
victim
. The
outcome of the first round undoubtedly surprised both of us. Now
let’s see how the bull does against a bullfighter properly armed
with this little laser.”

Elliott turned the laser on and pointed it
though the window toward the little car. He centered the weak and
harmless beam on the car. “Now, Señor Bull,” he said in his finest
Spanish accent, “I shall give you a brief lesson in optical
physics. You see, when you are looking at me,” he said as he
continued to make last minute adjustments, “you are focusing the
little bit of light reflecting from my body onto the most sensitive
part of your sensor array. Now that I have you centered in this low
power laser beam, I shall just turn it off for a few seconds to let
you get used to not having that extra light in your sensitive
little eyes.”

Elliott stepped in front of the window and waved
at the robot to make sure it was zoomed in and focused on him. “And
now, Señor Bull, take one last look at me, because it will be the
last thing you ever see.” He flipped the MODE switch to SINGLE
PULSE and the POWER control to MAXIMUM, placed his finger on the
FIRE button, closed his eyes tightly, and pushed the button.

A brilliant green flash pierced the window,
rushed over the laboratory lawn in the tiniest fraction of a
second, and ripped into the video system of the robot car, burning
out the sensor as if it had chanced to stare into a million suns.
He repeated the flash several times. “Now, my stupid bull, you
don’t even know why you just went blind, do you. You’re probably
telling your spider friend in the back seat that you have just
experienced a video failure and that he, or is it a she, should
look up here and tell you what is going on. In that event, what’s
bad for the bull is bad for the spider.” Elliott flashed the laser
many more times over a couple minutes to make sure that he had
burned out the visible sensors of both the car and the spider. This
exercise would have little effect on infrared sensors, so he would
still have to contend with those.

With his destructive mission completed, the
levity that surrounded the skirmish vanished. Elliott looked out
the window at the little car and whispered with a hatred that
surprised him, “Try and stop me now, you blind son-of-a-bitch.”

He was soon behind the wheel of one of the lab’s
pickup trucks and rolling down the long driveway. A short distance
from the guardhouse, he stopped where he could clearly see the car.
He kept the windows rolled up so the infrared imager in the car
would not be able to see inside the truck. He let the truck roll a
few feet down the driveway, and to his shock, the little car
responded by moving a few feet toward the driveway.

Elliott’s jaw dropped as he jerked to a stop.
The only sensor it could have left to see me would be the
infrared imager unless I didn’t blind the video after all or unless
the spider’s eyes survived. Maybe I just blinded the center of its
video arrays and it’s smart enough to now limp along with its
peripheral vision. Or maybe it’s just using its IR imager and
betting that I’m the one in this truck.
He drove down nearly to
the guardhouse and halted. The car moved a few feet closer.