Interface

"Why would you want my sex quotient?"

"We probably wouldn't to tell you the truth - no offense!" Green laughed nervously. "But by using the same type of detectors, we can get a sense of how you are reacting to the programming shown on the TV screen. That information is piped directly back to us over the radio."

"So, it gives you my emotions. Tells you what my body's thinking."

Green smiled. "That's a good way to describe it. What your body is thinking. I like that."

"What about my opinions, though?"

Green shook his head and frowned. "I'm not sure quite what you mean."

"Well, this tells you how my emotions respond, right?"

"Yes."

"But that's not the same as an opinion, is it?"

Green seemed to be baffled, lost. "It's not? I'm not sure what you're getting at."

"Well, maybe I watch some guy giving a speech. Maybe he's real good at giving speeches and so my emotions are good. Then, I'm lying awake in bed in the middle of the night, thinking about what he said, and suddenly it doesn't seem so logical any more, and I can see all kind of holes in his argument and I change my mind and decide he's just another pencil-neck, media-slick son of a bitch out to take my money and send the jobs to Borneo. So my final opinion of the guy is that he's a bastard. But all you know is that I had a good emotional response to his speech."

Floyd knew that he had Green now. Clearly Green, the big-city, high-paid intellectual, had never thought about this. He had never anticipated that someone might make this objection. He did not know what to say. "We don't have the technology to read that sort of thing," he finally said, speaking very slowly and carefully. "We don't have any way to read your mind in the middle of the night and find out that you think Senator So-an-so is going to send your job to Borneo."

"Humph," Floyd said, shaking his head.

"But PIPER is just one way we have of getting information," Green said, picking up momentum now. Floyd had the distinct impression that he was just trying to talk his way out of the tight corner that Floyd had backed him into. "Needless to say, we are receptive to any kind of input that you might want to give us. So if you have these thoughts in the middle of the night-"

"I do," Floyd affirmed, "all the time. They come to me like a thief in the night."

"-in that case, you would be more than welcome to provide those to us."

"My phone service got cut off," Floyd said. "But I could write you letters.

"That would be absolutely fine," Green said. "Our address is printed right there on the videotape. You go ahead and send us as many letters as you like. We'd like to hear your opinions on any subject."

"So I gotta wear this thing twenty-four hours a day?"

Green shrugged. "Just when you're awake."

"And what else do I gotta do to get this ten thousand bucks?"

"Absolutely nothing."

"Absolutely nothing?"

"Just get up in the morning and put it on, every day from now until Election Day. If you agree to this, I give you a thousand dollars right here and now. We'll be able to tell, by monitoring the signals from the watch, whether you're wearing it or not. As long as you keep it on during all of the programming segments that we broadcast, we will continue to send you a thousand dollars a month. On Election Day, we send you the remainder of the ten thousand."

Floyd grabbed the PIPER watch. The two halves of the watchband were spread wide apart. He put it on his wrist, wrapped his other hand around it, and the watchband tightened down firmly but comfortably.

"To take it off, just push that little button right there and the ratchet will be released," Green said.

"We got a deal," Floyd said. "Where's my thousand?"

36

"Ths is it, baby," Cyrus Rutherford Ogle said, sitting in the big chair and twiddling the joysticks. "This is the moon shot. T minus half an hour and counting." That is what Aaron Green saw as he was climbing into the back of the big GODS truck out in back of the Decatur Civic Center in Decatur, Illinois. It was 7.30 p.m. on Flag Day.

"My god," Aaron said. That was all he could force past his lips for the first several minutes.

It looked just like a plain flatbed semitrailer truck with a shipping container on the back. The shipping container, a steel box about the size of a mobile home, was brand new and slickly painted with the three-colored logo of Global Omni-present Delivery Services. These days, as the U.S. Postal Service continued to go the way of Greyhound, the logo had become as ubiquitous as a mailbox. Most people wouldn't notice this thing unless it was parked in their driveway. Out behind the Decatur Civic Center, sandwiched in between a food delivery truck and a video truck from Television North America, it was invisible. The only indications that it carried something other than mail were a soft humming noise and a glassy twist of heat waves coming from a small opening on its top. It carried its own power plant.

Aaron entered through a door in the rear, passing directly into a narrow aisle, some ten feet in length, between racks of electronics and heavier equipment that stretched from floor to ceiling. Nuclear submarines must be like this, Aaron thought, as he peered into the racks, picking out the familiar shapes and logos of various top-of-the-line Pacific Netware computer systems.

The aisle finally opened up into sort of an office and com­munications center. Countertops ran along both walls for several yards and a couple of desks sat in the middle. These surfaces were strewn with telephones, scrawled yellow notes, staplers, laptop computers, a miniature photocopier. Higher up, at head level, heavy shelves and racks were mounted to the walls, loaded with video stuff: three-quarter-inch and half-inch tape machines, monitors, and other rack-mounted goodies that Aaron recognized as being parts of a television editing suite.

The front third of the trailer belonged to Cy Ogle. It looked totally different. The other parts of it were nice, high-tech expen­sive, 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 i

"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 ru

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.