The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  On the day I heard about Dr. Ressler’s death, I posted a quote, one of my last, about the God of the scientists making men in his own image and setting them here with the single command to go and figure out how everything worked. Tonight, I would sneak fugitively into the library and add a complementary quote by the same author: “Trouble throughout the modern age has as a rule started with the natural sciences ….” Or better: “Everything has become perishable except perhaps the human heart.”

  I learned that night, as we put our last touches on the on-line replacement, that science, the chief, most miraculous project of the modern world, the source of all the trouble, was itself a self-reproducing automaton. Empirical wonder did not stop short of those forbidden infinitives, to protect, to hope, to assist. They too were embedded deep in the coding problem. In order to say “Copy me,” the string had first to say “Read me.” Naturally such a command would result in time in the need to do science. What else could it become?

  Doing science was simply a question of getting up the courage of curiosity. But the courage that made Dr. Ressler automatically interfere on Jimmy’s behalf would have paralyzed Todd and me had we recognized its source. I can’t pretend I had no idea. He hinted at it—his personal immunity, his already being spoken for. It’s there, obvious, in his toss-off about being remembered by posterity. But that evening, while we finished our entry for the science fair, these were just words I couldn’t afford to make sense of.

  Tonight, the project that enlisted me is all but ready for print. I have finished my book lookup; the self-assigned homework is done. I have retrieved from the stacks the gist, at least, of what his science thought to retrieve from the world. I can now hear, in the set of variations, the shattering process he spent a life listening to. Like the best of reductionists, I can pull it apart into base molecules that, through a circus tumbling act governed by physical law, learn how to fill every conceivable niche of sound. All this, and it hasn’t even come down to the wire; by the timehonored creative method of not eating, I have enough reserves left to start the job search or finance a full-scale retreat to the blood relations in Elkhart.

  In my time away, I have managed a layman’s guide to nucleotides, a miniature map of the man who so badly wanted in. I’ve come to the verge of declaring that the code codes only for the desire to break it. I’ve managed to name everything except the one thing, that evening, that Dr. Ressler knew. The Ur-text, the certain certainty that by itself motivated him, the in vivo foster parent of empiricism.

  I’d seen the glow for months, but had chalked up his gradual return to solid things, to Todd’s and my company. I should have known, by how quickly Dr. Ressler threw himself into Jimmy’s cause, that he followed a fuller preparation, long in motion. He felt the mass packed in his abdomen. The composer knew, weeks before any physician, that the oncogene had been triggered. Information was going back under, was about to disappear again into silence. His long apprenticeship to science was soon to be rewarded with a Name Chair in oblivion. The pattern behind the pattern, the mutation shaped into something significant, the mystery, the only muse, the built-in desire for discovery, was coming home. He knew. There was a fire loose in the landscape, in the library.

  XXIX

  THE THRESHOLD EFFECT

  In that museum in Rotterdam where my friend’s broken-off research tour of the known world took him, a room away from Brueghel’s great Tower (already crumbling in mid-construction around the base) hangs its twentieth-century counterpart, the contemporary reply to the scattering of languages: Magritte’s Threshold of Liberty. The painting opens on a sealed room whose walls divide into panels. Each panel is itself a painted window, hinting at what lies on the other side, beyond the pane: sky, trees, fire, lace, more windows, or just a further wooden panel, the wall the painted imitation hangs upon.

  In the center of the bare room stands a cannon, a paint cannon, but about to discharge itself all the same. The painting is an enigma, an absolute cipher. It is about enigma, the screen of knowing only through language, the threshold effect, the accumulation of small variations that transform a change of degree into a change of nature. Life stands on the threshold of some new twist it will never be able to name but must live through all the same. I will get no closer to liberty than thin explanation, this diminishing metaphor of panels porting images into the closed room. But it interests me to imagine Todd standing in front of that cannon just about to fire, shatter the painted chamber, flood the place with moonlight that until that moment had been only postulate. I stand next to him in the narrow gallery, looking, waiting.

  My sabbatical is up. The last text I read says that the doubling time for genetic knowledge has dropped to less than a year. Twice the field it was the day I started studying. And I’ve nothing to put down by way of synopsis except this belated discovery that I don’t much care to die apart from him.

  A CHILD’S GUIDE TO SURGERY

  The mutations we set into the system began to take effect the next morning. MOL data enterers, sitting down at their terminals, coffee cups in hand, saw on their screens the message: “Would you mind if your major medical coverage were instantly dropped? (Enter Y or N to continue).” An “N” looped them back to the identical question. A “Y” cleared the tube and put up a string of phosphors reading, “Then please make some noise about your colleague James Steadman,” before freeing the terminal and dropping the users into their ordinary dialogues.

  Midmorning, when the firm’s remote clients began requesting digital transmissions, the modems behaved flawlessly, the reports came over the wires, and the remote printers executed the ledgers without hitch, until the bottom line. Just where the balance should have been, the slavish dot-matrix printer pasted a boldface, near-letter-quality Q:

  Q:Your company is financially linked to an insurance organization that does not honor the spirit of its contractual commitments. What can you do to keep it honest?

  A:Drop a line to the CEO below.

  Underneath, the dumb printer knocked out the appropriate address. Two lines beneath, like the denouement sports score doled out only after the public service announcement airs, appeared the accurate but upstaged bottom line.

  Surprise blits began to infiltrate banking facilities in distant parts of the city. Tellers presenting transaction receipts to customers found that the innocuous little slips, universally distributed for the express purpose of being instantly thrown away, carried the announcement that today in history a certain stroke patient in a hospital in a neighborhood across town was about to be turned out onto the street. The slips were still thrown away, but not before a few of the bottle-messages reached civilization.

  By afternoon back at the MOL offices, the day shift’s crisis management, printing out the first batch of the day’s mass statements, noticed, after several hundred had been printed, something wrong. Each otherwise faultless statement contained, in the bottom strip of the universal financial form usually reserved for such stuff as “We wish each one of you a warm and personal New Year,” the emergency signal: “A stroke victim is about to be cut loose.” Just below came a random selection from the “Yes” pile Dr. Ressler and I had made from my stack of quotes of the day:

  In a few years we have learned virtually to ignore things that would have petrified the world …

  Hark, the dominant’s persistence till it must be answered to!

  For who would lose,

  Though full of pain, this intellectual being …

  I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

  Care is heavy, therefore keep you,

  You are care, and care must keep you.

  Le vent qui éteint une lumière allume un brasier. For a rough translation, please call …

  Verses-turned-viruses under the pressure of environment. Each message contained a contact where curiosity could be directed. Some quotes were canonical, others more transient. We’d clipped from Bartlett’s
, the daily newspaper, private stock, selecting on how well they made anonymous tragedy real. Others we picked for the roll of the words. Still others had nothing to do with Jimmy. We just liked them, favorite bits of recognition.

  The first, astonished operator to notice this issue of literature all over the credit union forms may have tried to abort and restart the statement run. If so, he got exactly the same result, with whatever parameters he called up the print job. A glance at the tampered file, any attempt to list its logic, showed it scrambled beyond recognition. The daytime operations staff faced a few unacceptable choices. They could go over the thousand statements by hand with a black magic marker. This would take prohibitively long and would raise more curiosity than the snippets themselves; worse, it would not look professional. They could fail to send the batch out at all, which would result in stiff penalties for failing to meet the DP contract. Or they could send the infected financial stubs out as is and hope, as with the personal New Year’s greetings, that no one paid any attention.

  This they elected to do, notifying the targeted insurance executives whose numbers appeared, assuring them firm to firm that this sabotage was not the work of MOL but of some runaway individual from within. When Dr. Ressler and Todd showed up for work that evening, they were taken into police custody.

  I sat home alone that night, expecting the phone to ring. I had no idea what was happening to them, although I suspected they had been rounded up. Every ten minutes I had to check myself from going over to the offices, now doubtless crawling with software experts trying to crack Dr. Ressler’s Chinese box. I scoured the city news, waded through the schoolchildren slayings and neo-Nazi resurgences, but there was no mention of anomalous mass-mail hijacking. I could not see the statements going out or eavesdrop over the relay circuits. I had no way of finding out whether we’d succeeded in grazing the banking industry with our tetanus prick.

  When my doorbell went off, I almost tore a ligament. I opened without even checking. It was the last visitor I expected: Annie. “You shouldn’t be here,” I shouted. But I wasn’t about to let her leave, now that she was. Annie was pale with excitement. Acting publicly and illegally, taking legitimation from the cause itself, was so new to her that she shook to talk about it. She was discovering the thermodynamics of pressure politics and wanted, that very evening, to expand into it like nature filling its abhorred vacuum.

  I gave her the apartment tour. She was as surprised at my assemblage of escapist Victoriana as her lover Todd had once been erotically charged by it. She kept snatching looks between me and all the embroidery, as if I were having her on. We sat in the living room pouring drinks, the radio news on low in the background, polling the air for waves from the pebble we’d chucked into it. Annie was transformed on activism: could we succeed in saving Jimmy? If insurance companies ran at a profit, wasn’t that essentially exploitative? Weren’t the central money centers the same ones who were fanning the fires in Central America and Africa? I told her I didn’t know.

  I didn’t mind her talking. It filled the space. At one point she stopped and, complete non sequitur, announced, “You know. I’ve been thinking a lot about all the talks you and I used to have. You might be right about at least one thing. Species don’t hold static. They don’t keep still.” The first awful concession: she wasn’t admitting anything else. But she let me know, made me take responsibility for ruining her faith for good.

  When she made to leave, I walked her to the door. There—having written down everything else from that year, I can hardly suppress this—we fell into a fumbling, confused moment, and all at once found ourselves kissing. I don’t know who I was putting my mouth to. But Annie was definitely kissing me, attaching to me by her hands with the same excitement of discovery she’d had on arriving. We struggled and broke off. She looked at me, imploring, needing, hoping I might now ask her back in. I stood still and let her leave as if nothing had been transacted.

  On day two of the information blitz, the mechanical messages were shuffled and sent out again a little differently. Dr. Ressler had inserted a clever routine that made sure, even though the idea-genes were distributed randomly, that no target received the same message twice. The enhanced statements went out to a new batch of recipients. Our doctored programs also began dispatching little-known facts: premium-to-payment ratios for major medical plans in the U.S.; number of days in a hospital bed required to wipe out average life savings.

  I went to work but could concentrate on nothing. Ignorance of what was happening to Todd and Ressler together with my anxiety over Jimmy incapacitated me. I remember going to pieces over a trio of submissions left in the question submission box: Q: How old is the minicam? Q: How many rats are living under Brooklyn? Q: Should we go to Mars? That afternoon I was picked up for questioning.

  Annie was interrogated separately, as well as a first-shift data entry clerk, completely innocent. Both were released in hours. I do not know what the others said. Aware that Dr. Ressler must certainly have been somewhere nearby, denying that anyone else had any involvement in the matter, I laid out exactly what I’d done and why. I said I had no idea at all how to stop the runaway software. That much was true.

  For safety’s sake, only Dr. Ressler knew. He had written the patches so that they would all unwrite themselves like the magician’s self-vanishing knot the instant a certain word was typed at the command prompt on the system console. The word existed nowhere but in his memory. I don’t know what Ressler told the authorities, but I know that he stopped short of dealing for Jimmy’s reinstatement, a proffered swap that would have converted us all into felons.

  I’m not sure which terrified the vested interests more: the suggestion that masses of sensitive data might be threatened—a notion that none of our messages even hinted at—or the acute embarrassment produced throughout the financial sector by this amateur theatrical showering of Milton and Robert Browning on the upper stories of the gleaming, inviolable World Trade buildings. In any case, no one had any use for me as soon as it became clear I could not help them stop the flow of messages. They sent me home over my own protests of guilt.

  The press, a day late, caught wind of the event, and I was videotaped in conjunction with the story, walking down Vernon Boulevard. I felt strangely exhilarated, dosed with questions I had no intention of answering. That rush accounts for my looking so unlike myself in the pictures on file. Beautiful. At home the next morning, I watched myself on the breakfast sampler of area news. An hour after the spot aired, I got a call from Keith, enormously amused by the escapade. “I did my part, doll. Called the front desk of the villainous outfit for a full explanation the minute I saw your pretty mug interfering with our agency’s morning spots.” Suddenly scared, not at what would happen to me but at what would never happen again, I begged Keithy to stay in touch. “Never fear. Every Christmas, a card. Like clockwork.”

  I don’t know how many bewildered New Yorkers phoned in for a gloss on Beaumarchais or a verification on our claims figures. Perhaps a mildly curious couple dozen. Public rallying on the stroke victim’s behalf amounted statistically to nil. Naturally. Ours was an equivocal case at best. Had the press not picked it up, it would have been less than insignificant, less than those people with the sandwich boards crammed with schizophrenically tiny writing who parade their imagined grievances in front of City Hall every day for twenty years. The city is full of suffering causes beyond affordability.

  The press, for its part, barely mentioned Jimmy except as a sidethread to the paisley, surreal cloth. What they found locally sensational was that this mailing campaign had been a computer crime, then still a novelty. Reporters circled with weird fascination around the violated machine, its ephemeral files, the proximity of Dr. Ressler’s virus to a network of sensitive information. When the hacks asked our targeted insurer for a comment, a self-assured executive, who’d had a full day to look over the paper trail on the matter and who thought that discretion was the better part of value, shrugged in front of the c
amera and said, “The man is covered. There was a clerical foul-up between ourselves and the hospital that we cleared up some time back. I don’t understand any of it.”

  Neither did seven eighths of the sane world, let alone half of the breakfast television audience. We were a brief, bizarre human-interest trailer, one of those thirty-second spots that mitigate the impact of the day’s real news. Our act of criminal conscience was newsworthy only until the mass of continuous diversion that passes for current event rendered it archaic trivia-game stuff. We would join the marginal list of those instantly forgotten local celebs that well-informed people, if they recall at all, suspect themselves of inventing. On day three, when the whole eccentricity was already dead, a city news reader closed the books on the story by reciting a canonical quote meant to parody our statement telegrams: “Across the wires, the electric message came/‘He is no better, he is much the same’.”

  At the same moment that the company spokesman denied any payment problem, Dr. Ressler surrendered the unscrambling word. They released him and Todd, a transaction that never would have happened had the two of them not been the only ones able to return the system to listable, patch-free status quo. Both were instantly fired, ironically losing, along with all other benefits, the coverage they had won back for Jimmy.

  They might have fared a lot worse had it been easier to formulate a charge against them. They could not be prosecuted for vandalism. Only cosmetics had been touched, and returned unscratched. An employee in a position to do so had simply taken it on himself to redesign the corporate product. They could not be hit for electronic blackmail, as no one had ever leveled any threat. They might have been sentenced—and I with them—for malicious moralizing, capricious use of quotes. But wisely deciding that the best thing was to let the story die out as soon as possible, and perhaps afraid of vestigial viruses still in the system, neither MOL nor any node of the offended financial network spreading along the Eastern Seaboard leveled any case.