Free Interface by Neal Stephenson, J. Frederick George

ambulance. The Governor moved his right arm, heavy with blood-pressure cuff and intravenous lines, and returned the salute. The ambulance moved forward on twin jets of steamy exhaust and angled across the parking lot, headed for the trauma center at Springfield Central Hospital, less than a mile away.
     
    6 As soon as Dr. Mary Catherine Cozzano got on the down elevator, headed for the parking garage, she began to go through a ritual she had developed for passage through hostile territory. She hauled the strap of her purse up over her head so that it ran diagonally across her body, snatch-proof. It hung on her right hip so as not to interfere with her pager, which was clipped to her left hip.   She unzipped the purse, pulled out her key chain,   and clenched it in her right fist so that the keys stuck out from between her fingers like spikes on a medieval weapon. As she carried her keys in her purse, she observed no size limitations; her key chain was as sprawling and ramified as a coronary artery, branching out to include a miniature Swiss Army knife, a penlight, a magnifying glass (all freebies from drug companies), and a stainless steel police whistle. The whistle dangled on a thick length of metal rope. She got it between her thumb and index finger, ready to use. She had already made sure that she was wearing her running shoes - not high heels, not boots - and a pair of scrub pants that offered her legs freedom of movement. That was a given, because these were the only clothes anyone could tolerate on a thirty-hour shift in a sprawling hospital.
    Finally, as the elevator was passing downward through the lobby level and into the subterranean parking levels, she reached into her purse and pulled out a black box that fit neatly into her left hand. It was rectangular with a bend near one end. The bent end was concave and sprouted four blunt metal prongs about a quarter of an inch long, making it look like the mouthparts of a tremendously magnified chigger. The prongs were symmetrically arranged: an
    outer pair that stuck straight out from the end of the device, and an inn er pair, closer together, angled toward each other as they s prouted from the concavity. When Mary Catherine found the box inside her purse, it fell naturally into her hand in such a way that h er index finger was resting on a black button, just under the crook, n ear the prongs. Mary Catherine pulled it out of her purse, held it away from herself, and pulled the trigger.
    A miniature lightning bolt, a purplish-white line of electrical discharge, popped between the two inner prongs. It created an a larming, crusty buzzing noise that seemed to penetrate deep into h er head. The spark whipped and snapped in the air like a slack clothesline caught in a November wind.
    She tested it like this, every day, because she was William A. Cozzano's daughter, and because her father was John Cozzano's son, and everyone in their family learned, when they were very young, not to be sloppy, not to assume, not to take anything for granted.
    Then the elevator doors opened, like the opening curtain on a cheap horror film, and she was staring into a low-ceilinged catacomb, filled with greenish, inexpensive institutional light that was hard on the eyes but did not really seem to illuminate anything. These were the tombs where doctors and nurses buried their cars while they worked. Most of the cars were shambling zombies, long since turned undead by the depredations of mobile chop shops that   cruised up and down the ramps night and day.
    During these trips through the catacombs, Mary Catherine liked to tell herself that her chosen speciality gave her an advantage in self-defense: she could diagnose people from a distance. By the way they walked, by the reactions on their faces, she could tell active psychotics from healthy, run-of-the-mill radio thieves.
    Mary Catherine was not the kind of woman who would carry a weapon in her purse. She was not sure what kind of woman would,