Interface (43 page)

The office had been professionally decorated by someone with a
serious thing about sleek. It was sleek from top to bottom and end
to end, the kind of place where any man who didn't have his hair
slicked back felt like some kind of a shit-kicking redneck. A sleek receptionist sat at the polished-granite cyclorama of the front desk,
ensconced beneath the ODR logo, answering phone calls and
routing nearly all of them to the shabby department store in Falls Church or the shabby Cadillac dealership in Oakland. Behind her
was all windows, chrome and glass - beautiful offices that no one
ever used except, apparently, when they had some kind of an
important meeting with someone fatuous enough to be impressed by this kind of thing. Which probably included 99 percent of all
politicians.

But Ogle hadn't chosen this building because it was new, sleek,
or convenient. As he told Aaron repeatedly, he liked it for one
reason and one reason only: you got into the place by walking
through a mall. The point was all in the symbolism of the thing.
Rooted in a goddamn shopping mall. The ultimate symbol of the
American middle class. The very people that Ogle made his money
and staked his reputation on.

It was also practical at times like this, when Ogle wanted to do
what was known as focus group interviews. The idea behind an FGI
was that you got a few people together who represented a cross
section of America and you interviewed them, maybe showed them a few proposed campaign commercials, and got their reactions.

Finding a cross section of America was pretty easy at Pentagon
Plaza. Take the elevator down to the mall level, wait for the doors to open, fling out a lasso, and you could reel in a complete focus
group before they even knew what was happening.

People who assembled focus groups for Ogle were very good at
wandering through the mall and sizing people up. By watching a person's clothing, hair, jewelry, the way they walked, the things
they looked at, the stores they were fascinated by and the stores
they ignored, the kind of food they selected at the food court and
how they ate it, these observers could peg a person's income
bracket to within about ten thousand bucks and make some pretty
accurate guesses about what part of the country they were from,
whether they came from a big city or a small town, and even what sorts of political views they were likely to hold.

These Ogle employees were officially called Focus Group
analysts, but in the corporate parlance they were simply referred to
as ropers. The ropers had a parlance all their own, a system of
classifying the American population. It was a vast field of expertise
and Aaron didn't have more than a foggy idea of how it worked.
He didn't need to. They assembled the focus groups. Aaron ran the
equipment.

They attached half a dozen PIPER prototypes to the backs of
chairs. Each one had a cuff dangling from it. The chairs were
arranged in a cozy semicircle in a nice little carpeted room in a nice,
proper office in the Pentagon Towers offices.

When they had gotten their little room all hooked up with the
prototypes and some video stuff, Shane Schram, the burly,
rumpled, prematurely bald, tough-guy psychologist, materialized
from some other part of the country and sent a couple of ropers
down into the mall. Within a few minutes, sample Americans
began to drift out of the elevators.

Schram met them right there in the elevator lobby with a hearty
hello and a thank-you for having agreed to participate. The
receptionist showed them into the interview room, where they
filled out little information cards, drank coffee, and ate doughnuts.
Pretty soon, they had a full complement of half a dozen. Schram
came into the room, shut the door, thanked them all one more
time, and launched into his spiel.

Each of the six subjects was being paid a hundred dollars for this.
Ogle was spending a total of six hundred bucks to test a system that
cost millions. It was a heck of a deal.

26

"This is our office," Schram said, "and we're paying you our
money. But this time is all
yours.
You haven't heard of us. But we
are a public opinion research company with a lot of big clients in
politics and corporate America. A lot of people are listening to what
we say about American opinion. And the way we learn about that
is by talking to people like you. And that's why I say that this time
is all yours - because the whole idea is for you to unload on us. To
tell us exactly what you're thinking. I want you to be brutally frank
and honest about it. You can say anything you want in this room, because I'm from New York City and you can't hurt my feelings.
And if you don't bare your true opinions to me, then I can't tell my
clients what is going on in the minds of America."

Aaron wasn't in the room. He was in the next room, watching
all of this on television. Or hearing it, rather. None of the cameras
was pointed at Schram. They had half a dozen cameras in that
room, each pointed at one of the subjects. Their faces appeared on
half a dozen television monitors, lined up in a nice neat row, and
underneath each TV monitor was a computer monitor providing a
direct readout from the PIPER prototype attached to their chair.

The PIPER readout consisted of several windows arranged on a
computer screen, each window containing an animated graph or diagram. Right now, all of these were dead and inactive. On the
monitor speaker, Schram could be heard explaining to the subjects
how to put on the cuffs: roll up your sleeve, remove jewelry, et
cetera.

One of the ropers, a young woman named Theresa, came into
the monitor room. She was carrying a stack of cards, one for each of the subjects. She took a seat behind a table, where she could
watch the monitors, and began to arrange the cards in front of her.

"Got a pretty wide spread today, considering," she mumbled.
She shuffled through the deck, pulled out a card, and laid it out on
the left side of the desk, looking up at the TV monitor on the far
left. The monitor was showing a woman in her fifties, frosted blond
hair in a complicated set, big jewelry, shiny lipstick, harshly
penciled eyebrows. "Classic MHCC, which we get too many of in
this mall."

"MHCC?"

"Mall-hopping corporate concubine," Theresa mumbled.
"Though to really find them in their pure form you need to go
somewhere like Stamford, Connecticut. Here they aren't really
corporate, they're more government. Generals' wives."

"Oh."

Theresa put another card on the desk. This one apparently
belonged to the person on the second TV monitor, a slightly portly
man in his mid-thirties, with a receding hairline and a somewhat
nervous affect. "This guy is a debt-hounded wage slave. In its
purest form," she said.

"Is that a pretty common one?"

"Oh, yeah. There's millions of debt-hounded wage slaves."
Theresa put down a third card. The third TV monitor depicted an
older black woman, gray hair in a bun, thick-rimmed glasses, with
a wary look on her face. "Bible-slinging porch monkey."

Number four, another black woman, this one in her late thirties, wearing the uniform of a major in the Air Force: "First-generation beltway black."

Number five, a pleasingly plump middle-aged white woman
with a big hairdo, who seemed excited by the whole thing, eager
to please: "This dame is a frosty-haired coupon snipper right now.
Later in life, depending on the economy, she'll probably develop
into either a depression-haunted can stacker or a mid-American
knickknack queen."

Number six, an older white gentleman with a gaunt face, very
alert and skeptical: "Activist tube feeder. These guys are really
important. There's millions of these and they vote like crazy."

"How many of these categories do you have?" Aaron said.

"Lots of
'em. Hundreds. But we don't use all of them at once,"
Theresa said. "We tailor the list to the job. Like, if we're trying to
sell athletic shoes, we don't pay attention to the tube feeders, porch
monkeys, Winnebago jockeys, or can stackers. On the other hand,
if it's an election thing, we can ignore groups who don't vote very
much, like trade school metal heads and stone-faced urban
homeboys."

"I see."

"Also there's a lot of overlap between groups, which makes the
stats a little gloppy sometimes."

"Gloppy stats?"

"Yeah, it's hard to interpret the statistics because things get
confused. Like, you've got your 400-pound Tab drinkers. That's an
adjective, pertaining to their lifestyle. You could treat 400-pound
Tab drinkers as a group unto themselves. Or you could narrow things down by looking at the ones who have no worthwhile job
skills. In that case, you'd have a new group called 400-pound Tab-
drinking economic roadkill."

"What good would that do you?"

"Say you wanted to market a new diet system that was really el
cheapo. You decide to market this thing by aiming for fat jobless
individuals. You come up with a marketing strategy where you say
that losing weight improves your chances of getting a job. Then
you zero in on the 400-pound Tab-Drinking economic roadkill
and market it to them as directly as possible."

As the members of the focus group snapped the cuffs into place
around their wrists, the computer screens came alive with data. The
windows on the monitor screens, which had been blank and inert,
sprang to life with colorful, rapidly fluctuating graphics. The cuffs
contained sensors that tracked various bodily responses and sent
them down the cable to the prototypes; here, the information
coming in from the cuff was converted to digital form and
transmitted to a receiving station in this room.

Aaron had spent much of the last month writing software to run
on a Calyx workstation. This software would scan the incoming
stream of data and present it in a graphical form so that Ogle, or
anyone else, could glance at the computer screen and get an
immediate snapshot of what the subject was feeling.

Several times, Aaron had been on the verge of asking why it was
that such quick analysis was needed. He couldn't understand what
the big rush was. But before he asked this question, he always
remembered what Ogle had told him during their meeting in Oakland:
You can't understand everything. Only I, Cyrus Rutherford
Ogle, can understand everything.

Shane Schram's voice continued to drone from the speaker. When
he had greeted these people as they came from the elevators, he was
bouncy and exuberant. But now that they were cuffed to the chairs,
he had gone back to speaking in a knowing, New York tone.
Everything he said, he said as if he were resigned to it, tired of it,
and as if it should be fairly obvious to anyone who wasn't stupid. If
you listened to it long enough you began to think that you and
Schram were in together on a number of secrets that were hidden
from ordinary saps.

"Now, the subject of today's little get-together is the wonderful
world of politics."

Up on the TV screen, six faces nodded and winked knowingly.
You could get a rise out of just about anyone by referring to politics
in this tone of voice.

"Since we can't bring any politicians in here, we're going to
show you a bunch of television instead. All I'm asking you to do is
to watch this TV program - it'll run to about a quarter of an hour
- and then afterwards, we'll sit and talk about it."

In the hallway outside the monitor room, Aaron heard a
shuffling noise. Then a loud metallic clank. Then another shuffling
noise. Then another loud metallic clank.

"I'm pushing the button that says PLAY," Schram said, jabbing
at a button on the VCR, "but it's not playing. Another wonderful
product from our sneaky little Jap friends."