works for the Feds has their heart in it. Because if they didn't, it would come out plain as day when it is their turn to sit in this chair.
The questions go on and on. Mostly nonsense questions. 'Have you ever been to Scotland? Is white bread more expensive than wheat bread?' This is just to get her settled down, get all systems running smoothly. They throw out all the stuff they get from the first hour of the interrogation, because it's lost in the noise.
She can feel herself relaxing into it. They say that after a few polygraphs, you learn to relax, the whole thing goes quicker. The chair holds her in place, the caffeine keeps her from getting drowsy, the sensory deprivation clears out her mind.
'What is your daughter's nickname?' 'Y.T.'
'How do you refer to your daughter?'
'I call her by her nickname. Y.T. She kind of insists on it.'
'Does Y.T. have a job?'
'Yes. She works as Kourier. She works for RadiKS.'
'How much money does Y.T. make as a Kourier?'
'I don't know. A few bucks here and there.'
'How often does she purchase new equipment for her job?'
'I'm not aware. I don't really keep track of that.'
'Has Y.T. done anything unusual lately?'
'That depends on what you mean.' She knows she's equivocating. 'She's always doing things that some people might label as unusual.' That doesn't sound too good, sounds like an endorsement of nonconformity. 'I guess what I'm saying is, she's always doing unusual things.'
'Has Y.T. broken anything in the house recently?'
'Yes.' She gives up. The Feds already know this, her house is bugged and tapped, it's a wonder it doesn't short out the electrical grid, all the extra stuff wired into it. 'She broke my computer.'
'Did she give an explanation for why she broke the computer?'
'Yes. Sort of. I mean, if nonsense counts as an explanation.'
'What was her explanation?'
'She was afraid - this is so ridiculous - she was afraid I was going to catch a virus from it.'
'Was Y.T. also afraid of catching this virus?'
'No. She said that only programmers could catch it.'
Why are they asking her all of these questions? They have all of this stuff on tape.
'Did you believe Y.T.'s explanation of why she broke the computer?'
That's it.
That's what they're after.
They want to know the only thing they can't directly tap - what's going on in her mind. They want to know whether she believes Y.T.'s virus story.
And she knows she's making a mistake just thinking these thoughts. Because those supercooled SQUIDs around her head are picking it up. They can't tell what she's thinking. But they can tell that something's going on in her brain, that she's using parts of her brain right now that she didn't use when they were asking the nonsense questions.
In other words, they can tell that she is analyzing the situation, trying to figure them out. And she wouldn't be doing that unless she wanted to hide something.
'What is it you want to know?' she says. 'Why don't you just come out and ask me directly? Let's talk about this face to face. Just sit down together in a room like adults and talk about it.'
She feels another sharp prick in her arm, feels numbness and coldness spreading all across her body over an interval of a couple of seconds as the drug mixes with her bloodstream. It's getting harder to follow the conversation.
'What is your name?' the voice says.
39
The Alcan - the Alaska Highway - is the world's longest franchise ghetto, a one-dimensional city two thousand miles long and a hundred feet wide, and growing at the rate of a hundred miles a year, or as quickly as people can drive up to the edge of the wilderness and park their bagos in the next available slot. It is the only way out for people who want to leave America but don't have access to an airplane or a ship.
It's all two-lane, paved but not well paved, and choked with mobile homes, family vans, pickup trucks with camper backs. It starts somewhere in the middle of British Columbia, at the crossroads of Prince George, where a number of tributaries feed in together to make a single northbound highway. South of there, the tributaries split into a delta of feeder roads that crosses the Canadian/American border at a dozen or more places spread out over five hundred miles from the fjords of British Columbia to the vast striped wheatlands of central Montana. Then it ties into the American road system, which serves as the headwaters of the migration. This five-hundred-mile swath of territory is filled with would-be arctic explorers in great wheeled houses, optimistically northbound, and more than a few rejects who have abandoned their bagos in the north country and hitched a ride back down south. The lumbering bagos and top-heavy four-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Hiro on his black motorcycle.
All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.
The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline ice-scape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
For a fee, you can drive into a Snooze 'n' Cruise franchise and umbilical your bago. The magic words are 'We Have Pull-Thrus,' which means you can enter the franchise, hook up, sleep, unhook, and drive out without ever having to shift your land zeppelin into reverse.
They used to claim it was a campground, tried to design the franchise with a rustic motif, but the customers kept chopping up those log-and-plank signs and wooden picnic tables and using them for cooking fires. Nowadays, the signs are electric polycarbonate bubbles, the corporate identity is all round and polished and smooth, in the same way that a urinal is, to prevent stuff from building up in the cracks. Because it's not really camping when you don't have a house to go back to.
Sixteen hours out of California, Hiro pulls into a Snooze 'n' Cruise on the eastern slope of the Cascades in northern Oregon. He's several hundred miles north of where the Raft is, and on the wrong side of the mountains. But there's a guy here he wants to interview.
There are three parking lots. One out of sight down a pitted dirt road marked with falling-down signs. One a little bit closer, with scary hairys hanging around its edges, silvery disks flashing and popping under the full moon as they aim the bottoms of their beer cans at the sky. And one right in front of the Towne Hall, with gun-toting attendants. You have to pay to park in that lot. Hiro, decides to pay. He leaves his bike pointing outward, puts the bios into warm shutdown so he can hot-boot it later if he has to, throws some Kongbucks at an attendant. Then he turns his head back and forth like a hunting dog, sniffing the still air, trying to find the Glade.
There's an area a hundred feet away, under the moonlight, where a few people have been adventurous enough to pitch a tent; usually, these are the ones with the most guns, or the least to lose. Hiro goes in that direction, and pretty soon he can see the spreading canopy over the Glade.
