Jipi and the Paranoid Chip Read online

  Jipi and the paranoid chip

  By Neal Stephenson (excerpt as appeared in Forbes, July 7, 1997)

  THIS IS THE highest-resolution video you can get, better than reality,” says Mr. Cardoza. He gropes across the dark table top for the joystick and zooms in on the face of a white woman sitting in the lobby, sipping tea and reading a magazine. Jipi tacitly deconstructs the white woman’s makeup system, which is recently applied (it’s about 9 a.m.) and about as well done as anything she’s ever seen on an actual person, as opposed to an actress. So that’s the kind of person who stays at the Manila Hotel.

  One reason watching films is fun is that you can gape at beautiful people without being, or even feeling like, a creep. But film actors always look perfect. Even when a nearby detonation blows a ton of muck all over them, you know the dirt will end up in neat, bone-structure-enhancing diagonal streaks under the cheekbones. In a certain sense this gets boring after a while. You never get to stare at real people, with all of their mistakes and imperfections, in the same way you can stare at film stars. Unless, that is, you’ve got a rig like Mr. Cardoza’s concealed in a nearby flower arrangement.

  He’s absolutely right about the resolution. Jipi zooms in on the woman’s left eye and finds that her eyeliner, which from arm’s length would look flawless, is in fact as jiggly as a seismograph tracing: a permanent record of every cappuccino-induced tremor that passed through her hand when she was applying it, and of every rumble that shook the hotel’s foundations from the heavy equipment of the All-Manila Sanitary Sewer System Overhaul Project (Amsssop), which is advancing on the Hotel as noisily and inexorably as great big mechanized armies did way back when. Jipi can see the tweedy striations in the woman’s iris as it reciprocates across the page of her magazine. But then, either there is a minor temblor or else one of those Amsssop caterpillars across the street strikes bedrock, and the vibration turns the image into an elliptical blur that almost makes Jipi a little queasy. Mr. Cardoza gropes for the joystick and zooms way back. “That’s too close anyway,” he says. Then he reconsiders. “At least, it is for me. Some of our Guest Comfort Facilitators concentrate entirely on the nostrils.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Most find that nostril dilation is only one clue,” he cautions. “More important is the overall facial expression. In combination with the Tactical Overlay, this should enable you to achieve virtually 100% mindshare management.”

  “Oh yeah, I was going to ask you,” Jipi says, “if a guest asks me, I should tell them I’m a Guest Comfort Facilitator, right? Not a Mindshare Manager.”

  The whole concept of the latter term actually falling on a guests s ears is so mortifying to Mr. Cardoza that the only response he can muster is nervous laughter. Then he changes the subject. “Here is a developing situation,” he says. “What’s happening at the main entrance?”

  “Looks like those Russians are finally piling onto their tour bus.”

  “Yes, but what are the implications for you?”

  “The doormen are having to hold the doors open for a long time.” Jipi’s eyes move to one of the Tactical Overlays. “Uh-oh. Winds are vectored from an Amsssop site.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one they just opened up yesterday.”

  “Very good. That’s an important detail.”

  Jipi pokes at some controls and brings up a floor plan of the lobby. It’s randomly speckled with blue dots. But some of the dots near the door have begun to turn green. “Sensor grid has picked up a fresh infusion of hydrogen sulfide.” The green spreads from dot to dot like pneumonic plague through a jammed cathedral. But then it begins to die down. “Oh! The neutralizers must have kicked in.”

  “Remember, hydrogen sulfide is just a bellwether!” Mr. Cardoza says, getting really excited and frustrated, like a boy watching someone play a game that he’s much better at. “Remember: new digging. Just opened up yesterday.”

  “Oh, yeah, so there’s going to be an aerobic decomposition spike!” Jipi pokes at the controls some more and finally brings up an overlay labeled PUTRESCINE (SMELL OF DEATH). And then all she can do is laugh in embarrassment, because every detector within 20 meters of the front doors is red, and it’s spreading like a few gallons of burning kerosene washing across a polished floor. The Smell of Death situation has gotten totally out of hand while she was distracted by flashy but essentially unimportant developments on the Rotten Egg Smell front. “Sorry!”

  “It’s okay! The tacticals only give you hints as to where you should focus your attention.”

  “Right!” Jipi glances back up at the high-definition feed of the white woman reading the magazine. Mr. Cardoza has set the zoom so that they can see her from the waist up—anything closer and you get into that can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees thing. The woman’s sitting with thighs crossed. She’s got the magazine folded back on itself and is holding it in both hands. But now she lets it drop just a couple of inches onto her knee, and her eyes rotate fractionally upwards, and in the high-def video it’s easy to see them changing focus—she’s staring at the floor now. Her chest rises and her nostrils flare slightly.

  Jipi says, “Do you want me to—”

  “Emily’s on it,” Mr. Cardoza says, grabbing the joystick and zooming violently backwards. “One of our best.” And sure enough, a young, well-dressed Filipina has arrived on the scene and nearly toppled into the white woman’s lap. She’s got one hand cupped over her eye. Then she does a prim, girlish deep knee bend and begins groping at the carpet. “She is pretending to have lost a contact lens,” Mr. Cardoza says.

  “Beg your pardon, sir, but isn’t that kind of an obvious gambit?”

  “Admittedly,” he says. “We are careful to use it only once every two or three weeks. But it seems to have worked in this case. Let’s review. Mr. Cardoza rewinds the video a few seconds and then plays it back. They watch the white woman in closeup as she inhales the first traces of the Smell of Death into her nostrils. The faintest shadow of a new expression passes over her face. It’s not turning into the sort of expression that a hotel manager wants to see on the faces of his guests. But then the woman’s eyes dart upwards as she’s distracted by the little drama of the lost contact, and a few moments later she’s actually helping Emily grope around on the carpet. “You see?” Mr. Cardoza says triumphantly. “She smelled it. But before her mind consciously realized what she was smelling, Emily derailed her train of thought. First-rate work.”

  Jipi knows the score here. “And the guest is going to focus on Emily for a while—long enough for the ventilation system to handle this putrescine transient—because...

  He shrugs. “Basically because Emily’s got a nice personality. You can bet on it.”

  Mr. Cardoza is the general manager of Mindshare Management Associates Inc. He has mentioned to Jipi a couple of times that he has, in his employ, 75% of the young women with nice personalities in Metro Manila. It looks as though he’s about to mention it again. But Mr. Cardoza is in the mindshare business and is enough of a professional to know that if he says it again he’ll begin to bore her. Jipi’s tempted to ask him just what the hell he means when he quotes these authoritative-sounding stats, but this is, after all, her first day on the job, and she doesn’t want to blow it. It’s probably something to do with Net reputations.

  “But doesn’t she subconsciously know that she smelled the Smell of Death?”

  “What are you saying?” Mr. Cardoza asks, more amused than threatened. Probably not much makes him feel threatened. Mindshare Management’s revenue has been doubling every six months for the last several years.

  “Why don’t you just tell each guest that Amsssop is tearing up some 400-year-old sewers in the ne
ighborhood and the place is going to smell bad for a while, but it’s only temporary?”

  “The Hotel Xanadu tried that approach when Amsssop was in Makati,” Mr. Cardoza says airily. “Oh, we tried to sell them our services, but they thought they knew better.” He snickers. “They nearly went out of business. All of their guests said, ‘Oh, you admit that your hotel smells like death, and so why don’t you give me a big discount!’ It was a disaster.”

  “Yeah, but didn’t all of the guests who got refunds come away with a high opinion of the Xanadu’s honesty?”

  “Yes. Nowadays, the only people who stay at the Xanadu are high-tech businessmen from California, who like to think of themselves as exceptionally rational. It is a great hotel for Vulcans. Everyone else avoids the Xanadu as if it were a leper colony.”

  “I see.”

  “Your question is reasonable,” Mr. Cardoza admits. “Subconscious feelings are important— of course! But we are in the reputation business here. A hotel’s reputation is compiled from the impressions that its guests register on the Net while they are there and after they have checked out. This is a conscious act of volition on the guest’s part.”

  “Oh. So subconscious impressions don’t get registered?”

  “Our research indicates that they tend not to be. Unless a guest can consciously articulate her feelings about a hotel, those feelings are not liable to be registered on the Net.”

  “Got it. So as long as you can distract them before they consciously realize that the place smells like death, you’re okay.”

  “It has worked in every hotel that has been downwind of Amsssop. At least, the ones that have been smart enough to hire us.”

  “This is the last phase, right?”

  “Amsssop has been tearing up Manila for nearly a quarter of a century. With Intramuros, the project finally reaches completion.”

  “Then what? I guess there are plenty of other opportunities for mindshare management professionals.”

  “It is a vast field of opportunity,” Mr. Cardoza says, then lowers his chin, stares at her significantly, and adds, “A young woman with a nice personality need never be out of work.”

  “I don’t know. Homer says that Nippon cranks out a hell of a lot of girls with nice personalities.”

  Mr. Cardoza makes kind of a poofing noise out of his lips and gets a look on his face like he’s just taken a big whiff of Amsssop gases. “Perky doesn’t pay the bills.”

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t believe me? Then why did Mr. Goto hire you? Why did he recommend you to us?”

  Jipi figures it’s partly that Mr. Goto has the hots for her, but decides not to mention this. It would only lead to the question of why Homer prefers her to all of those perky Nipponese girls. She decides it’s a good time to shut up.

  Before it got really valuable, Intramuros was largely bought by the Asian Economic Miracle Management Foundation, a shadowy pan-Asian nonprofit, headquartered out of Tokyo and Hong Kong, whose goal is to help Asian countries that are on the cusp of having their very own economic miracles manage the process in some small way and avoid the mistakes that permanently marred the landscapes of the first economic miracle states. So now the district is mostly a great big historical park with ancient churches poking out of the lawns from place to place. At the moment it’s also got big Goto Engineering trucks and trailers piled here and there, cutting trenches across the lawns, but that’s just an Amsssop transient. It’s surrounded by a wall, and the wall is surrounded by a golf course, and the golf course is ringed by skyscrapers that have all gone up in the last couple of decades, since the founding of the Bank of Manila and Kinakuta. Mindshare Management has its offices in one of those skyscrapers. In another, on the fiftieth floor, Teeb’s family has a great big apartment, which doubles as an informal Yapese consulate. Now that Jipi’s an official friend of the family, she gets to live in the apartment, surrounded by great big stone coins that are supposedly worth millions of devus. Teeb frequently flies in from Yap, and then she and Jipi hang out together. Sometimes they go out on the town—right now, there’s no better place in the world than Manila to go dancing. Other times they stay in the apartment and watch old movies, or just look out the windows: Almost every day there’s an amazing sunset over Manila Bay, and when it fades out, the golf course’s lights come on and form a lasso of radiant green around Intramuros, which is only lit up in places where people want it to be. When you enter the park at night, an aerostat—a little flying robot about the size of a football—tags along behind you to light your way. You can tell it to turn its lights off if you want to just look up at the stars, or if you’re with your lover and you would like it to be dark. But Jipi’s situation on the lover front is extremely labile and so this doesn’t come up often.

  Jipi does pretty well at the Manila Hotel job. One morning, most abruptly, she gets promoted to what Mr. Cardoza says, not without a certain ominous vibe, is a much more demanding position.

  “Okay, it’s like this. Some company—Lamarck Logic—developed some software,” Mr. Cardoza says.

  “Never heard of them.”

  “One of these California high-tech outfits. They don’t write software, they evolve it”

  “Oh... Homer told me about this,” Jipi says. She’s not totally comfortable admitting it, but a good deal of what she knows, she knows because at some point in the past Homer decided, for no discernible reason, to tear off on a long—winded digression about it. “It’s like they make a bunch of little pieces of software and see which ones are best at doing some job. Each one’s a little different. Some do a good job, some don’t. The ones that don’t get erased. The others are reproduced, except with small random differences, and then they repeat the cycle for, like, millions of times.”

  “Something like that. Anyway, this particular software’s purpose was to help police officers, and others who were not mental health care professionals, identify paranoid schizophrenics on the Net.”

  “Why?”

  The answer, clearly, is that (a) Mr. Cardoza doesn’t know and (b) it’s not appropriate to evince curiosity about this. To say as much would be to embarrass himself and to embarrass Jipi respectively. Mr. Cardoza has not risen to the top of the mindshare management consulting industry by embarrassing himself or others. So he works it out while he’s saying it: “A security thing, I suppose. Normal criminals behave more or less predictably. Paranoid schizophrenics, on the other hand, are wild cars.”

  “You mean wild cards?”

  “Oh. Is that where that expression comes from? Anyway, they are always doing things that are completely nuts. Cops worry about this. And so they wanted some way to identify who was, and wasn’t, a paranoid schizophrenic simply by monitoring their Net traffic.”

  Jipi comes as close as she ever does to frowning. She’s been told that what feels like a tremendous frown to her looks like a mildly perplexed look to everyone else. She is vaguely troubled by the idea that, somewhere in the world, there’s a security force that’s going around throwing people into straitjackets simply because of what they say on the Net. “So are you telling me that Lamarck Logic is part of the police department?”

  “Of course not. They were just a contractor. To a governmental organization.”

  Jipi continues to wear the expression that in her case passes for a frown. Mr. Cardoza can plainly see it, but, businesslike as ever, plows onwards: “This organization—”

  “The Black Chamber?”

  Every muscle fiber in Mr. Cardoza’s body fires simultaneously. He adopts an expression that Jipi read about in the encyclopedia once, in Mexico, after a neighborhood kid had stepped on a rusty nail; it is a common symptom among people suffering from end-stage tetanus infections and it is called rigor sardonicus.

  “I mean the International Data Transfer Regulatory Organization,” Jipi says, just trying to patch things up a bit.

  “I don’t know who the organization was,” Mr. Cardoza says, sounding a bit fluttery. “May I con
tinue? Time is a factor here.”

  “Please.”

  “They got some actual paranoid schizophrenics who had been institutionalized, and set them up with Net interfaces. This enabled them to have conversations with individuals who were not physically present. They also got some test subjects who were, I take it, just normal people, and set them up in cubicles somewhere with Net interfaces of their own. And they created these evolvers—pieces of software with rudimentary conversational skills—and provided them with the same interface.” Mr. Cardoza gets up and attempts to draw a triangle on a whiteboard. But he’s one of these guys who is so wrapped up in what he’s saying, and so inherently bad at drawing stuff, that this is nothing more than a pro forma gesture—something he probably read about in a management book. Some people think visually! Try to illustrate key points with simple diagrams. So a vaguely triangular apparition ends up on the whiteboard. Qua geometric figure, it’s so mangled that Mr. Cardoza’s words end up explicating the diagram, rather than the other way around. “So we have three types of participants now—right?”