Interface (4 page)

"Probably not a bad idea. Pull up the CNN monitor tape and rerun the speech for me - no, hold it, I can't stand the thought of watching him. Download a transcript off the news wire."

"Okay, Daddy."

Ten minutes later, Otis brought back the transcript. Otho
scanned through it, looking for a few key words, and went almost instantly to the concept of forgiveness. Deep vertical crevices appeared in the middle of his brow and he let out a feeble stream
of air through pursed lips.

By this time Otis knew he was in for a long night, so he turned
on the bedside TV set and punched up CNBC.

"That bastard has just got every bull and bear in the world going
insane." Otho set the faxes down on his bedside table and slipped
his feet into a pair of slippers by the bed. "But he's half right. This country has problems. Someone needs to do something or all of its
investors will get screwed."

"Investors?"

"Yup. America used to have citizens. Then its government put
it up for sale. Now it's got investors. You and I work for the
investors."

Otis regarded his father with the mixture of respect, fear, and awe that he had shown since he was a child. "What's going on,
Dad?"

"It was just a matter of time before some politician actually became stupid enough to mention forgiving the national debt."

"Like Senator Wright?"

"Yeah. Who died in a plane crash. But obviously the President
thought it sounded like a catchy idea."

"How are you going to handle this, Daddy?"

"Crank up the word-processing software. I'm going to do the
first round-robin report since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is too big for me to just fly off the handle - I have to provide the Network
some options."

Otho's joints creaked and ground audibly in the nearly perfect
silence of the capsule as he made his way out of bed, over to a stainless steel toilet, and from there into the control center. He sat down in front of a large high-resolution monitor and began jotting down a few options, as they came into his head. Later, he could rework them into deathless prose:

a.
    
Pull investment out of the U.S. national debt - absorbing the
loss immediately - and explore new areas, such as purchasing the
larger part of the former Soviet Union;

b.
    
Do nothing and hope that the American political structure
will muddle through;

c.
    
Intervene directly in American politics in order to return it to
a certain sort of stability and to insure our long-term investment in
the debt;

d.
    
Suggestions?

He then directed his system to send out the message in encrypted
burst-mode fax transmissions. Beyond vague geographical indi
cations, he did not know to whom the faxes would go. When he
had taken control of the Network's finances fifty years ago, it had
been stipulated that all communication would be to code-identified
participants.

The returns came in remarkably quickly. In the aftermath of the
President's speech, everyone important was awake right now,
regardless of time zone.

With the exception of a few Middle Easterners who wanted the
Network to invest massively in the Muslim-dominated republics of
the former Soviet Union, most of the Network liked the third
option. The clincher was a fax from Lady Wilburdon, the acting

chairperson, who noted, "You have done well for us, and we place
our trust in you. Put your country back in working order."

He spent a few minutes doodling with an old, well-worn slide
rule. Back in the early seventies he had purchased a couple of the
first pocket calculators and, as a mathematician, been horrified by
their illusive precision. The slide rule was a far more trustworthy
and illuminating guide to the numerical world.

The United States had borrowed ten trillion dollars since the
onset of Reaganomics. A significant fraction of that debt was now
owned by the Network. Those loans were supposed to bring in a
certain fixed amount of interest every year. The cap proposed by
the President would reduce that income by an amount on the order
of a few tens of billions of dollars per year - possibly even more, if
the country went into a deeper crisis and made further cuts.

In the long run, then, the Network stood to loose hundred of
billions of dollars from the measures that the President had just
proposed. Otho was therefore justified in spending real money
here - easily in the tens of billions. This was more than enough to
throw an election. Perot had nearly done it for just a few hundred
million.

Otho knew perfectly well that his Network was not the only
organization of its type in the world, and that he was not the only person running through this sort of a calculation tonight. It wasn't
enough just to mess around with an election; everyone would be getting into that game during the next few months. The important thing was to do it well, and not just on an ad hoc basis but as part
of a coherent long-range strategy.

If the Network planned carefully and wasn't too obvious about
it, it could go far beyond managing the outcome of this one election. It could actually erect a system that would enable
America's investors to have a permanent say in the management of their assets. It would eat up a lot of the Network's liquidity, but by
moving some money around, Otho would be able to free up
enough to assemble quite a little war chest. The markets had all gone to hell anyway, providing a perfect cover for the enormous shifts he would have to make in the next couple of days.

The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that
it was a sound decision. He should have done it a long time ago.
The fact that he hadn't probably proved that he was obsolete, or
something.

The United States of America had severed its purpose. It was
time to cash her in. Like a big creaky old corporation, her
individual parts, intelligently liquidated, were worth more than the
whole. She still had the best damn military money could buy, as the
Iraqis had discovered during the Gulf War, and she still came up
with new ideas better than anyone. Under new, fiscally responsible
management, she could still perform well, pay her debts, and
provide a tolerable standard of living for her citizens. Otho needed
to make sure that that management was provided by the Network
and not by one of the other entities with which the Network
competed.

He sent out a fax to Mr. Salvador telling him to swing by Cacher
for a face-to-face. That was the hard part; he had never been good
at the interpersonal stuff. Then he got down to the work he did
better than anyone else in the world: sending out sell orders,
shuffling assets, arranging his pieces on the board.

In simple numerical terms, liquidating the Constitution of the
United States was not the biggest or the most difficult job Otho had
ever undertaken. For some reason it made him nervous anyway.
Since the Kennedy assassination he'd had nothing but contempt for
politicians. But he wasn't attacking a particular president here; he
was attacking the institution of the presidency. Meddling with
primal forces. He moved slowly, made mistakes in his arithmetic,
forgot things, kept going back on his own decisions. It was an unfamiliar sensation to be agonizing about his job. Images kept
coming unbidden into his mind, clouding his thoughts: FDR
declaring war on Japan, the moon landings, D-Day, football games
on Thanksgiving, Lou Gehrig's farewell speech.

More than once his fingers came to a dead stop on the keyboard as these and more personal, more emotional memories surged
uncontrollably through his mind. He wondered if senility had
finally touched him. Finally he had to get up and hobble over to

their little kitchen and take the bottle of vodka out of the freezer.
He knew that he was doing the right thing here, that if he didn't
someone else would. But it hurt.

By 10:00:00 GMT, the communications room was once again
quiet. Otis woke up from a short nap and went in to check on
Otho.

From the dark room, a thin voice almost chanted, "Well you
know, this country once worked real well, when we had values that
people believed in."

Otis saw the empty vodka bottle on the table, still fogged with
condensation, and realized that his father had just gotten drunk for
the first time in three decades. "What do you mean by values?"

"They were code words like
honesty, hard work, self- reliance .
myths, actually, to motivate the people to accept the natural
inequities found in a market system. In the old days, contract was sacred: divorce, bankruptcy, fraud, were taboos for the average people. The rogues of course, the robber barons were beyond that.
We have to return the country to those values so that there won't
even be a thought to renege on the debt."

"Daddy . . ."

"Yes, boy?"

"How will you do it?"

"I think I'll hand this one off to Mr. Salvador. He's an ambitious fella. He obviously wants to take my place a couple of years down the road, or whenever Lady Wilburdon decides to replace me. He's
an asshole, and there's a good chance he'll get killed or ruined
trying to do this. And if he survives, he'll be a better man for it."

"Daddy?"

"Yes, boy."

"Good night, Daddy."

3

"Look, it's
not
like this is
some kind of a
-"
aaron green said.
Then a cautious instinct took control and he brought himself up
short. He was looking over the epaulets of the security guard at a
large red sign on the wall: DO NOT MAKE JOKES OR
COMMENTS REGARDING WEAPONS OR EXPLOSIVE
DEVISES.

"It's not a
what?"
said the guard in front of Aaron, a wiry older
white man. Aaron was still trying to decide where to begin when
the guard spoke the dreaded words: "Step over here with me, sir."

Aaron followed the guard over to a table, just beyond the picket
line of metal detectors, still within the dreaded security zone.
Beyond it lay the concourse, a pacifist Utopia full of weaponless
citizens streaming in an orderly fashion toward their gates. In the
overpriced bars and overpriced restaurants, business-suited travelers
stood, drinks in hand, below television sets, watching the President
deliver his State of the Union address.

"What do we have there, sir?" said the guard behind the table,
the chief of this beady-eyed, polyethnic truth squad. He was a very
wide, convex black man with a deep voice and he was trying to
sound open-minded and jolly. He was wearing an ID flasher with
the name BRISTOLS, MAX.

"It's a piece of electronic equipment," Aaron said, setting the
case on the table.

"I see. And you can open this up and show it to me?" Bristol
said.

The case was largely full of gray foam rubber. A rectangular
cavity the size of a couple of shoe boxes had been excavated from

the center. Filling this cavity was a white steel box with ventilation
slots cut into the top. The box was exactly the right width to fit into a standard electronics rack.

The plan was that one day, a whole lot of these things would be
sacked together in racks, racks lined up next to each other,
hundreds in a single room. The room and the equipment would be owned by big media companies in L.A. They would buy all of the
stuff from Green Biophysical Systems, of which Aaron Green was
the founder, chief technologist, president, and treasurer.

With the lid of the case open, the upper half of the faceplate was
visible. It had no controls, knobs, or anything, just a single red LED
with the word
power
printed underneath it, and, in big letters, the
Green Biophysical Systems logo, and the acronym IMIPREM.