Interface (44 page)

Intense
 
movement
 
and
 
color blossomed
 
on
 
all
 
six
 
of the
monitors. This crack about the Japanese had produced the strongest
emotional response of anything he had said today.

The only problem was how to translate the physical data coming
over the wires into information about their emotional state. That w
as still an inexact science. Seeing the vivid responses on the
computer monitors, Aaron glanced up at the television screens,
trying to read faces.

To some extent, all of them were smiling at Schram's little joke.
But most of the smiles did not look very sincere. They knew he had
made a racist remark at the expense of the Japanese, and they knew
that they were supposed to find it funny, but none of them was
sincerely amused. They were faking it.

Which still didn't tell Aaron why they were
really
thinking. Were
they angered by Schram's display of racism? Did they feel
humiliated to be reminded of Japan's economic success?

"Oh, no wonder," Schram said, "there's no videotape in the
machine. My secretary must have taken it out. That fucking cunt."

Another burst of color and activity hit the computer monitors.
The faces all looked shocked and nervous. But not all of them were
responding in the same way. In particular, the women responded
completely differently from the men.

Schram left the room, leaving the subjects alone with each other.

Once again, Aaron heard the shuffling and clunking noise out in
the hallway. He stuck his head out the door. It was a janitor
emptying metal wastebaskets into a rolling dumpster. The janitor
was some kind of an astonishing carnival freak; he was hunched over and he dragged one leg as he walked, and something didn't look entirely right about his complexion.

"Jesus," Aaron mumbled under his breath.

The janitor turned to look at him. He must have been some kind
of a burn victim. His skin was rough, mottled, striated, like a pizza.
He had no neck per se; his chin seemed to be welded directly to his
chest by a long sheet of skin that had contracted as it healed.

He turned into the room where the subjects were seated,
dragging his dumpster behind him. Aaron ducked back into the
monitor room to see all of the computer screens going wild. The
six faces reacted almost in unison: they glanced up, their eyes
widened, they gaped and stared for an instant, then manners got the
better of them and they pretended not to notice. But Aaron could see the emotional impact of this spectacle continuing to simmer
away beneath the surface. He could see them sneaking quick
glances at the janitor, then looking away, ashamed by their own
curiosity.

Within a few seconds, the janitor had finished emptying the
wastebaskets and moved on down the hallway. The subjects sat
quietly, shooting looks back and forth, daring one another to say
something.

Schram came back into the room. "Well, my fucking secretary
took an unauthorized break. She obviously thinks she can use the
bathroom any time she feels like it."

This brought up lots of interesting stuff on the computer screens,
particularly among the women.

"But I rummaged through her desk and I found this videotape in
her bottom drawer. It's unlabeled, but I think it's the right one."

Aaron's monitor room had a seventh TV screen showing him the
same program that the subjects were watching. Until now it had
just been showing static. At this point, the static was replaced by a
moving image.

It was a videotape of a woman sucking a man's penis.

"Whoops," Schram said: "How do you stop this thing?"

The image changed. Now it was a woman sandwiched between two men on a large, heart-shaped waterbed, having simultaneous
anal and vaginal sex.

"Goddamn new VCR. I'm not familiar with the controls,"
Schram said. "Hang on a second, I think I heard my secretary
coming in, she knows how to work this thing. I'm really sorry
about this."

Schram left the room for a minute or so, long enough for the
woman on the heart-shaped waterbed to reach an electrifying
climax. Both of her lovers withdrew and reached a simultaneous, on-screen orgasm. Then a new sequence began: a man tied to an
overhead pipe being whipped by a woman in black leather.

About this time, Schram and his secretary got back into the
room.

"Oh, Jesus," the secretary said, "where did you get this? Where
did this come from? Turn this thing off."

The pornography stopped rolling and was replaced by static.
Aaron could hear the sound of the videotape being ejected from the
VCR.

"I found it in your desk," Schram said. "I was trying to find the
political spots, which you so brilliantly lost."

"Oh. And that gives you the right to go through my personal
things?"

"Hey. What you do on your own time is your own goddamn
business. If this kind of stuff turns you on, you're welcome to have
it around your home. But when you bring it to work-"

"You
bastard!"
the secretary screamed. "You
bastard! just
because
you couldn't get it up with me! That's why you did this!" Then she
burst into sobs and ran out of the room, screaming in humiliation.

"I couldn't get it up with you because you were such a frigid bitch!" Schram yelled down the hallway.

Aaron had long since stopped paying attention to any of the
monitors. He was just staring at the wall, listening to the speaker, as
if it were some kind of intense radio play.

"I'm sorry about that, folks," Schram said. "To tell you the truth,
I've always harbored a suspicion that she was one of those Anita
Hill types. You know, comes on real sexy and then turns around
ten years later and says you've been harassing her."

Out in the hallway, Aaron could hear the secretary's high heeled shoes clacking and popping as she returned. He stuck his head out
the door.

She was storming back toward the interview room, her face a
ghoulish vision of streaked mascara. And she was carrying a gun.
Aaron withdrew his head and slammed the door.

"This is what you deserve, you son of a bitch!" she screamed,
and then three quick explosions overwhelmed the speaker system.

"I should kill you all, because you're witnesses!" the secretary
said. "Don't anybody move from your chairs!"

The only thing Aaron could do now was look at the TV
monitors. The subjects' faces had turned into sweating, distorted
fright masks. Their eyes were wide open, darting back and forth, they were blinking rapidly, their jaws trembled, several held their
hands over their faces, trying not to scream.

One of them - the debt-hounded wage slave - suddenly held
both of his hands straight out in front of his face and turned his head
to one side, bracing for the impact of a bullet.

A metallic click sounded from the monitor speaker.

"Shit!" the secretary said. "I'm out of bullets."

This revelation triggered a burst of emotions on the computer screens that was more vivid than anything seen yet.

"Freeze!" another voice shouted, a deep male voice. "Nobody
move! Put the weapon on the floor, ma'am."

Aaron couldn't see what was happening, but he could see the
relieved expressions on the subjects' faces, he could see the
emotional response on the computer monitors. On the speaker, he
heard the litany of the Cop Show Bust: "Lie down on your
stomach and lace your fingers together behind your head. Don't
move and nobody will get hurt."

It sounded safe. Aaron decided to go out and see what was going
on. He walked down the hall to the interview room.

The secretary was lying on the floor. A large black cop was in
the process of handcuffing her. Schram was half-sitting, half-lying
on the floor, crumpled against the far wall of the room, covered
with blood. Huge bursts of his blood had splattered on to the wall
from the impact of the bullets and what looked like a gallon of the
stuff had run out of his wounds and puddled on the floor all
around him.

"My God," Aaron said. "I'll call an ambulance."

"I already done it," the cop said. "Go to the elevators and wait
for 'em."

Aaron did exactly that. And he didn't have to wait for very long;
the crew arrived with astonishing speed, four men rolling in a big
gurney and carrying their equipment in bags and boxes. They
didn't do much work on Schram, just lifted him directly on to the
gurney and wheeled him out of the room. And down the hallway.
Down the hallway to the bathroom.

The bathroom? Aaron followed them in there.

Schram had already climbed to his feet and was in the process of
stripping out of his bloodstained clothes. Underneath his shirt,
several small packets had been taped on to his body, electrical wires
running into them. All of these things were soaked with blood and
appeared to have been blown open from within. As Aaron
watched, Schram ripped them off his body, exposing clean,
unblemished flesh, and tossed them into the garbage.

"Squibs," he said. "Do you think they bought it?"

Aaron was still just standing there, his jaw flopped open like the
hood of an abandoned car.

"You bought it, obviously," Schram said, "so they probably did.
Why don't you get back in there and I'll meet you in a couple of
minutes, after I get cleaned up." Schram stripped off the last of his clothes and walked, buck naked, into a shower stall, leaving a trail
of bloody footprints on the polished white marble floor.

The secretary had been hauled off in chains. Several more "cops"
had arrived and begun to interrogate the six witnesses. One of the
cops was blustery and bullying and seemed to be treating the six as
though they were all potential suspects in the crime. One of them
was soothing and sympathetic. As they took turns talking to the six subjects, the readouts on the screen fluctuated back and forth from
one extreme to the other.

Within a minute or two, Schram had joined Aaron in the
monitor room, wearing a fresh set of clothes. "Can't you get in
trouble for doing this?" Aaron said. He knew it was sappy even as
he was saying it. But he couldn't help himself.

"For doing what?" Schram asked, sounding perfectly innocent.

"For - for what you just did."

"What did I just do?" Schram said.

"You - I don't know, you scared those people."

"So?"

"Well, isn't that a little extreme?"

"Life is extreme," Schram said.

"But isn't it illegal to do that, or something?"

"They all signed releases. Why do you think we're paying them
money?"

"Did the releases give you permission to do
that!"

"The releases say that these people are willingly taking part in a
psychological experiment," Schram said, "which is certainly the
case."

"But aren't you going to tell them it was fake?"

"Of course I will. Of course I'll tell them," Schram said. "How
else are we going to get them pissed off?"

"You want them to be pissed off?"

"Before they get out of that room," Schram said, "I want to run
them through every emotion in the book."

"Oh. Well, which emotion are they being put through now?"

"Boredom. Which is going to take a while. And in the mean
time, I want to go back over our results so far."

Everything that had happened to this point - the six feeds from
the six video cameras, the audio track coming over the speaker, and
the streams of data coming from the PIPER prototypes - had all
been recorded by the computers. By entering some commands into the Calyx system that controlled the whole thing, they were able to
go back and replay portions of the experiment, seeing everything,
on the dozen or so screens, just as Aaron had seen it the first time it had happened.