I was having trouble catching my breath all of a sudden. “Who else, Mr. President? I need to know all your enemies.”
'Helene Glass in the Senate is an enemy... Some of the reactionary conservatives in the Senate and House are enemies.... I believe... that Vice President Mahoney is an enemy, or close to one. I made a compromise before the convention to put him on the ticket. Mahoney was supposed to deliver Florida and other parts of the South. He did deliver. I was supposed to deliver certain considerations to patrons of his. I haven't delivered.
I'm screwing with the system, and that isn't done, Alex.'
I listened to Thomas Byrnes without moving a muscle. The effect of talking to the President like this was numbing and disturbing. I could see by the look on his face what it cost Thomas Byrnes to admit some of what he had to me.
“We should put surveillance on these people,” I said.
The President shook his head. “No, I can't allow it. Not at this time. I can't do that, Alex.” The President rose from his chair.
“How did your kids like the keepsakes?” he asked me.
I shook my head. I wouldn't be held off like that. “Think about the vice president, and about Senator Glass, too. This is a murder investigation. Please don't protect someone who might be involved. Please, Mr. President, help us... whoever it is.”
“Goodnight, Alex,” the President said in a strong, clear voice.
His eyes were unflinching.
“Goodnight, Mr. President.”
“Keep at it,” he said. Then he turned away from me and walked out of the solarium.
Don Hamerman entered the room. “I'll see you out,” he said stiffly. He was cold -- unfriendly Perhaps I also had an enemy in the White House.
NO WAY, JOSE! Couldn't be. Could not be. This just could not be happening. Welcome to the X-Files meets The Twilight Zone meets the Information Superhighway At five one and two hundred ten pounds, Maryann Maggio was a powerhouse. She thought of herself as a “censor of the obscene and dangerous” on the Prodigy interactive network. Her job with Prodigy was to protect travelers on the Information Superhighway An emergency was developing before her eyes right now. There was an intruder on the network.
This couldn't be happening. She couldn't take her eyes off her IBM desktop screen. “This is the interactive age, all right. Well, people, get ready for it,” she muttered at the screen. “There's a train wreck a-comin'.”
Maryann Maggio had been a censor with IBM-owned Prodigy for nearly six years. By far, the most popular service on Prodigy was the billboards. The billboards were used by members to broadcast personal messages for other members to react to, learn from, plan their vacations, find out about a new restaurant, that sort of thing.
Usually the messages were pretty harmless, covering topical subjects, questions and answers on anything from welfare reform to the ongoing murder trial of the month.
But not the messages that she was staring at right now. This called for Infante the Censor, the protector of young minds, as she sometimes thought of herself. “Big Sister,” according to her bearded, three-hundred-pound husband, Terry the Pirate.
She had been monitoring messages from a particular subscriber in Washington, D.C., since around eleven that night. In the beginning, the quirky messages were borderline judgment calls for her to make. Should she censor or hold back? After all, Prodigy now had to compete with the Internet, which could get pretty damn wild and wacky She wondered if the sender knew this. Cranks sometimes knew the rules. They wanted to push the edge of the envelope.
Sometimes they just seemed to need human contact, even contact with her. The censor of their thoughts and actions. Big Sister is watching.
The first messages had asked other subscribers for their “sincere” point of view on a controversial subject. A child-murder case in Washington, D.C., was described. Then subscribers were asked whether the child murders or the Jack and Jill case deserved more attention from the police and from the press. Which case was more important, morally and ethically?
Maryann Maggio had been forced to pull two of the early messages.
Not because of their content per se, but because of the repeated use of four-letter words, especially the dreaded f word and the s word and one of the c words.
When she pulled the messages, though, it seemed to cause an unbelievable emotional explosion from the subscriber in Washington. First came a long, nasty diatribe about the “obscene and unnecessary censorship plague on Prodigy.” It urged subscribers to switch to CompuServe and other rival on-line services. Of course, CompuServe and America Online had their censors, too.
The messages continued to fly out of Washington faster than the D.C.-New York shuttle. One called for Prodigy to “fire the ass of your absurdly incompetent censor.” Maryann Magio censored it.
Another message used the f word eleven times in two paragraphs.
She censored that fucker, too.
Then the message sender became more than just another foul-mouthed, annoying loose cannon on the service. At 1:17 the subscriber in Washington began to claim responsibility for the two brutal child murders.
The subscriber claimed that he was the murderer, and he would prove it, live on Prodigy.
“Big Sister” pulled the message immediately She also called her supervisor to her cubicle at the Prodigy center in White Plains, New York. Her huge body was shaking all over like jelly by the time her boss arrived, bringing black coffee for both of them. Black coffee? Maryann needed a couple of Little John's “fully loaded” pizzas to get her through this total disaster.
Suddenly, a brand-new message flashed across the screen from the Washington subscriber, who seemed articulate and intelligent enough, but incredibly angry and really, really crazy.
