The Media Candidate (4 page)

“Yes, it’s a little strange, but we’d been
collaborating on a data-analysis problem, something she was doing
about candidates and funding. Anyway, it turned out that looking
for correlations in her data was very similar to looking for
certain high-energy-physics events in a chaotic background, so I
was helping her apply our computer programs to her problem. Dean
Tresbien thought I might be able to help sort out some computer
files or something. I think there were several papers that were
almost ready to publish, and we agreed it would be fitting for her
name and the Political Science Department’s to appear in the
journals as a tribute to her great work.”

“Yes,” she drew out as she touched a button
labeled Dean Tresbien. After listening for a half minute, she said,
“Dean Tresbien is out of town today.”

“It would only take me a few minutes to find the
files we worked on together. I could put them together and leave
them with you. It would be a snap, then, for the department to get
them published.”

“I wouldn’t want to put you to such a trouble,
Professor Townsend. I’m sure we can—”

“Oh, I’d be happy to do it. Terra was such a
wonderful person, and she had such insight into political affairs.
I want to do something to memorialize her name. I promise I won’t
disturb anything, and I’ll be gone in a jiffy.” Elliott walked down
the hall to a room marked
Halvorsen
, and entered.

The administrator said, “Wait just a minute!”
but was too late. She punched the button labeled COPE.

Elliott was busy on Halvorsen’s computer when he
was interrupted by a scratching sound behind him. He looked up to
the flick of a lighter. Two eyes studied the glow of tobacco as
smoke billowed around them. Two lips parted just enough to liberate
sweet smoke where it convolved into fractals. Elliott met his gaze
through the cloud just as another cloud was born. They played a
waiting game in non-committed silence. Finally, Elliott rose and
stared into the steel face of Sherwood.

“I’m Professor Townsend. And you are?”

“I understand you were advised not to interfere
with any of the Halvorsen things. We take quite a dim view of
burglary.”

“And who is we?” Elliott asked.

“I recommend that you leave behind anything you
might have found here. This is all Government property, and you are
liable for prosecution.”

“I see,” said Elliott. “And by what authority do
you claim this as so-called Government Property?”

“You have precisely two options, Townsend. You
may leave immediately with nothing more than what you arrived with,
or …” He drew a long breath through the glowing tobacco and
directed the rest of his sentence to the bowl of his pipe,
punctuating it with aromatic bursts. “… you may leave immediately
with some form of stolen property.” He then raised his eyes toward
Elliott. The image of Sherwood was disfigured by a gray cloud,
which slowly began to clear. “In the later event, we will surely
have the pleasure of another meeting. Unless, of course, I am
otherwise occupied, in which case I will apologize in advance for
having to send one of my …” He removed the pipe from his mouth and
exhaled the final word, “… associates.”

Elliott sat before the computer in his own
office at the University and logged onto the X-Web.
Let’s
see
, he thought. “
COPE” and “Background.”
A myriad of
images assaulted his eyes and ears. He ignored everything and
looked at the “In the Beginning” button. His display roared back at
him.

The Committee for Political Equality is an agency of
the Executive Branch whose mission is to preserve free competition
among political parties. It was created by President Prince, the
first president from the CBS Party. It’s the only government agency
not wholly funded by the taxpayer. Instead, half of its budget is
derived from the Federal Government with the other half being
contributed by the political parties that it monitors—”a
self-funding agency” as President Prince dubbed it, “a joint
venture between the private and the public sectors to protect our
precious freedoms for future generations.”

COPE has evolved over the years to the very essence
of what the public and private sectors can accomplish when they
team their resources for the benefit of all Americans. It is our
most trusted watchdog. It has three basic functions: monitor the
spending of parties and candidates, investigate the truth of
candidates’ claims, and assure the quality of candidates.

He clicked the “Spending” button, and Jack from
Election Beat
burst into the room followed by a half dozen
young, athletic, and naked assistants, each weighed down with a
stack of reports that Jack explained represented the spending and
budget accounts of the political candidates in just one state for
just the spring election season.

“This proves that COPE goes all the way for
America,” Jack said. “COPE is so effective at uncovering scandals
and breeches of the public trust, that it has expanded its
activities. And as it matures, more levels of improprieties and
waste are uncovered. COPE’s goal: zero tolerance. That’s the least
Americans deserve.”

Elliott clicked the “Truth” button. A giant
truthometer shaped like a thermometer zoomed out at him with the
cold days before COPE hovering at the 20 percent level and then
climbing after COPE to over 80 percent at the present.

Jack appeared again with his assistants dragging
a firehose behind them. “Imagine that each lie that COPE has saved
Americans is a drop of water. Now let’s take a look at that saving
in just the last election season.”

The firehose came to life as Elliott clicked the
“Quality” button. A very portly and bald cigar-smoker with a phone
in one hand and a drink in the other, grew to fill the screen “If
you wouldn’t buy a car from him,” Jack said, “why would you let him
represent you in Washington?”

The scene morphed into a tanned jock just as he
snapped a blinding serve past his opponent. One of Jack’s
assistants rushed onto the court yelling, “Senator Longbone from
Colorado!” Then a bare-breasted beauty screamed out a hit song to a
convulsing audience. Another assistant jumped onto the stage
shouting, “Representative Shakem from—”

Elliott clicked “Stop” and sank back in his
chair with the last image frozen before him. Finally he reviewed
“What others say about COPE.” There were over a hundred links to
other sites, and he perused many of them before deciding that they
were merely projections of the same party line he had witnessed
from the COPE site. He ended up staring at a picture of COPE’s main
entrance lobby with the inscription in granite above the door: “The
freedom of political choice is so fundamental to America that we
must not abandon it to the whims of unaccountable politicians. Let
us insure a level playing field for our political process. In the
long look of history, COPE will be seen as the lever on which
balances our fragile Republic.”

He sat back wondering about those words and
suddenly said out loud, “Paper, that’s the answer—good old
fashioned paper.” As he logged off, he continued, “If it weren’t
for me, the Lab wouldn’t even have a library anymore. I’ll bet in a
year it’ll be turned into a multi-media center or a holographic
interface port. But right now, it’s still a library.”

He turned on the light as he entered the
library. The librarian had been retained until about fifteen years
ago when they discontinued the last paper periodical subscriptions.
The library contained books dating back well into the twentieth
century, many of them predating even the beginning of electronic
library references in 1985. Elliott had used these paper references
often during his career to the dismay of most of his colleagues.
But today he rummaged through some non-technical books that had
probably never been off the shelf. After paging through the indices
of several, he found one with a major heading of “COPE” and a dozen
subheadings under it. Elliott began reading.

COPE established its headquarters in an impressive
white building in the hills above Hollywood. Its director
maintained that it needed to be physically detached from the
political influences of Washington if it was to “steadfastly serve
the interests of the people whom it is sworn to safeguard, rather
than bow to the winds of partisan politics.” It chose to be close
to this world media capital with which it has a symbiotic
relationship. It also wished to be close to the technology of
Silicon Valley.

Elliott paged to another section of the
book.

After the end of the cold war and the legalization
of drugs, the FBI fell into disfavor and experienced serious budget
declines. The FBI director sold the idea of a new agency to the
president and became the director of COPE using J. Edgar Hoover as
a role model. The FBI continued as the senior agency but with a
much smaller budget than COPE.

Then COPE was instrumental in getting the law
repealed that had legalized drugs, even though the law had
successfully reduced drug-related crime by over 90%. Soon the drug
wars were once more in full bloom, and business was booming again
at the FBI.

A rider to an act of Congress shortly after COPE was
founded established Federal funding of all “serious” political
parties seeking national office. Unserious candidates were defined
as those not supported by a major party. The two well-funded
parties, in turn, funded the private-sector half of COPE.

Elliott studied a table showing the projected
COPE budget ramping up rapidly with most of it going into its
newest mission: assuring the quality of candidates. Elliott leaned
back against the bookshelf where he sat on the floor and thought,
So that’s what they mean by a self-funding agency.
Then he
continued reading:

The formal mission of COPE was to monitor the
activities of the political parties to insure that they all play by
the same rules. With the appropriate political and media support,
Americans embraced it fervently. Once created, however, its mission
and its budget broadened.

“Hm,” he said to the book as it grayed out in
his lap. “I wonder how they enforce their rules. And what kind of
technology are they developing to do the enforcing?”

The next morning, Elliott sat motionless on the
side of the bed as he’d done every morning of his career. This was
his “collecting time” as he explained to Martha. “This is where I
collect my thoughts and figure out where I’m going that day.” He’d
tried to get Martha to try it herself because “it helps to focus
your day.”

Martha always responded, “I can’t even focus my
eyes without a cup of coffee. How can I focus my day before I get
up and have my coffee and read the paper?”

Elliott fervently believed in the ritual; and
this morning it had special meaning to him, even though it would
not be followed by his other longstanding ritual of going to
work.

This morning’s collecting time, however, took a
much longer look than just this one day. His meditation carried him
beyond his home and his life. As he relaxed his mind this morning,
a giant spider the size of a cat emerged and stalked him. The
spider transformed into a holographic TV. There was Martha and “her
TV family” exploring a wonderland of Hollywood animation,
intertwining advertising, politics, adventure, and emotions until
they were a monolith, a seamless package.

Then he caught a thermal and rose toward a
mountain. There was Ms. Dobbs at its peak holding a white ribbon
with gold lettering that read
Best of Fair
. Around her sat
her subjects: Martha, Susie, and even Luke. He couldn’t soar over
this mountain, so he flew away from it.

Water below him swirled and grumbled into a
collage of grotesque icons, like the ice cubes in a vodka ad. But
the icons jelled into faces. Lizzie smiled, waved, seduced. Junkie
invited the cameras to explore, to grope. Baseball jocks, movie
stars, and news anchors all spun about this sea, celebrating its
fertility, exploiting its abundance. They flowed with the torrent,
always laughing, always on top.

Millions of bodies clung to their TVs, voting
and applauding, even as the whirlpools sucked them beneath the
surface. Suddenly Elliott plummeted in the still air. What would
his choice be now that he could no longer soar? He opened his eyes
and saw just swirling vines and swaying flowers of an Oriental
carpet at his feet. His collecting time had never before strayed so
far. But he had never before been faced with such a dilemma.

Elliott had dedicated forty years of his life to
the Laboratory, years looking for answers to questions that might
not have answers, searching for fundamental particles with his
high-energy cyclotron. These particles could help man understand
the basic building blocks of the universe, forces that shaped the
universe in that blinding instant of creation billions of years
ago.

But the technology he’d developed was not like
superconductors or lasers or transistors that could be harnessed to
make life better for others. The knowledge gained in his laboratory
was the most basic kind, but it couldn’t relate to anything on
earth or even on the sun or the brightest stars in the sky. The
kinds of events he’d studied occurred in only two places, in his
laboratory and at the instant of the creation of the universe. It
was an expression of art with a price rivaling the Big Bang it
simulated. Elliott could not suppress the feeling that the billions
spent on this laboratory might have solved earthly problems.

He rubbed his eyes when the Oriental carpet
began to defocus.
And the time, the eons, I gave to the Lab.
Could have spared some for my family. Now I’ve got the time. Now I
can repay—but to whom?