The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  “Having recently authored some pretty ugly kludges myself, I am glad to hear that.”

  Ressler extended the idea. “Efficiency and accuracy are not the same thing. Like it or not, life can only revise itself like a library saving or pitching books strictly on the basis of how frequently they’ve been checked out.” He spoke obliquely to me, tailoring his metaphors to an end I could not then see. “We like to think of nature as unerring. In reality, everything it does is an approximate mistake. Its every calculation is short-term, a quick fix. ‘Kludge’ is right, Franklin.” Under the shadow of what we were about to launch, the rules of decorum were changing.

  “Take our species: the apex of engineering. We’ve all but completed our systematic destruction of the whole, buffered web. The evidence is there, for anyone paying attention. Even if we stopped this evening …. And yet, something in the joy of building—something in my inherited, egoistic firmware—still insists that we also possess the first, flawed, rough prototype that might, in time, take nature beyond the knee-jerk, blind short-term. You see, we can project, unlike any other postulate in nature, unlike nature itself. Model. Foresee. Think. But we have no one to help us make our projections wise.”

  He stubbed out a butt and checked his watch. “There is talk in the genetics community about the Human Genome Project. Sequencing, base by base, the entire five-thousand-volume DNA string. But whose string? Yours? This fine woman’s here? What of the volumes for gray whales, horned toads, diatoms, four million species in all, lost by the thousands while we talk about them? Even the complete library, unattainable, will never begin to hint at the books, the stories the string might have produced.”

  Todd, my Todd, stood up, realizing what was at stake all around him. Life was suddenly too real to get out of alive. “Christ. What do we ask for, then?” Frantic, he asked the man he loved blindly, the woman he cared for a little, the general night—anyone who might answer. The question tore him like a marathoner’s cramp, his rib trying to free itself from imprisonment in its side. I never loved him more than at that moment.

  “What do you mean?” Ressler asked, elsewhere, years away.

  “I mean: we have this office sewn up; the records are in our power. A Defense Department contractor, a major financial institution, a dozen municipal outfits. Five years of transactions. Half a billion dollars would vanish into a giant Mylar null if we say so. We could take a day of data, scramble it beyond all recognition. ‘What’s a day, one day, worth to you?’ What do we ask for? A new Clean Air Act? Save the Whatever-it-is Seal?” Ressler chose his moment to say nothing. Todd looked at me, his voice wobbling into the shimmies. He assumed, all at once, the entire, terminal, toxic clot the race had laid over the place. The anguished understanding that he might, possessing these files, cut a deal, force a rescue on one bit of the botched job, was like alcohol in an incision. Todd was in real pain, drowning in causes. “An industry-free zone in the Antarctic? Ban the personal AK-47 from over-the-counter sale? Free food for the starving? Russians out of Afghanistan?”

  “U.S. out of North America?” I suggested. It helped briefly to undo the urgency, to thin the tangible sickness calling on all sides for instant cure.

  Ressler took my handmade chart back from Todd and gave it one more glance before answering. “Yes, the only question worth asking, now that we’ve all turned activist.” This is the sense if not the sound of his words as he sang them: we have it now, have extracted knowledge from information, and it’s not enough. We need to ask ourselves what we want to be when we grow up. We need that thing, that arithmetic of ecology that should have preceded knowledge, too easy, too obvious to bear repeating, too embarrassing and indicting to mention by name. The lookup code for care. “I suggest, seeing as how everything is already at stake, that we ask for the one essential in the triumvirate that life is too large and crucial to care about.”

  Todd looked at him without comprehension. “Meaning?”

  The baggage of the gene, the curse of populations. “Keep to the original plan. Ask for Jimmy.”

  We sat in silence, reluctant to take the machine on-line, to bring up the doctored version of programs whose results, both digital and analog, we had no way of forecasting. Todd retrieved a sketchbook and began doing portraits, lightning contour studies as controlled as anything I’d ever seen him do. Dr. Ressler surprised us both by asking to keep two. We dragged our heels, postponing the launch for a few seconds, and we all three knew it. I half-jokingly suggested that we wait a few more days, until the anniversary of Morse’s first public telegraphic message on the line between Washington and Baltimore. The notion tickled Dr. Ressler, but by that point he could only laugh gamely and say, “I dearly wish we could.”

  Delay was no longer just a question of losing time, of being outraced by the hospital collection bureaucracy. We had systematically destroyed all chance of returning to the old program. The files were gone. We could allow the vested interests no other program to fall back upon, or our changes would be quickly suppressed before they could produce their desired effect. We could run the new version or nothing at all. And running nothing at all, as Todd pointed out, would be the equivalent of performing a lobotomy on a chunk of the city’s working interests large enough to create a seizure throughout the rest of the interdependent network.

  “That first remote message,” Dr. Ressler asked, stubbing out another butt and starting anew. “Was it really ‘What hath God wrought’?”

  “That’s how the books report it.”

  Todd snorted. “Probably backstopped. Jimmied up after the fact.” His inadvertent verb stopped the conversation. He fiddled with a CRT contrast button. “Sorry. The fellow must be on my mind.”

  We rehearsed for the last time how we would put our claim once our variant system software was in operation. Dr. Ressler said, “We haven’t talked about it yet, but we ought to try to minimize prosecution, once the project has had its run.”

  “Ha!” Franklin discounted. “Information Age criminals never get prosecuted. They get hired on as consultants to the DOD.”

  Dr. Ressler smiled; that was the precedent. “All the same, I’ll link your immunity to the other conditions. Should push come to blow, you two and Annie haven’t the first idea of how this bug slipped into the works. As far as you are concerned, you don’t know your ASCII from your ALGOL.”

  “What about you?” I said, indignant at the suggestion that we scatter and leave him alone, answerable to everything.

  He smiled and exhaled. “They can’t do anything to me,” he answered. “I’m already spoken for.”

  Willfully or just ordinarily oblivious, we went on to other matters. “Well, as long as I still know you for another day yet,” Franklin cackled, “can I ask you one thing?”

  “Name it.” His voice acknowledged that he still owed us an explanation. He knew what this last petition to the Question Board would be: the same question that had started us here, before love, before knowledge, before disaster.

  Todd began gingerly enough, accelerating only slowly into a semblance of courage. “I understand … I can see how one might not be able to trap certain feelings off in a side panel. I mean, I can see how, if the attraction, if the need were large enough …” He shot me an involuntary glance. “That a person might choose to go on caring, as if …”

  “As if it still counted?” Dr. Ressler assisted.

  Something broke in Todd, and his urgent attachment to the man, his innate need to prove that neither of their disappearances was inevitable, flooded the room. “I can understand the torchbearing. Celibacy. Self-denial. But son of a mother … It seems to me that the worst thing, the worst hurt anyone could possibly have inflicted on you, shouldn’t have been enough to …”. He trailed off, afraid at the end to ask.

  But he had as much as asked already. Dr. Ressler had only to coax him to put it into words. “Enough to do what?”

  “To make you give up science.” Todd’s eyes swam with confusion. Shouldn’t you have thrown
yourself into it with redoubled effort? How could you desert the one place that might have given you some comfort?

  It was Dr. Ressler’s turn to be surprised. This was not the phrasing, not the question, he expected. “Oh,” he said, alerted into softness. “But I never quit science.”

  Franklin and I exchanged astonishments. Todd dismissed him bitterly. “I mean something more than keeping up with the journals.”

  “So do I.” The professor returned a self-conscious grin. “Look. Analysis depends on breaking down complex hierarchies into understandable parts. That’s indispensable to good science, and I did it for years. Even got a paper out of it, as you junior sleuths insist on reminding me. But analysis is just part of the method. When you catch a glimpse of your smallest, discrete components, and even these don’t explain the pattern you are after, sometimes the situation calls out for another motion, a synthetic cycle.

  “Remember John Von Neumann?” he asked. “‘Yes, it is obvious’? The sharpest systematic intellect of the century. Games theory, contributions to quantum mechanics, father of digital computer software.” He gestured through the two-way mirror into the computer room, suggesting that something of those old language generations still floated around in the newest machines. “Codeveloper of the hydrogen bomb and advocate of the preemptive strike. Once told Life, ‘If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?’ Claimed to have invented a whole mathematical discipline while riding in a taxi cab. Wrote a pivotal book, published posthumously by my old I-state research university, called Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, in which he proves that machines can be made complex enough to copy themselves.

  “Von Neumann, the cleverest product evolution has yet offered, thought that the language of the functioning brain was not the language of logic and mathematics. The only way we would ever be able to see the way the switches all assembled the messages they sent among themselves would be to create an analog to the language of the central nervous system.” He fell silent, perhaps wondering whether sheer cleverness is ever enough. “The firmware language of the brain. That’s what I have spent the last twenty-five years pursuing.”

  The revelation stunned us. Todd rubbed his temples. “I don’t get it. No institution? No grant? No laboratory? What are you doing here?”

  Ressler laughed. “It’s not a particularly popular or accredited line of research these days.” He held up a finger, holding the floor. He went to his attaché case, brought it back to the table, and unzipped it. It poured forth, like a flushed warren, long, stiff, manila-colored, heavily penciled-over scores. Musical scores. “This one is a woodwind octet,” he announced self-consciously. “Look here. I stole this bit from Berg. But he stole a similar bit from Bach, so I’m safe from lawsuit.”

  Todd flipped through the penciled staves, looking for some explanatory key. I collected myself first. “You’re a composer,” I said, a thrill coursing at the forbidden word.

  “Yes, I guess I am.” He sounded as startled by the revelation as we were. “I even went back to school awhile, although the pieces have remained hopelessly amateur.”

  “And?” I asked. I could not help myself, took his hand between mine. Nothing he could say or do would ever surprise me again. “Research results? Anything to write the journals about?” Could there really be another language, cleaner than math, closer to our insides than words?

  He answered me figure for figure. “Precious few conclusions, so far. Soft, slow passages more effective when contrasted with loud, fast ones. Nothing much more definitive. But bear in mind, the field is still in its infancy.”

  Todd, recovering his wits at last, plied him with enthusiastic questions. What had he written, and how much? Lieder, chamber works, symphonic? Problems of instrumentation and registration, color, timbre. The trade-off of genre. Tonal? Serial? Aleatoric? I tried to follow this tech shoptalk but found myself hearing something else, absolutely silent: a monk, late twentieth century, working in total isolation, locked in a cell for longer than I could imagine, a lifetime, just composing, trying to emulate, recreate, variegate, state, consecrate the sound he had once heard while standing on his front porch on a spring morning, about to enter, thinking his love waited for him inside. I thought of all the experimental, heuristic, and botched compositions that kept him company over long years, and how, whatever the orchestration, form, choice of language, all pieces amounted to love songs, not just to a lost woman, but to a world whose pattern he could not help wanting to save.

  What he had done, how he had chosen to spend his energies, really was science. A way of looking, reverencing. And the purpose of all science, like living, which amounts to the same thing, was not the accumulation of gnostic power, fixing of formulas for the names of God, stockpiling brutal efficiency, accomplishing the sadistic myth of progress. The purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it.

  I did not know the letter names yet, but I gathered that this biologist had discovered that A, T, G, and C spelled out endless variations on the old Socratic imperative in the cells. To say that the variants came from the same command was not to say they came to the same thing. Each still had to be identified in its particular texture. For that, one could only remain alert, stay flexible, keep deep down, work. All human effort now hung on the verge of revealing something unexpected, from the simplest of beginnings. The system ran undeniably toward randomness, but along the way, a steady stream of new nuances accumulated, each complete in its complexity, each incorporating the issuing theme. Dear Goldberg, play me one of my variations.

  And at that moment, losing the thread of the conversation, I blurted out that colossal contemporary irrelevance: “Have you had any pieces performed?”

  Dr. Ressler looked as nervously delighted as a little boy about to do his talent show number. “Opus One debuts tomorrow,” he declared. “The sole work by which I hope to be remembered.”

  He punched up the system time on the screen, and we were struck by the work still left to do before the arrival of the day shift. “Oh Jesus,” Todd let out.

  The geneticist-turned-musical-recombiner threw his portfolio back together. “Sorry. My fault. That’s what happens when you begin to solve the globe’s problems. Before you know it, it’s a quarter to six in the morning.”

  We fell to the cleanup tasks. I shredded the printouts of our last-minute test runs. Todd dummied up a console log, leaving no clues about the nature of the program that would soon be executing. And Dr. Ressler performed his coup de grâce. He selected, at random, a string of zeroes and ones deep in the system firmware. Using it as a cryptographic key, he ran the sequence against the program code of the impostor routines, storing down the scrambled product. Then he manually single-stepped into the loading procedure a pointer back to that random sequence, so that the scrambled programs would be deciphered into intelligible code when and only when they fed into the machine at run-time. When the corporate programmers went into the packs the next day to list the files and see where the unexpected behavior came from, they would find only gibberish. The trick was not uncrackable, but would slow the reversing process down.

  The self-enciphering spread across acres of digital storage. “All right,” he said, when the task came up complete. He took a deep breath and lifted a significant eyebrow. “Time to collect the songbooks.” Our bit of genetic engineering was done. For better or worse, Franklin brought down the last remnant of old firmware. We held our breaths like rocket scientists as he attempted to boot the complete, new system. The status indications flashed one by one across the console without producing any unexpected warnings. Up came what seemed to be the old, original cold-start screen.

  Ressler, ensuring that his name would be the only one traceable to this new boot, used two fingers to type it in. The screen prompted “password:” and echoed its demure x’s as he entered his. It waited an ungodly wh
ole minute, long enough for us to realize that a crash now would leave us with Jimmy on the street, his mother without a mortgage, and the three of us plus Annie in prison. Then, having put the fear of God in us, the system at last decided to flash:

  System Date and Time: 05/15/8406:35.45

  User sressler logged in.

  Last user logout was 00/00/00 at 00:00.00

  Command?

  Uncanny. We had created a new species, registering its own day one. No previous user. Ressler had even added the humorous touch of patching in a new version number for our new animal. But when he answered the command prompt with the standard request to bring up the start of the day’s on-line processing tasks, up came what cosmetically resembled in every respect the old operating system. And yet it was only a simulation.

  We breathed again. At least it ran. If the wrinkles we had introduced behaved in context the way they tested out in isolation, we were in business. Ressler grinned, as if Opus One had never caused him the least stress. “Looks good on this end.” He produced, from behind the CPU where he had stashed it who knows how long before, a bottle of our old favorite drugstore vintage and the requisite paper cups. “To our friend’s physical therapy,” he proposed. And we clinked wax rims.

  “To musicians and physicians,” Todd added, and we sipped again. Two sips to the wind, it was my turn. “To the language of the central nervous system.”

  AT THE CADENCE

  What would I add to the list of things we did that night? How would I interpret the account, two years and a handful of evenings after the fact? We thought to engage in a very old-fashioned gesture, or one so modern as to still be, like music, in its infancy. We acted according to a new complex mathematics, one dependent on the tiniest initial tweaks. The attempt was an absurd mismatch of scale—the notion that the entire community was accountable to the infinitesimal principle of a single life.

  I would say: at the same moment that we tried to bring our premise into being, we were also testing its validity, objectively, if not without passion. We worked on the same problem that had occupied Dr. Ressler from earliest adulthood. Now that he had half-unraveled it, he concluded that the bulk of the text down at ATCG level was still in the infinitive: to look, to want, to stand amazed. We simply read those verbs out loud, extending the synonym list. To try. To investigate.