Interface (5 page)

The power cord was coiled up in a separate niche in the gray
foam rubber. Yet another niche contained an item that Aaron
hoped they wouldn't notice: a cuff. Hard plastic shell lined with
black foam, for comfort. He wondered what the guards would
think of that.

"Looks interesting," the guard said. His insincerity was palpable.
"What is it?"

Aaron took a deep breath. "An instantaneous, multiplexing,
integrating, physiological response evaluation and monitoring
device."

"What does it do?"

It doesn't blow up.
"Well. It's a little bit like a polygraph."

"I need to see it work."

"What?'

"I need to see your IMIPREM work," Bristol said.

Aaron pulled the IMIPREM out of its foam rubber nest and set
it on the table. Then he uncoiled the power cord, fit one end into
a three-pronged recessed socket on the back of the unit, and
plugged the other end into a wall outlet near the table. The little
LED came on. "There," he said.

Bristol raised his eyebrows and looked extremely dubious.
"That's all it does?"

"Well, it does a lot more than that, naturally," Aaron said, "but
it has no interface, per se, except through a computer. See, if I
could hook this up to a computer, it would produce all kinds of
meaningful output."

"But the only thing it'll do right now, here, for me, is turn on
this little red light," Bristol said.

Aaron was trying to come up with a diplomatic way to say yes
when they were interrupted by another person. He was carrying a
laptop computer. He was holding the device out at arm's length.

"Tick, tick, tick, tick!" the man was saying. But he pronounced
it "teeuhk, teeuhk." He was one of those southerners who could
add syllables to words and make it sound good. "And then somewhere over Newark - BOOM! Haw, haw, haw!"

The old guard grinned and guided him to the table.

"Sir," Bristol said.

"Howdy," the man with the computer said. "This is a Compaq
- more bang for the buck than IBM! Haw haw!"

As Aaron watched in disbelief, Bristol exchanged a friendly,
knowing grin with the big southerner.

"Got a Gamma Prime CPU, a gigabyte drive, and three pounds
of Semtex," the southerner said.

He had a smooth, trombonelike voice that could be heard for
miles. All of the metal detector guards were looking at him and
chuckling. The businessmen filing through the metal detectors,
picking their pocket change out of the plastic buckets, were looking
at the southerner with appreciative grins, shaking their heads.

He was tall, probably a couple of inches over six feet, had love
handles, an unexceptional suit, a high forehead, the beginnings' of
jowls, a florid complexion, eyebrows raised up in a perpetually
surprised or skeptical expression, a tiny little pursed mouth.
"Whoa, looks like I got some competition here!" he blurted,
eyeing the IMIPREM in mock wonder.

Then his whole face changed; suddenly his eyes were narrowed and darting, he had become secret and conspiratorial, shooting
sidelong glances at Bristol, Max. "Abu Jihad!" he hissed at Aaron. "Praise be to Allah! We have perfected a nuclear device capable of
fitting under an airline seat!"

The big guard and the southerner joined together in loud,
booming laughter. "I got a glass of bourbon with my name on it in that bar by the gate," the southerner finally said, "so let me crank
this thing up for you and get on out of here. If you don't mind, sir,"
he added to Aaron, courteously enough.

"Not at all."

The man snapped the computer open and folded back the top;
to reveal its screen, a flat, high-resolution, color monitor. Aaron
had other things to be worrying about right now, but he couldn't help staring at the man's computer; it was one of the nicest and
most powerful laptops you could buy, certainly one of the most
expensive. These things had only been on the market for a couple
of months. This one was already worn and battered around the
edges.

The southerner hit the on button, hollering "BOOM!" so loud
that Bristol actually startled a little bit. Then he laughed.

The screen came alive with windows and icons. From a distance,
Aaron recognized about half of the icons. He knew what this soft
ware did. He could guess that the southerner did a lot of statistical
analysis, desktop publishing, and even desktop video production.

"Sir, would this do the trick?" Bristol was saying.

"Yo!" said the southerner, giving Aaron a dig on the arm. "He's
talking to you!"

"Huh?" Aaron said.

"Would this computer be capable of talking to your machine
there?" Bristol said.

"Well, yes, if it had the right software loaded on to its hard drive.
Which it doesn't."

"Oh, I see what's going on," the southerner said. Suddenly he
stuck out his hand toward Aaron. "Cy Ogle," he said. "Pro
nounced, but not spelled, like mogul."

"Aaron Green."

Cy Ogle laughed. "So you have to show this guy here that your
box won't blow up when we reach our cruising altitude. And until
you hook it up to a computer, it won't do anything except turn on
that little red light."

"Exactly."

"Which don't mean jack to him, because that light is about the
size of a grain of rice, and for all he knows the rest of the box is full
of black powder and roofing nails."

"Well..."

"You have the software with you? On floppies? Well, load it in
there, and let's take this baby for a spin."

Aaron couldn't believe the guy was serious. But he was. Aaron
fished the diskette with the IMIPREM software out of his briefcase
and popped it into the drive on Ogle's machine. A single-typed
command copied the files on to Ogle's hard drive.

In the meantime, Ogle had already figured out what to do with
the cable: he ran it from the back of the IMIPREM into the corresponding port on the laptop.

"Okay. Ready to roll," Aaron said.

Aaron unbuttoned his shirt cuff. He fished the plastic cuff out of
the case and snapped it snugly around his exposed wrist.

A ten-foot cable dangled from the cuff. Most of it was coiled up
and held together by a plastic wire tie. Aaron plugged it into the
back of the IMIPREM.

A new window materialized on the screen of Ogle's computer. It
was a moving, animated bar graph. Half a dozen colored bars, of
different lengths, fluctuated up and down. At the base of each bar
was a label:

BP
       
RESP
       
TEMP
       
PERSP
     
PULS

GSR
       
NEUR

"It's monitoring my body right now. See, the bars stand for
blood pressure, respiration, body temp, and a few other things. Of
course, this is its most basic level of functioning, beyond this it's
capable of an incredible number of different-"

Ogle's hand slammed down on Aaron's shoulder and gripped
him like a pair of barbecue tongs.

"I'm an undercover agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms," Cy Ogle said, "You're under arrest for conspiracy

to commit terrorist acts on board an airliner. Don't move or you'll
be shot!"

"What!?" Aaron screamed.

"Just kidding," Ogle said, "Haw, haw!"

"He's right, look at the bars," the guard said.

Blood pressure and just about everything else had suddenly shot
way up. As they watched, and as Aaron calmed down, the bars
subsided.

"Thanks for the demonstration, sir, it was very interesting," the guard said. "Have a nice flight."

Then Bristol turned to look down the concourse. Aaron and
Ogle were both looking that way too; some kind of generalized
disturbance seemed to have broken out. But it wasn't hooligans or terrorists. It was businessmen in suits, stampeding out of the bars
and restaurants where they had been watching the President on
TV. They ran down the concourse, knocking travelers and sky caps
aside, and began to scuffle over the few available pay telephones.

Ogle chuckled indulgently. "Looks like the President made a
corker of a speech," he said. "Maybe we should hook you machine
up
to them."

As it turned out, they were on the same flight, sitting across the
aisle from each other in the first row of first class. Coach was full of shuffling grannies and beefy sailors; first class was mostly empty.
Ogle worked on his computer for the first hour or so, whacking the keys so rapidly that it sounded like a hailstorm on the tray table,
occasionally mumbling a good-natured "shit!" and doing it again.

Aaron pulled a blank tablet of graph paper out of his briefcase,
uncapped a pen, and stared at it until they were somewhere over
Pittsburgh. Then it was dinnertime and he put it away. He was
trying to organize his thoughts. But he didn't have any.

After dinner, Ogle moved from the window to the aisle seat,
right across from Aaron, and then startled Aaron a little by ordering
them both drinks.

"Big presentation," Ogle said.

Aaron heaved a sigh and nodded.

"You got some kind of small high-tech company."

"Yeah."

"You developed this thing, spent all your venture capital, prob
ably maxed out your credit cars to boot, and now you got to make
some money off it or your investors will cash you in."

"Yeah, that's about right."

"And the cash flow is killing you because all the parts that go into
these things cost money, but you don't actually get paid for them
until, what, thirty or sixty days after you ship 'em. If you're lucky."

"Yeah, it's a problem all right," Aaron said. His face was getting
red. This had started out interesting, gotten uncanny, and now it
was starting to annoy him.

"So, let's see. You're going to L.A. The big industry in L.A. is
entertainment. You got a device that measures people's reactions to
things. A people meter."

"I wouldn't call it a people meter."

"Course not. But that's what they'll call it. Except it's a whole
lot better than the usual kind, I could see that right away. Anyway,
you're going to go meet with a bunch of executives for movie and television studios, maybe some ad agencies, and persuade 'em to
buy a whole bunch of these things, hook 'em up to man-on-thestreet
types, show 'em movies and TV programs so they can do all
that test audience stuff."

"Yeah, that's about right. You're a very perceptive man, Mr.
Ogle."

"What I get paid for," Ogle said.

"You work in the media industry?"

"Yeah, that's a good way to put it," Ogle said.

"You seem to know a lot about what I do."

"Well," Ogle said. All of a sudden he seemed quiet, reflective.
He pushed the button on his armrest and leaned his chair back a
couple of inches. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes,
curled
 
one
 
hand
 
around
 
his
 
drink.
  
"High-tech
 
has
 
its
 
own
biorhythms."

"Biorhythms?"

Ogle opened one eye, turned his head a bit, peered at Aaron.

"Course you probably don't like that word because you are Mr.
High Tech, and it sounds to you like cocktail-party pseudoscience."

"Exactly." Aaron was beginning to think that Ogle knew him better than he knew himself.

"Fair enough. But I have a legitimate point here. See, we live
under capitalism. Capitalism is defined by competition for capital.
Would-be businessmen, and existing businesses seeking to expand,
fight for the tiny supply of available capital like starving jackals around a zebra leg.