Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

DNA carries just part of the instructions for these purposive, molecular machines. The actual welding — go straight a fraction of a micron; make a hard turn, 137 degrees in plane X, north-by-northwest — depends on physics. The shape an enzyme takes, and therefore its function, results from the laws governing atoms in space. To manufacture breathing, searching, speaking, rule-defying life from out of constrained matter requires no transcendence. Every level of the hierarchy arises from the previous, without any need to change the rules or call in outside assistance. Yes, some sleight of hand: a knit sock is just a series of knots, a computer just switches, a haunting tune just the intervals that walk it down the scale. But what other way to grasp a thing except as the emergent interplay of parts, themselves emergent from combined performances at lower levels?

The emergence of function from codon assignments is like that child's toy: two intermeshed gears with an asymmetrically affixed pen that produces unpredictable designs. The surprise, recursive flowers the toy makes aren't hinted at in any part of the assembly— not gear, not pen, not the cranking hand. Each of these parts does only what is allowed. The flower lies latent in the aggregate rules of geometry, which know nothing about flowers. In the same way, my most inexplicable high-order ability — understanding things through metaphor, applying the light of likeness to probe the layers of the pyramid — already lies infolded, hidden in the craggy terrain, the hintless indifference of my crumpled-up polypeptides.

Solving the lookup table — itself arbitrary — is prerequisite for my locating the particle of purpose, the smallest programmed machine in that regress of programmable machines making up living tissue. In grounding Mendel's invariant inheritance squarely in molecules, Ressler hoped to position science for a theory of molecular evolution. Protein synthesis would reveal how the destructive anarchy of chance, capable only of wearing the rock away, can carve Chartres. The production of enzymes, each shaping an urge to bring about reactions that would not occur spontaneously, is the first rung up form's ladder toward free will.

The catalyzing shape of enzymes is the seam between predetermined atomic interactions and the self-ordering living library. Enzymes are the machines DNA creates and sends out into the cellular factory. They are the factory. The coding problem was, to Ressler's generation, nothing less than a matter of locating the fundamental message unit behind the biosphere. Just as the innermost in a set of nested Chinese dolls anticipates the shape of the outermost, the way the array of living things bends itself to the environment depends on the ability of chains of amino acids to fold into specific, reaction-promoting molds. Or a step before that: on the way nucleic acid hides the enzyme shape in a helical archive.

Addictive, naked hunger to reconstitute the real: the freshly scrubbed Ph.D.'s compulsion to locate the lookup table was, by another name, a longing to unfrock things as they are. Life that refused to push all the way down to the evidence was just a costume party. Only by demonstrating beyond doubt how unaided atoms accounted for craving, variety, the accident of being alive could Ressler see what compensation the truth of his own contingency might hold.

He and I both — desperate to disassemble the table's mechanism, to show that the cell's fundamental engines create living purpose and not the other way around. To demonstrate that blind atomic bumping can lead to anything, even sight. Long before love coiled him he felt desire, a catalyst posted from the beginning of the genetic record, bringing the parts of his substrate inexorably together. However differently his life might have unfolded, he could not have long survived the need to refuse surfaces, to come closer than flush. In the sum of their catalyzed reactions, his choir of molecular autonoma sang, Bloody your hands. Get past it. What would it mean to leave this place, really leave it? That is his coding problem. The message I eavesdrop on, still vibrating on the wires.

The molecular engines — still not all named by the week he died — begin to say who he was at fifty, the work he had yet to do back up the steps of the living hierarchy, here at organism level. His traits, my own, Todd's, lie tangled in the shape of proteins. But the triumph of biological reductionism, the grounding of living things on molecular necessity, the establishment of chance as the mainspring of change, each successive tier rising seamlessly from the previous, still leaves me something inexplicable at the top: after curiosity, impulse, restlessness — his ability to give it all up. My friend possessed deep in the coils of his cell an urge to unite the natural world in one internally consistent model. He hid the compulsion for years. But our showdown, forced on us, revived for a moment his attempt to put hands through the pane, a need always stronger than its decoding. Years after he thought he'd come home from the commute for good he returned to the thick of the search. His last days — and every day I knew him was one of his last — shone with all the surprise of the cybernetic enzyme. After a quarter century he was back, pitting himself against the lookup table. And this time, something more: submitting to it a uniquely landscaped command.

I Have Become a Stranger to the World

In our walking days, I talked to more perfect strangers than I ever had before or since. Todd was intent on single-handedly reviving the custom of greeting people on the street. In the city, this was tantamount to taking one's own life. But we always got away with it, and I was amazed at how many people greeted back as if old friends. We had long talks about election rigging with news vendors, exchanges over dog disobedience with retirees, leisurely debates about Western history with men in three-piece suits who must have had more important places to be. Once, we were riding the local next to a man whom Todd induced into telling us all about his combat experience in Asia. Giving us the blow-by-blow of his tour of duty, the vet asked Todd suspiciously, "What do you do?" When Franker lied, "Art history," the man let out his breath. "Good. Can't hurt me with that." Todd talked to anyone, on any excuse. Cabbies, police, Englishless immigrants, bank officials, drunks — an endless dialogue with people I'd never have spoken to alone.

I was now free to see Franklin every hour I wasn't working. He came by the library, late afternoons before he started his shift. These were my least productive hours of the day; had I not had an excellent track record, I would have been reprimanded. Sometimes, to Save my job and to keep him from putting his hands down my shirt where I sat at the Reference Desk, I would send him into the shelves with questions. I remember giving him "Who was Leslie Lynch King, Jr.?" Frank came back after an hour and a half, successfully identifying him as the thirty-eighth president of the U.S. "The Public," he shook his head angrily, "is a sadist."

We met everywhere, and soon had touched one another in as many places. The MOL office was still our haunt of choice. Following the disastrous system crash that cost both men a sleepless week, the machines returned to normal. Outside of island visits by Uncle Jimmy, Annie Martens, and the janitors, we reined in our shamelessness only for Dr. Ressler.

However genuinely the professor enjoyed our round tables— free-wheeling wine-and-cheese talk spiraling to absorb the spread of international terrorism, the limits to sports record-breaking, and the nuances of surviving a certain late-night cashier at the corner convenience store — he seemed as genuinely relieved when conversation ended. More often than not, he wound up, saying, "You two must excuse me. I have to supervise the workings of the North American financial network." And he would return to the gigabytes, leaving Franker and me alone to escalating experiment.