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  A year from tonight, I hope to stand on the West Front of this great building and begin my second term as your President.

  (cheers and applause, mostly from one side of the hall)

  He proceeded to do some ritual complaining about the usual topics: the budget deficit and the national debt. Just as predictably, he blamed it on the usual suspects: gridlock in Congress, the growth of entitlements, the insurmountable power of PACs, and, of course, the need to pay interest on the national debt, which had grown to something like ten trillion dollars. The only mildly interesting news coming out of the speech so far was that he intended to adopt a Rose Garden strategy during the coming election year, staying at the White House and doing battle with the two-headed monster of the deficit and the debt. This was the only responsible thing he could have done; but Congress applauded him deliriously.

  It was all so completely predictable, so politics-as-usual, that Cozzano was lulled into a near coma, trapped between boredom and disgust. Which made it all the more shocking when the bombshell hit.

  We must either cut entitlements - the payments made to our senior citizens on Social Security, and sick people on Medicare and Medicaid - or we must cut the interest that is paid to the national debt. Now, granted, we borrowed that money. We must pay it back if we can. And we most certainly will make our best effort to pay it back. But not at the expense of the sick and the old.

  (applause and cheers)

  Our debt is the result of our own sinful irresponsibility in fiscal matters, and we must accept the consequences of those sins.

  But I am reminded of the words of the great Russian religious figure Rasputin, who once said, in a similar time of economic troubles, “Great sins demand great forgiveness.”

  (applause)

  Let us not forget that we owe this money to ourselves. Surely we can find it in our hearts to repent from our economic foolishness and to forgive ourselves for the mistakes that were made by ourselves and by our predecessors.

  (applause)

  This nation was founded upon a great social contract. A contract in which people banded together to form governments in the defense of life, liberty, and property. This noble experiment has lasted for more than two centuries. Written into the contract by our founding father Jefferson was the assertion that if government violates the contract, the people have the right to overthrow it. This is the basis of the glorious revolutionary tradition that serves as a shining light of inspiration for the entire world.

  (applause, cheers)

  Tonight, in the spirit of Jefferson, I call for a new social contract. I am proposing to the Congress, and to the American people, the Declaration of Fiscal Independence.

  (applause)

  In short, my fellow Americans, I propose as a first step to place a cap on the percentage of our budget that can go toward paying interest on the national debt. The exact level of this cap, and the details of its implementation, are subject to discussion and agreement between my staff and Congress -and I’m sure that we can look forward to many lively discussion on the issue.

  (laughter)

  But regardless of the details, the message is the same. Great sins demand great forgiveness. Let us now forgive ourselves, so that we may go forth into the brave new world of the third millennium with a clean slate and a clear conscience.

  (thunderous applause and cheers)

  Let the message go forth to the world that the country of the third millennium will be the United States of America and that its opening breaths of life were sounded in this noble hall on this great evening.

  (ten-minute standing ovation)

  It was an outrage, pure and simple.

  Having failed over his entire term in office to do anything about the budget deficit, the President was now going to patch it up by allowing America to weasel out of its financial obligations.

  Which was bad enough in and of itself; but he was also trying to portray this measure as an act of Lincolnian fortitude on his part.

  Cozzano felt an atavistic desire to fly to Washington, climb up on that podium, and slap the President across the face. It was the same brute, animalistic impulse that came into his head when he imagined someone hurting his daughter. His heart thumped powerfully a few times. He realized that he was being primitive and stupid, and tried to calm himself down. There was no point in thinking these things.

  Still Cozzano did not sign the letter on his desk - a thank-you note to the Prime Minister of Japan for his hospitality during Cozzano’s visit last week. His powerful fingers gripped the smooth inlaid barrel of the pen. The rhodium alloy nib, charged with just the correct amount of French ink, was poised a few millimeters above the grainy surface of the buttery cotton-fiber stationery that Cozzano used for personal correspondence. But when Cozzano moved the pen - that is, when he did the thing in his mind that, ever since he had been inside his mother’s womb, had caused his fingers and his hand to move - nothing happened. His eyes tracked

  across the paper, anticipating the pen’s course. Nothing. The President spoke on and on, stopping every few sentences to bask in adulation.

  Cozzano’s hand sweated. After a while, then pen fell out of his fingers. The nib dove into the paper and slid straight across it like a plow skidding across hard prairie. It left a comet-shaped streak of blue-black on the page, whacked down flat, and rocked side to side for a few moments, making a gentle diminishing noise.

  He cursed under his breath and a strange sound came out of his mouth, a garbled word he’d never heard before. It sounded so unfamiliar that he tried to look up, thinking that someone else might be in the room. But no one was here; he had spoken the word himself.

  When he moved his head it threw him off balance and pulled him toward the left. His left arm had gone completely limp. He saw it slide off the desk, but he didn’t quite believe it, because he didn’t feel it move. The cufflink, a cheap hand-me-down from his father, popped against the sharp edge of the tabletop. Then his arm was swinging at his side, eased to a halt by the slight mechanical friction of his elbow and shoulder joints.

  He slumped back into the chair’s comfortable, Cozzano-shaped recesses. His right arm slid off the desk as he did so and he found that he could move it. He was sitting comfortably in his chair now, sagging leftward. He saw his intercom and knew that he could punch the button and call Marsha. But it was not clear what he should say to her.

  His eyes drooped half shut, the sound of the roaring, stomping, howling, and applauding Congress closed in on him like a nail keg lowering over his head, and in his confusion, he lost his will. He was entirely too tired to do anything, and why bother to fight it? He had accomplished enough for several lifetimes. The only thing he’d missed out on so far was having some grandchildren.

  That, and become President, which he was going to do before the year 2000. But he wasn’t sure if he really wanted that awful job anyway.

  2

  The State of the Union was never a big event in Cacher, Oklahoma. Forty-eight-year-old Otis Simpson yawned and looked at the wall clock, just for the record. It was 02:46:12 Greenwich Mean Time. He turned the sound off. The speech had devolved into endless waves of applause. Commentators were beginning to break into the sound track in hushed, solemn tones, stating the obvious: “the President shaking hands with congressional leaders as he makes his way out of the room.” Soon the analysts would come on and tell Otis what he had just watched, and Otis definitely didn’t need that. The only opinions that mattered would be coming in via fax and modem during the next few hours. His job was to stay awake in the meantime. So he triggered the other monitor and began to keep one eye on an HBO flick, already in progress.

  Otis had inherited his mother’s tendency toward bulk, his father Otho’s awkward looks, and a light regard for basic hygiene. The many folds in his ample frame contained an inexhaustible supply of sweat-blackened lint balls, and his thinning hair failed to conceal the skin ailments that plagued his scalp. He had never married. His mother had died giving
birth to him. He served as a trusted assistant on his father’s work, the full extent of which he never fully understood.

  Otho Simpson, eighty-six, had, as was his pattern, gone to bed at 00:00:00 Greenwich Mean Time. This time was as good a bedtime as any other and was easy to remember. Otho and Otis lived belowground, in a former lead mine, and did not pay much attention to the diurnal cycle upstairs. Their job was to gather and respond to information from all over the world, from all twenty-four time zones, and so there was not much point in trying to hew to a particular schedule. Otho was spare and gaunt, hampered by persistent urinary tract infections that filled whatever room he was in with a disconcerting odor and caused continual pain. Unlike his son, Otho had a mind that, had he chosen, could have earned him a Nobel Prize in economics or physics or at least made him a very rich man in a more conventional sense. Instead, he had become an accountant of sorts, and spent his life looking after a body of investments with a total cash value in the neighborhood of thirty trillion U.S. dollars.

  These assets did not belong to any one specific person or entity, as far as Otho could tell. They belonged to a coordinated international network of investors. Otho didn’t know who these people were. He wasn’t supposed to know and he probably wasn’t supposed to think about it. But he did think about it from time to time, and he had drawn some conclusions based on circumstantial evidence. Most of them were individuals, many were families; some were corporations. Their net worths varied from a few million dollars up to tens of billions. Judging from the hours when they liked to do business, most of them must be living in American and European time zones, with a few in the time zones that were used by Japan, Hong Kong, and Australia. He only knew one member of this organization by name, one Lady Guenevere Wilburdon; she was his contact and his boss.

  In the last half century, especially after the death off his wife in 1948, Otho had rarely left Cacher. Several times a week he would hobble on to the lift, ride it several hundred feet straight up to the surface and go for a stroll through the ruins of the town, taking in what passed for fresh air in Cacher and feeling the sun on his skin. But he felt most comfortable down below, in the subterranean capsule that was his home, surrounded by twenty feet of solid reinforced concrete, breathing filtered air and drinking distilled water.

  The capsule had been built during the early fifties by a huge international contractor called Maclntyre Engineering. It was built to exactly the same set of specifications used for the control capsules of Minuteman silos - easy enough, since Maclntyre had con­structed most of those. Any information that could conceivably influence the performance of the economy - public and proprietary, open and secret, from hard data to vicious gossip - was funneled into the capsule over a variety of communications links. Otho read every word of it and used it to manage the investments of the Network. His life was rather solitary and he had not seen a movie in a theater since The Sound of Music, but he did not care; the honor of being the anonymous manager of a significant fraction of the assets of what used to be called the Free World sufficed to give him a value-laden life.

  Several hours after the conclusion of the State of the Union address, at 06:00:00 GMT, a digitized chord sounded from one of the workstations, waking Otis up. A window materialized on the screen and filled with columns of numbers. This was normal; it happened every day at this time.

  A chorus of faint humming noises was emanating from a stainless steel rack carrying several dozen identical fax machines. Otis was surprised to note that nearly all of the machines suddenly had long strips of paper dangling out of them, and several were still active. Most of his father’s clients took a hands-off approach and rarely, if ever, bothered him with specifics.

  Otis went to the workstation and scanned the numbers: a statistical summary of how the Network’s investments had per­formed during the last twenty-four hours, and initial responses to the State of the Union Address from the stock exchanges in Delhi, Novosibirsk, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo. All of the capital markets were sharply down. Commodities, especially gold, were soaring uncontrollably.

  The digital clock on the wall clicked to 06:10. Otis went in to wake up Otho. Otho and Otis slept in steel-framed bunk beds in a small room just off the communications center.

  “Daddy, the figures for yesterday are in.”

  Otho sat up in bed without hesitation, as if he’d never been asleep. Another workstation was next to him on a bedside table. He reached out with one withered hand, grabbed a mouse, and chose

  a few commands from the menus on the screen. A copy of the financial tables materialized. He put on a pair of extremely thick glasses that made his eyes look the size of baseballs.

  The numbers for the first part of the day weren’t bad. But the State of the Union address had changed all that.

  “We got a lot of faxes too,” Otis said, handing his father a thick sheaf of slick, curly paper, covered with notes from all over the world, many handwritten.

  “Jesus Christ,” Otho said, “what did that son of a bitch say?”

  “Daddy, I turned the sound off on him and watched an HBO movie.”

  “Probably not a bad idea. Pull up the CNN monitor tape and rerun the speech for me - no, hold it, I can’t stand the thought of watching him. Download a transcript off the news wire.”

  “Okay, Daddy.”

  Ten minutes later, Otis brought back the transcript. Otho scanned through it, looking for a few key words, and went almost instantly to the concept of forgiveness. Deep vertical crevices appeared in the middle of his brow and he let out a feeble stream of air through pursed lips.

  By this time Otis knew he was in for a long night, so he turned on the bedside TV set and punched up CNBC.

  “That bastard has just got every bull and bear in the world going insane.” Otho set the faxes down on his bedside table and slipped his feet into a pair of slippers by the bed. “But he’s half right. This country has problems. Someone needs to do something or all of its investors will get screwed.”

  “Investors?”

  “Yup. America used to have citizens. Then its government put it up for sale. Now it’s got investors. You and I work for the investors.”

  Otis regarded his father with the mixture of respect, fear, and awe that he had shown since he was a child. “What’s going on, Dad?”

  “It was just a matter of time before some politician actually became stupid enough to mention forgiving the national debt.”

  “Like Senator Wright?”

  “Yeah. Who died in a plane crash. But obviously the President thought it sounded like a catchy idea.”

  “How are you going to handle this, Daddy?”

  “Crank up the word-processing software. I’m going to do the first round-robin report since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is too big for me to just fly off the handle - I have to provide the Network some options.”

  Otho’s joints creaked and ground audibly in the nearly perfect silence of the capsule as he made his way out of bed, over to a stainless steel toilet, and from there into the control center. He sat down in front of a large high-resolution monitor and began jotting down a few options, as they came into his head. Later, he could rework them into deathless prose:

  a. Pull investment out of the U.S. national debt - absorbing the

  loss immediately - and explore new areas, such as purchasing the

  larger part of the former Soviet Union;

  b. Do nothing and hope that the American political structure

  will muddle through;

  c. Intervene directly in American politics in order to return it to

  a certain sort of stability and to insure our long-term investment in

  the debt;

  d. Suggestions?

  He then directed his system to send out the message in encrypted burst-mode fax transmissions. Beyond vague geographical indi­cations, he did not know to whom the faxes would go. When he had taken control of the Network’s finances fifty years ago, it had been stipulated that
all communication would be to code-identified participants.

  The returns came in remarkably quickly. In the aftermath of the President’s speech, everyone important was awake right now, regardless of time zone.

  With the exception of a few Middle Easterners who wanted the Network to invest massively in the Muslim-dominated republics of the former Soviet Union, most of the Network liked the third option. The clincher was a fax from Lady Wilburdon, the acting

  chairperson, who noted, “You have done well for us, and we place our trust in you. Put your country back in working order.”

  He spent a few minutes doodling with an old, well-worn slide rule. Back in the early seventies he had purchased a couple of the first pocket calculators and, as a mathematician, been horrified by their illusive precision. The slide rule was a far more trustworthy and illuminating guide to the numerical world.

  The United States had borrowed ten trillion dollars since the onset of Reaganomics. A significant fraction of that debt was now owned by the Network. Those loans were supposed to bring in a certain fixed amount of interest every year. The cap proposed by the President would reduce that income by an amount on the order of a few tens of billions of dollars per year - possibly even more, if the country went into a deeper crisis and made further cuts.

  In the long run, then, the Network stood to loose hundred of billions of dollars from the measures that the President had just proposed. Otho was therefore justified in spending real money here - easily in the tens of billions. This was more than enough to throw an election. Perot had nearly done it for just a few hundred million.

  Otho knew perfectly well that his Network was not the only organization of its type in the world, and that he was not the only person running through this sort of a calculation tonight. It wasn’t enough just to mess around with an election; everyone would be getting into that game during the next few months. The important thing was to do it well, and not just on an ad hoc basis but as part of a coherent long-range strategy.