Interface (3 page)

(applause)

This nation was founded upon a great social contract. A
contract in which people banded together to form
governments in the defense of life, liberty, and property. This
noble experiment has lasted for more than two centuries.
Written into the contract by our founding father Jefferson was
the assertion that if government violates the contract, the
people have the right to overthrow it. This is the basis of the
glorious revolutionary tradition that serves as a shining light of
inspiration for the entire world.

(applause, cheers)

Tonight, in the spirit of Jefferson, I call for a new social
contract. I am proposing to the Congress, and to the American
people, the Declaration of Fiscal Independence.

(applause)

In short, my fellow Americans, I propose as a first step to place
a cap on the percentage of our budget that can go toward
paying interest on the national debt. The exact level of this
cap, and the details of its implementation, are subject to discussion and agreement between my staff and Congress -
and I'm sure that we can look forward to many lively
discussion on the issue.

(laughter)

But regardless of the details, the message is the same. Great sins
demand great forgiveness. Let us now forgive ourselves, so
that we may go forth into the brave new world of the third
millennium with a clean slate and a clear conscience.

(thunderous applause and cheers)

Let the message go forth to the world that the country of the
third millennium will be the United States of America and
that its opening breaths of life were sounded in this noble hall
on this great evening.

(ten-minute standing ovation)

It was an outrage, pure and simple.

Having failed over his entire term in office to do anything about
the budget deficit, the President was now going to patch it up by
allowing America to weasel out of its financial obligations.

Which was bad enough in and of itself; but he was also trying to
portray this measure as an act of Lincolnian fortitude on his part.

Cozzano felt an atavistic desire to fly to Washington, climb up
on that podium, and slap the President across the face. It was the same brute, animalistic impulse that came into his head when he
imagined someone hurting his daughter. His heart thumped
powerfully a few times. He realized that he was being primitive and
stupid, and tried to calm himself down. There was no point in
thinking these things.

Still Cozzano did not sign the letter on his desk - a thank-you
note to the Prime Minister of Japan for his hospitality during
Cozzano's visit last week. His powerful fingers gripped the smooth
inlaid barrel of the pen. The rhodium alloy nib, charged with just the correct amount of French ink, was poised a few millimeters
above the grainy surface of the buttery cotton-fiber stationery that
Cozzano used for personal correspondence. But when Cozzano
moved the pen - that is, when he did the thing in his mind that, ever since he had been inside his mother's womb, had caused his
fingers and his hand to move - nothing happened. His eyes tracked

across the paper, anticipating the pen's course. Nothing. The
President spoke on and on, stopping every few sentences to bask in
adulation.

Cozzano's hand sweated. After a while, then pen fell out of his
fingers. The nib dove into the paper and slid straight across it like a
plow skidding across hard prairie. It left a comet-shaped streak of blue-black on the page, whacked down flat, and rocked side to side
for a few moments, making a gentle diminishing noise.

He cursed under his breath and a strange sound came out of his
mouth, a garbled word he'd never heard before. It sounded so
unfamiliar that he tried to look up, thinking that someone else might be in the room. But no one was here; he had spoken the
word himself.

When he moved his head it threw him off balance and pulled
him toward the left. His left arm had gone completely limp. He saw
it slide off the desk, but he didn't quite believe it, because he didn't
feel it move. The cufflink, a cheap hand-me-down from his father, popped against the sharp edge of the tabletop. Then his arm was
swinging at his side, eased to a halt by the slight mechanical friction
of his elbow and shoulder joints.

He slumped back into the chair's comfortable, Cozzano-shaped
recesses. His right arm slid off the desk as he did so and he found
that he could move it. He was sitting comfortably in his chair now,
sagging leftward. He saw his intercom and knew that he could
punch the button and call Marsha. But it was not clear what he
should say to her.

His eyes drooped half shut, the sound of the roaring, stomping,
howling, and applauding Congress closed in on him like a nail keg
lowering over his head, and in his confusion, he lost his will. He
was entirely too tired to do anything, and why bother to fight it?
He had accomplished enough for several lifetimes. The only thing he'd missed out on so far was having some grandchildren.

That, and become President, which he was going to do before
the year 2000. But he wasn't sure if he really wanted that awful job
anyway.

2

The State of the Union was never a big event in Cacher,
Oklahoma. Forty-eight-year-old Otis Simpson yawned and looked at the wall clock, just for the record. It was 02:46:12 Greenwich
Mean Time. He turned the sound off. The speech had devolved
into endless waves of applause. Commentators were beginning to
break into the sound track in hushed, solemn tones, stating the
obvious: "the President shaking hands with congressional leaders as
he makes his way out of the room." Soon the analysts would come
on and tell Otis what he had just watched, and Otis definitely didn't
need that. The only opinions that mattered would be coming in via
fax and modem during the next few hours. His job was to stay
awake in the meantime. So he triggered the other monitor and
began to keep one eye on an HBO flick, already in progress.

Otis had inherited his mother's tendency toward bulk, his father
Otho's awkward looks, and a light regard for basic hygiene. The
many folds in his ample frame contained an inexhaustible supply of
sweat-blackened lint balls, and his thinning hair failed to conceal
the skin ailments that plagued his scalp. He had never married. His
mother had died giving birth to him. He served as a trusted assistant
on his father's work, the full extent of which he never fully
understood.

Otho Simpson, eighty-six, had, as was his pattern, gone to bed
at 00:00:00 Greenwich Mean Time. This time was as good a
bedtime as any other and was easy to remember. Otho and Otis
lived belowground, in a former lead mine, and did not pay much
attention to the diurnal cycle upstairs. Their job was to gather and
respond to information from all over the world, from all twenty-

four time zones, and so there was not much point in trying to hew
to a particular schedule. Otho was spare and gaunt, hampered by
persistent urinary tract infections that filled whatever room he was
in with a disconcerting odor and caused continual pain. Unlike his
son, Otho had a mind that, had he chosen, could have earned him
a Nobel Prize in economics or physics or at least made him a very rich man in a more conventional sense. Instead, he had become an
accountant of sorts, and spent his life looking after a body of investments with a total cash value in the neighborhood of thirty
trillion U.S. dollars.

These assets did not belong to any one specific person or entity,
as far as Otho could tell. They belonged to a coordinated inter-
national network of investors. Otho didn't know who these people
were. He wasn't supposed to know and he probably wasn't
supposed to think about it. But he did think about it from time to
time, and he had drawn some conclusions based on circumstantial
evidence. Most of them were individuals, many were families;
some were corporations. Their net worths varied from a few
million dollars up to tens of billions. Judging from the hours when they liked to do business, most of them must be living in American
and European time zones, with a few in the time zones that were
used by Japan, Hong Kong, and Australia. He only knew one member of this organization by name, one Lady Guenevere
Wilburdon; she was his contact and his boss.

In the last half century, especially after the death off his wife in
1948, Otho had rarely left Cacher. Several times a week he would
hobble on to the lift, ride it several hundred feet straight up to the surface and go for a stroll through the ruins of the town, taking in
what passed for fresh air in Cacher and feeling the sun on his skin.
But he felt most comfortable down below, in the subterranean
capsule that was his home, surrounded by twenty feet of solid
reinforced concrete, breathing filtered air and drinking distilled
water.

The capsule had been built during the early fifties by a huge
international contractor called Maclntyre Engineering. It was built
to exactly the same set of specifications used for the control capsules
of Minuteman silos - easy enough, since Maclntyre had con
structed most of those. Any information that could conceivably
influence the performance of the economy - public and
proprietary, open and secret, from hard data to vicious gossip - was
funneled into the capsule over a variety of communications links.
Otho read every word of it and used it to manage the investments
of the Network. His life was rather solitary and he had not seen a
movie in a theater since
The Sound of Music,
but he did not care; the
honor of being the anonymous manager of a significant fraction of
the assets of what used to be called the Free World sufficed to give
him a value-laden life.

Several hours after the conclusion of the State of the Union
address, at 06:00:00 GMT, a digitized chord sounded from one of
the workstations, waking Otis up. A window materialized on the screen and filled with columns of numbers. This was normal; it
happened every day at this time.

A chorus of faint humming noises was emanating from a stainless
steel rack carrying several dozen identical fax machines. Otis was
surprised to note that nearly all of the machines suddenly had long
strips of paper dangling out of them, and several were still active. Most of his father's clients took a hands-off approach and rarely, if
ever, bothered him with specifics.

Otis went to the workstation and scanned the numbers: a
statistical summary of how the Network's investments had performed during the last twenty-four hours, and initial responses to the State of the Union Address from the stock exchanges in Delhi,
Novosibirsk, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo. All of the capital
markets were sharply down. Commodities, especially gold, were
soaring uncontrollably.

The digital clock on the wall clicked to 06:10. Otis went in to
wake up Otho. Otho and Otis slept in steel-framed bunk beds in a small room just off the communications center.

"Daddy, the figures for yesterday are in."

Otho sat up in bed without hesitation, as if he'd never been
asleep. Another workstation was next to him on a bedside table. He
reached out with one withered hand, grabbed a mouse, and chose

a few commands from the menus on the screen. A copy of the
financial tables materialized. He put on a pair of extremely thick
glasses that made his eyes look the size of baseballs.

The numbers for the first part of the day weren't bad. But the
State of the Union address had changed all that.

"We got a lot of faxes too," Otis said, handing his father a thick sheaf of slick, curly paper, covered with notes from all over the
world, many handwritten.

"Jesus Christ," Otho said, "what did that son of a bitch say?"

"Daddy, I turned the sound off on him and watched an HBO movie."