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.