Interface (62 page)

The front third of the trailer belonged to Cy Ogle. It looked
totally different. The other parts of it were nice, high-tech expen
sive, but they hadn't even started to spend money until they'd
reached this part.

The trailer was eight feet wide. They had built a hollow sphere
eight feet in diameter, put Cy's big chair in the center, and then
paneled the inner surface of the sphere with monitors. Each
monitor was about the size of the ones used in notebook com
puters. They were in full color and they were very sharp. The only feature that broke this sweep of tiny little color monitors was a twelve-inch television screen, dead center, right in the middle of
everything.

"Welcome to the Eye," Ogle said. "Welcome to the Eye of Cy."

Now that he mentioned it, it did look as though Cy Ogle were
sitting in the center of an eight-foot eyeball, lined with computer
monitors, with the TV screen in the middle serving as the pupil.

Aaron already knew the answer, but he had to do it anyway: he
started counting the monitors. There were exactly one hundred of them. Each one of those monitors was running the software that Aaron Green had spent the last couple of months developing. All
of the experience they had gathered from all of those focus groups
at Pentagon Towers - all of the mock shootings, fire drills, movie clips, hunchbacked janitors, staged marital disputes, and every other
scenario that had come from the fevered imagination of Shane
Schram - had been distilled into the animated graphs and charts and
colored bars on those hundred screens.

By examining those graphs in detail,
 
Ogle could assess the
emotional status of any one of the PIPER 100. But they provided
more detail than Ogle could really handle during the real-time
stress of a major campaign event. So Aaron had come up with a very simple, general color-coding scheme. The background color
of each screen fluctuated according to the subject's general emotional state. Red denoted fear, stress, anger, anxiety. Blue denoted negative emotions centered in higher parts of the brain: disagreement, hostility, a general lack of receptiveness. And green meant
that the subject liked what they saw. Green was good. Regardless of color, the brightness went up with the intensity of the emotion.

Stepping a little closer and scanning the screens, Aaron could see
that a good eighty or ninety of the PIPER 100 were wearing their
wristwatches, as per their agreement with Ogle Data Research.
There were a few stragglers. Almost all of them were women. One
of the problems that had come up with the PIPER program was
that the bulky watches looked clumsy on a woman's wrist, and
most women didn't want to wear them all the time. Hopefully,
they were carrying them around in their purses, and would take them out and put them on as soon as the program started.

If they didn't, they'd forfeit the rest of their money, and their
wristwatches would be given to someone a little more reliable. For this, the first test of PIPER, a 90 percent compliance rate would be
pretty decent.

"So, what's the mood of America?" Aaron said. He couldn't
resist asking. He stepped as far forward as he could and stood right
next to Ogle's chair, so that the panorama of screens completely filled his peripheral vision. The effect was like hanging in outer
space, in the center of a dynamic young galaxy: against a backdrop
of velvety black, bursts of colored light flared unpredictably in
every direction, in hues of red, green, blue, and mixtures thereof.

"Hard to say, since we don't know what any of these people are
reacting to," Ogle said. "I been keeping an eye on this poor guy
right here." He pointed to a screen that had been consistently red
ever since Aaron had come into the room. "I think this guy must be right in the middle of a bar fight or something."

Aaron leaned closer to the red screen and squinted to read the
label at the bottom. It read, TRADE SCHOOL METAL
HEAD/KENT NISSAN, MT. HOLLY, N.J.

"His blood pressure is through the roof," Aaron said. "Maybe
you're right."

He couldn't help checking out his five participants. Floyd
Wayne Vishniak seemed to be in a quiescent state, probably sacked
out on his couch watching television. Chase Merriam was in an
excellent mood; probably getting lubricated at a cocktail party in the Hamptons.

"Hey, this looks
great!"
another voice exclaimed. "Jesus! Look at
this thing! It's virtual reality, man!"

It was a tall man in early middle age, with a neatly trimmed beard
and a ponytail: the controlled hippie look. He was wearing shorts
and sandals and a Hawaiian shirt, and was just tossing a weather-
beaten leather satchel on to one of the counters.

"Evening, Zeldo," Ogle said.

Zeldo's gaze was fastened upon the Eye of Cy. "This thing is
killer,"
he said. "Does it work?"

"The input side works," Ogle said, "as you can see for yourself.
Now that you're here, we can run some tests on the output
side."

"What's the output side?" Aaron said.

"Okay, I'm up for it," Zeldo said. He ran over to the nearest
Calyx workstation and started to sign in. "I just came over from
Argus's dressing room. He's waiting."

"Who's Argus?" Aaron said.

A faint beeping noise sounded from the direction of Cy Ogle.
His big chair, in the middle of the Eye of Cy, had a telephone built
into it, and he was punching in a number.

"Good evening, this is Cy Ogle," he said. "Is there any
possibility that I could speak to the Governor? Thank you so very
much." Ogle was actually capable of delivering this kind of
dialogue as though he meant it.

"I have acquired Argus," Zeldo said. The screen of his Calyx
system had come alive with a multiple-window display showing
the status of some incredibly complicated system.

"Evening, Governor. You mind if I put you on the speaker-phone?"

One of the windows on Zeldo's screen was a rapidly fluctuating
bar graph. It had been dead for a little while, but now it put on a
burst of colorful activity.

"Okay," Ogle said, and punched a button on his phone.

"I hate these speakerphones," said a deep voice. When he spoke,
the bar graph on Zeldo's screen came alive.

"They make me feel like I'm in a box," the voice continued.
Aaron had finally recognized it: it was the voice of Governor William A. Cozzano.

"We want to test our communications link," Ogle said.

"That's what Zeldo told me," Cozzano said. "Go ahead and do
something."

The armrests of Ogle's chair were huge, like the captain's chair on the bridge of the
Enterprise.
The right one was covered with
small keys, like on a computer keyboard. Each key was labeled in
small letters.

The left armrest contained a row of several joysticks or sliders
that could individually be moved back and forth, left to right,
between two extremes. Aaron stepped forward, leaned over Ogle's shoulder, and read the labels on the joysticks:

LIBERAL
                
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10
         
CONSERVATIVE

LIBERTARIAN
       
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10
         
AUTHORITARIAN

POPULIST
             
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10
         
ELITIST

GENERAL
               
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10
         
SPECIFIC

SECULAR
               
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10
         
RELIGIOUS

MATERIAL
             
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10
         
ETHEREAL

KIND/GENTLE
        
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10
         
BELLIGERENT

Right now, all of the joysticks were set close to the middle except
for GENERAL/SPECIFIC which had been set to 1 (GENERAL)
and stuck in place with a piece of duct tape.

Ogle punched a button on his armrest.

"Bullet whizzing past my head," Cozzano said.

"Correct," Ogle said. "That means that you're under attack and
you'd better take cover and defend yourself."

"Got it," Cozzano said. "Do another one."

Ogle punched another button.

"Apple pie," Cozzano said. "Which means American values."

Ogle punched another button.

"Ice cubes. Which means I should cool it."

Ogle punched another one.

"A B-52. A strong national defense."

They went on in this vein for several minutes. Ogle had a few dozen buttons on his armrest.

"Argus is Cozzano," Aaron said.

"Right," Zeldo said. "Argus was the mythological figure who had a hundred eyes. With Ogle's help, and with the PIPER 100 feeding him their emotions, Cozzano becomes the new Argus."

At first, Floyd Wayne Vishniak didn't know what it was: a burst of
tinny music with sort of a patriotic brass-band sound to it. It sure
wasn't coming from his TV set, which was tuned to a fishing
program. Finally a flash of red-white-and-blue color caught his eye.
It was coming from his wrist. From the big fancy wristwatch that he was being paid to wear. It was showing a logo, a computerized
American flag image.

Finally they were doing something. He'd been wearing the
damn thing for two weeks and hadn't seen anything on it except
for occasional test patterns. He turned off the TV - the fish didn't
seem to be biting anyway - cracked open a beer, and sat down to watch.

Chase Merriam was out on the lawn of his brother-in-law's house
in East Hampton, Long Island, savoring a mint julep and enjoying
the cool night air, when his watch came to life. It didn't much
bother him, since this was a dull party anyway. The sound of the
music attracted the attention of several other partygoers, and by the
time the program got underway, he was in the center of half a
dozen people, standing on tiptoe, staring at his wrist in fascination.

"This is ridiculous," he said. "Why don't we all just watch it on
C-SPAN."

Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence, pundit extraordinaire, moderator of the
Washington Hot Seat,
and nemesis of Eleanor Richmond, was a
veteran of the Kennedy glory days. He had come down from
Harvard to serve as an Undersecretary of State for Cultural Affairs,
"liasing" with Ed Murrow's USIA. After putting in his three years,
he had returned to Harvard to take a joint appointment in the
Political Science Department and as an administrator at the
Kennedy School. He had a Savile Row tattered professional
elegance with a hint of dandruff around the shoulders of his dark
gray pinstriped suit. His graying hair, cut long in the back to com
pensate for its gradual retreat in front, defied the best efforts of spray
and gel to get it to lie down, and the backlights of the set turned
them into silvery scratches against the dark blue background. As the
house filled up and the media consultants fussed over their candidates and the technicians ran around barking into their headsets, he
sat in his chair, legs crossed, flipping listlessly through some papers.

In a normal debate, tickets would have been distributed equally among supporters of each of the three candidates. But William A.
Cozzano was not technically a candidate at all, even though a
spontaneous ground swell had put his name on the ballot in forty-
two states. The President of the United States was continuing to pursue his Rose Garden strategy and would not be in attendance
tonight, though some of his handlers were already cruising the press
room, buttonholing journalists and trying to apply some prespin to
the event. The only "real" candidate was Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane. A reasonable number of tickets had therefore been
handed out to the McLane campaign. Other than that, it was open seating; but given that the event was happening thirty miles away
from Tuscola, the place was dominated by Cozzano supporters. Tip
McLane was coming into the lion's den tonight, which was exactly
the kind of situation in which he excelled.