The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  “Interesting,” Todd said, giggling nervously.

  “Indeed,” Ressler concurred. “Promises to be a long night.”

  I had no idea what was going on. I looked from one to the other. “System crash,” Todd explained curtly.

  Ressler pulled on his earlobe. “Yes, we have once again done what the three-thousand-page user’s manual insists is impossible.” He led the three of us into the command room, where the twinkling LCDs had frozen solid. He looked at Todd, shook his head. “I’m mortified. Apparently, one can simulate a duplicate of oneself, but one can’t actually be in two places at the same time.”

  “My fault for keying away blithely. What about the Report Gen?” They looked through the two-way mirror. The printers were drifting dead in the electrical current. “And Payroll?”

  Dr. Ressler scratched his head. “Fairyland.”

  “The long chunk it had already finished?”

  “I think, friend, that as things stand, we’ll be lucky to rebuild the Master File without a cold reboot.”

  Franklin whistled. “Well! I’ll take a good system crash over a crossword any day. That’s why we’re working for the military-industrial complex in the first place. Right?” The two fell into flowchart, Holmesian deduction, tapping panels, toggling switches, volleying terms, injecting patches, and cross-referencing their way through the massive metal-bound manual with masochistic relish. As I couldn’t contribute, I was forgotten in the intellectual excitement of the fix. They were an unlikely pair, never more at ease with one another than at this crisis moment, with a hundred essential financial trails teetering on the brink of the ether. In the unreal solitude of their shift they were at peace, cut off from all others. Even I was at best a registered alien.

  I went and sat in the lunchroom, glanced at the day’s paper, which Franklin no longer shredded. I sat quietly in the dark, trying to recover that spark I’d felt on receiving my first introduction to programming. Within my lifetime, we’d built the first prototype animal capable of behaving like any other—the universal simulating machine. The complex behavior of Todd and Ressler’s computers floated on a sea of self-organizing ands, ors, and nots: a circuit-medium of living language. Strange slippage: language itself was the computer; metal and silicon were just ways of marshaling the syntax. If the driving language were properly designed, it might provide a complete, enumerable description of everything there was. Not just a description, a semantic table that animated itself. I tried to formulate, without sufficient vocabulary, the odd, momentous identity at machine level of information and instruction. Every “Thus it came to pass” harbored a secret, equivalent, “Go ye, therefore.” One of the great, isolate, alert moments of my life.

  In a while, Franklin came to find me. “Uncle Jimmy was right; I should have asked the charming Ms. O’Deigh out to eat. Listen to one’s elders; everything they tell you is right.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

  “It’s digital devastation in there. Don’t look! Think the Bosch nightmare of your choosing. I might get out by nine a.m. If I’m lucky.” He was in no more hurry to go home than he was to die. He never finished on time anyway. His second-shift vocation was innate, self-inflicted, a desire for perpetual distraction from real work, the thing calling out to be done. “A shame, too,” he said softly, tilting my head back. “I’d thought I might be able to visit, tonight.”

  “Come by whenever you feel like,” I said, deliberately misinterpreting. “I’ll be awake.”

  He shrugged; the matter was digital, out of his hands. He let me out by way of the fire exit, disabling the alarm behind me. I felt him, his split, how much he would have given not to hold back. He restrained me at the door. “Got an exit visa?”

  “Passwords are trivial,” I said, kissing him good night. The kiss lingered, a simultaneous interpreter between visiting heads of state. It contained whole grammars, self-generating syntaxes. No longer just a description; it lived like a command.

  QUOTE OF THE DAY

  In the expansion each day brought, I had little time for reparations. I visited Tuckwell one Sunday. Overdue, unable to put it off any longer, I returned to the old apartment for the first time since clearing out. I couldn’t believe I’d lived here recently, come back every day to the settlement. I found Keith in the posture of eighty million other American males at that moment: crapped out in front of the football game. Apparently, nightly news no longer produced sufficient threat to satisfy his addiction to event. He was talking back to the set, also a national prerequisite. Only Keithy performed the pathetic act in a style all his own, turning the sound off and delivering his own play-by-play into the roarless apartment.

  “Ol’ Staubach ran for daylight as if an entire detachment of Mujahadin were on his ass. Secondary’s fallen apart. The best lack all conviction. This is the moment when the entire offensive line must look over that brink at the inner bogeyman. Of course, none of this has any bearing on reality. All Ethiopia could live for a week on these teams’ boiled shoulder pads. You think that troubles Roger? Nope. The old pro sacrifices his body, plunges ahead for no gain.”

  “Hi,” I said. He studied the play. “I came to say hello. Roger Staubach retired four years ago after playing eleven seasons.”

  Keith gave me a suspicious look. “How can you be sure?”

  “Forgotten already? Forty percent of my livelihood is sports trivia.” We couldn’t talk there; the place was too loaded. I hauled him out of the apartment, hanging on to keep him from breaking away. We ducked into the nearest greasy spoon. He was in bad shape, worse than I had thought. We ordered coffee. Tuckwell floated unopened sugar packs on the surface of his. He waited, made me ask him how he had been. At length, he gave me a manila folder he’d brought along. “Birthday present,” he claimed passively; it wasn’t my birthday. The folder housed a mounted ad: a grainy aerial photo that Franklin could have drawn freehand. Photorealism from his No. 2 pencil was child’s play.

  On second look, I recognized it as a vaguely familiar military document I’d seen reprinted. Tuckwell wouldn’t identify; he wanted audience participation. Given the time I’d spent on Twenty Questions in my life, I had no patience for it then. But I’d long ago learned that when Keith got a bee up his ass, all I could do was let it cross-pollinate. I set the image on the table: a construction site, an empty lot a week before the circus comes to town. Muddy ground recently torn up, with man-made craters filled with water. A few pieces of blurry equipment, corrugated tin sheds. Superimposed on the photo was a system of arrows and Acronymese. I managed to ignore Tuckwell’s pointed silence long enough to concentrate. Aerial view, construction site, strategic arrows: I did my quiz-show contestant stint. “U–2 shot of Cuba, twenty-one years ago.”

  “Very good. Natural-born uncoverer. And what do you remember about said incident?”

  “Keithy, I was just nine years old. I swear I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Don’t be a Hoosier.” We sat and looked at the icon, knowing that another word would spell disaster. To self-conscious effect, he took out of his rucksack an acetate overlay. He handed it to me, saying, “Forgot something.” I spread the overlay over the photo, and the scene was transformed. It now read, in fancy, living color, 40-point type: “DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE OTHER GUY IS UP TO?”

  Keith was wired by now. A wrong guess was worse than none, so I set the composite image down and folded my hands. He explained that his outfit had been hired to free-lance this ad; it would hit the stands in three big-circulation glossies next month. His eyes gleamed. “The bastard will sell,” he chuckled. “Apotheosis of vending by fear. Paranoia— our supreme erotic desire. Everyone secretly adores having his worst nightmares orchestrated.”

  “I thought we bought things we liked.”

  “Wake up, lady.”

  “Who’s the client?” I asked. “What’s the product?”

  “God damn it, O’Deigh. Who in hell cares? Haven’t you figured this game out yet? Nobody sells products.
They sell slogans.”

  He was right: I thought of all the times patrons had asked me to identify forgotten commodities by dimly remembered sales pitches. The best display in adland, the ne plus ultra of mottodom, was: “The Best Motto Money Can Buy.”

  We stared at the reconnaissance, pretending to sip at our tepid, distracting narcotic. I could stand it no longer. “A beautiful lettering job. The layout’s nice. What would you like me to say?” I had come to try to be kind, but was not prepared to find kindness so messy. I could think of nothing to say that would extricate us.

  But I had misread Keith—flunked the economics of compassion. Before I knew what was happening, he was hissing at me, “You want me to quit my job? Make some difference? Go chain myself to the fence at Lawrence Livermore?” He began racing along a mental tangent angle I could not intercept. “You think I don’t know what’s at stake? You’re the one; you don’t have the slightest sense of what we’re up against. You, with all the facts. You won’t sum them up. Look at this.” He smacked the photo with a violent backhand. “‘Twenty-one years back.’ You still haven’t the slightest idea what we’re looking at.”

  I knew I was looking at a triumph of late-day, calculated despair. I knew the sort of product the photo promoted, the market distraction we have inserted between every desire and its itch: the ultimate bottled water, a salt elixir that creates more thirst than it gratifies. I’d heard him deliver the same speech when we lived together, but never so distraughtly, never with such solid supporting evidence.

  The waitress’s hovering maddened him. On the woman’s third return he said, “You want us out of here? Why not put a taxi meter in these booths? Or I can leave a bunch of quarters on the edge of the plexi here, and you can come by every ten minutes and pick one up.” He was pacing in place, poking the slots on the napkin holder, squeezing the mustard pump, spindling the straws. I took his hands and held them steady, more wrestler’s pin than old flame’s cradle. He turned on me, gave me the most menacing smile I’ve ever seen: “You still don’t know the secret word here, do you? You think the issue is apocalypse? The missiles are nothing, dear heart. No-thing.” He looked at the photo as if he’d forgotten what the issue was. “How you supposed to take arms against something like this?” His laugh was desperate, falsetto. “Picket?” His voice popped, like a teenager learning to drive a standard transmission. “The product is electronic mail. The advertisement is a finalist for a national award.”

  I knew that such things existed. But I’d never taken them seriously. “How? It hasn’t even run yet.”

  “Novelty is all. These folks are on top of things. I have to fly to LA next month, because …”. He looked at me with caustic pride. “Because the awards are being televised.”

  “Who’s the sponsor?” I risked. Keith cackled.

  “Brought to you by the folks who left you sponsorless.” He breathed, clearing an aisle down the minefield between us. “Thing is, I could use a stunning, statuesque, killer beauty in black elbow gloves to drape over my arm.” He waited until I could no longer accept gracefully. “Care to help me find one?”

  I took him home, where he began communing with the remote control before I was out of the room. At last I asked him what I had come to ask, a question no answer could satisfy. “Keithy, will you be all right?”

  He shut the sound off and stared. “Why did you move?”

  I manufactured something about room, adulthood, self-reliance, the need for perpetual experiment. I didn’t try to explain that I was after the one thing I already knew would not be left me at the end: what it felt like to be alive.

  BOOKS

  I went through my library this morning, searching for books I might be able to peddle secondhand. A bit histrionic, perhaps. Premature. I still have cash left, if none coming in. Haven’t yet been knocked back onto necessity. But for a minute this morning, I got obsessed with the idea of efficiency, the political economy of plants: capture the energy I need to build just those structures that will let me capture all the energy I need. I forgot for a moment how inept and archaic nature really is. Grotesque encumbrance of peacock tails, koalas’ dependence on a single leaf, inexplicable energy cost of narwhal horn: efficiency belongs only to ingenious naturalists.

  This morning around ten, I ran out of sentences. It became impossible to type another verb. So I attacked my library, thinking to pare it down. I didn’t need both the Times Atlas and my schoolgirl Hammond; I could part with the older almanacs; my Spotter’s Sailboats, acquired who knows where, had stood me in all the stead it ever would; I could ditch either Bartlett’s or the Oxford Quotes.

  But in choosing between these last I rediscovered just how differently two identical purposes could be met and also, indirectly, the source of the note that first persuaded me to come out and meet Todd by streetlight. Running my finger down the entry “Ears,”

  hath e. to hear

  high crest, short e.

  I have e. in vain

  in e. and eyes to match me

  ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty e.

  leathern e. of stock-jobbers

  I was struck by the ears that were missing. If not here, then I would need to check one of those great compendia the rearguard guerrilla actions against the scattering of world’s word where he cribbed all his love notes. I found them in “Adam’s Curse,” by Yeats.

  I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:

  That you were beautiful, and that I strove

  To love you in the old high way of love;

  That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown

  As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

  The lines turned up in a superfluous anthology I’d ear-marked for sale. The note that had stolen the verses returned to me intact, and with the note, Todd—more real, less efficient than I’ve yet made him out. And with him, I had what I was after, and my sentences came back all afternoon. And I vowed not to sell so much as a single, redundant letter.

  XV

  THE NATURAL KINGDOM (II)

  Q:How big is the biosphere? How high? How wide?

  R.G., 5/12/81

  Q:What is Life?

  E. Schrödinger, 1944, J.B.S. Haldane, 1947

  Q:Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

  Matthew (?), ca. 80 (?)

  A. CLASSIFICATION

  Books may be a substantial world, but the world of substance, the blue, species-mad world at year’s end outstrips every card catalog I can make for it. If I’m to locate Ressler’s code, I must step back and see what the nucleotides are after at beast level. But every system for listing life that I come across is a map at least as unwieldy as the place itself.

  In the first nomenclature, what Adam called a creature was what it was—an exact lookup table for the living library. But that perfect equivalence between name and thing was scattered in ten thousand languages, punishment for an overly ambitious engineering project. Schemes to recapture the Ur-order go as far back as I can track. Theophrastus classified plants by human use, not an auspicious second start to naming, but a popular one in the centuries following him. Color, shape, feature, habitat, behavior: successive methods cast makeshift classification nets over a school that will not stay still long enough to be drafted.

  I’d thought the gross macrodivision, at least, was secure, until I read of unicellulars neither animal nor plant. A nineteenth-century patch job, Protista is a category so diverse it hardly helps. I watch a fourth kingdom secede: Monera, cells without nuclei. But subdividing still doesn’t suffice; later treaties draw up five or six domains. And all this splintering takes place while I’m still at the top of the classifying pyramid.

  Descending into phylum, class, and order, I’m swamped in ever more controversial flowcharts. Strata shade off into suborders and superfamilies, overrunning the borders. Seed-bearing plants alone number 200,000 species. At the third rung, a single class, Insecta, exceeds three-quarters of a million species, with thousands more added every year. Tra
cking these figures for no one’s but my ears, I realize that I’d stopped asking, for years now, that first question: how many ways are there of being alive? What is this place? How can I say it?

  Bat to banyan, bavarian gentian to baleen whale: I was expelled from childhood the day that living strategies began embarrassing me with their ludicrous profusion. Too immodest, teeming: I could memorize a hundred species a day and die not yet scratching the collection’s surface. Species laugh off the most rigorous hierarchy. My Baedekers to the biosphere, government offices packed to exploding with print, strain under the weight of this wild violation of the paperwork reduction act.

  A year too late, a life since I last bothered to ask the only thing worth asking, I feel strong enough to take on natural history again. Girlish-strong, discovering that the catalog can never be complete. Made strong by desperation at what’s come over the list. However impaired my vocabulary, however late my start, I must have a quick look while there’s time. Something’s happened, yesterday, this morning, something threatening the whole unclassifiable project, changing the rules of the runaway gamble forever. Something all my reading leads to.

  Here, in the isolation of my books—clunky classroom translations of the original—I learn the first principle of natural selection. Living things perpetuate only through glut. How many ways are there of being alive? My answer lies in a block of code programmed to generate more copies of itself than are lost to execution. Speciation, fracturing into every subniche and supercranny, depends on surplus of offspring in every breeding creature on earth, the prodigal gene.

  If the volumes are beyond listing, I try at least to locate life’s bookends. How large is the envelope? Living cells have been snagged miles high in the stratosphere. Dives into the deepest sea trench, under several atmospheres, turn up diaphanous fictions that explode before they can be brought to the surface. Bacteria thrive in ice currents and boiling ripples. I look for inhospitable places where living things haven’t penetrated. Even in the Sahara’s desiccating winds, 4 percent humidity, and 33°C daily temperature swings, scrub dots the dunes, roots descend fifty feet into sand, grains swarm with microorganisms.