Free Interface by Neal Stephenson, J. Frederick George Page A

but certainly not her. She did it anyway. At first it had been a con cession to her father. Ever since the death of her mother, her father's concern for her safety had become an obsession with him. When she had moved into her apartment, he drove up from Tuscola with all of his tools and spent a weekend reinforcing the deadbolts, putting bars on the windows, caging her in from the outside world. The people who lived in the apartment across the air shaft - an extended family of Brazilian immigrants - spent most of that weekend gathered in the living room, almost as if for a family portrait, staring in astonishment as the Governor of Illinois dangled halfway out of a sixth-story window sinking bolt hole after bolt hole into the brick window frames with a massive three- quarter-inch electric drill that he had borrowed from one of his farmer cousins.
    The next time her birthday rolled around, Dad had given her a small, neatly wrapped box. Mary Catherine had been embarrassed and flushed with gratitude, thinking it was a necklace - and coming from Dad, it was sure to be too formidable to wear. But when she had gotten it out of the box, it turned out to be a stun gun instead. A fitting weapon for a neurologist.
    Dad had never observed any limitations on his life. He saw nothing remarkable   in   assuming   that   one   day   he   would be President of the United States. He had always assumed that Mary Catherine would feel the same way. He always told her that she could do anything she wanted with her life, and while she never doubted him, she always took it with a grain of salt. And when he first became aware that, as a woman, she was in danger in ways that he was not, and that this danger limited what she could do, he was deeply troubled. He refused to accept it for a long time. But he was starting to understand and was trying to find ways to exempt her from the regulations that society imposed on all women. Because, goddamn it (she could hear him say), it just wasn't fair. Which was all the reason he needed to do anything.
    She was halfway to her car when her beeper detonated, scaring her half out of her scrubs. She had been awake or virtually awake for thirty-six hours and was running on a lean, rancid bland of caffeine and adrenaline. One reflex told her to grab the beeper and push the button that would make it shut up. The other reflex told her to pull the trigger on her stun gun and get it up into the solar plexus of any bad guys who might be in her vicinity. The reflexes got a little c onfused and the two little black boxes collided, the stun gun and the beeper, and the stun gun won; the beeper went silent.
      (a) This was no time to stand still and figure out the problem and ( b) as of thirty minutes ago, she was no longer on call. This had b een a mistake on the part of the operator. She had paged the w rong doctor. Sooner or later, they would figure it out, they always did. Right now, Dr. Cozzano needed to get home and sleep.
    When she got back to her apartment, her answering machine w as taking down a message from a man whose voice she did not re cognize. She just caught the tail end of it as she was coming th rough the door: ". . . condition is stable and he's under the p ersonal care of Dr. Sipes, who of course is a very fine neurologist, T hanks. Bye."
    She recognized the name Sipes; he was on the faculty of the Central Illinois University College of Medicine and he showed up at all the conferences. Apparently this call had come from down-s tate, where some colleague had a question about something. Didn't sound urgent; she would call him back later. She turned down the volume on the answering machine, locked all of the locks th at Dad had installed to keep her safe, fed the cat, and went into t he bathroom.
    There was a mirror in the bathroom. Mary Catherine had not looked in a mirror for something like a day and a half. She took this o pportunity to see if she still recognized herself.
    Her father was the