Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I must be asking the question wrong. Any outcome, once reached, must have been decided by something. The sort of freedom I am talking about — Dear Franklin, Where are you? When can I see you? How long you have been away! Come home — must be constraint by another name. Constraint that jumps some complexity threshold. The molecules I look for need not be capable of autonomous behavior; the word, when pushed, probably has no meaning. But are they enough, in themselves, to escape the determinism of physical vectors? Do these microprograms, once fired up, always run the same way, water down an arroyo? Or can they self-determine, self-modify, rewrite their own program listings?

They can. Allosteric enzymes are themselves synthesized. The microtransistors are drawn up, tailored, detached, and sent into the fray by a macroprogram, the nucleotide sequence — semantic bursts of DNA thread. Worker bees, assembled by the queen in her hive, these hatchetmen, day laborers, have the critical ability to apply their logical toolboxes back on the master program. Allosteric proteins can bind to and influence DNA, inhibiting or promoting the synthesis of allosteric enzymes themselves. I stare at purpose, at the molecular level. The running program — DNA synthesizing enzymes — creates and executes subroutines that double back, influence the way the master program executes, cascading into new subroutines, run-time solutions.

To the best of my metaphoric understanding, it goes like this. Codons along a stretch of DNA direct the sequencing of amino acids in a protein. This sequence constrains the lint-ball molecule to adopt one of two or more possible shapes. Held in one shape by an attached brace, its personality — the lure of its binding sites— is inert. But when that jamb is removed, the protein recoils, takes on a new surface. Part of that switched-on surface attaches to a segment of DNA, switching oíf that segment's instructions. The segment of code temporarily patched out could even be the one manufacturing the binding molecule itself. The substance that switches the protein's code-modifying abilities on and off theoretically could be anything, even the by-product of enzymes manufactured on that or other DNA segments. The master control and its agents combine to alter their own combined behaviors.

One allosteric enzyme, working by itself, is already a formidable machine, reactively linking unrelated substances. Thousands of them, joined into branching, judging, regulating feedback networks, can just about account for the numbing inventories, the shifting assembly lines that run the corporate cell. With meta-programming — the ability of the central network to reset even its own switches — the last constraints of the hardwired universe are shed. The field is broken wide open. Anything can happen, and does.

But can chance alone create such structures? Oh, yes. I have become abandoned to the idea. Chance is necessity by another name, thrown over the complexity barrier. The building blocks for self-replicating molecules can emerge from a milky suspension of ammonia, methane, water, and free hydrogen treated with an electrical spark. All the other steps from polypeptide to vanished near-Nobelists can be derived.

Solution can take shape — slowly, stupidly, agonizingly inefficiently — on trial and error alone. Error takes care of itself, in the hardwired universe's unforgiving compulsion to extinguish its dead ends. The trial: that much emerges from quantum perturbation — random mutation that infests the duplicating life molecule with variation. Molecular rules are not fixed, but statistical. That mother lode of modern anxiety — indeterminacy — lifts the whole dance off the ground and holds out the promise of sending it anywhere there might be to go.

Who made me? My answer, all but demonstrated, ten days past New Year's, 1986, has none of the crisp, winter, nighttime traveler's comfort offered by the old Baltimore Catechism. The science I study doesn't even frame the question the same way. Each system answers only the question it asks. The magic, memorized chants of my girlhood dealt in revealed things — truths that could be got at only by leap, flash, obedience, and rejection of human comprehension. They will never be reconciled with a skepticism based on repeatable test.

Yet in both, the name is not the thing. The one scientist I really knew came within a hair shirt's breadth of being a divine. Ressler was a Franciscan minus the cassock. He of anyone I've ever met was free from use's hammerlock, the blundering functionalism that leaves us blind to the miracle of our presence here. I can't begin to describe his speech, his actions, his days — they were so empty, selfless, contemplative. For a brief moment, he achieved a synthesis between scientist's certainty in underlying particulars and the cleric's awe at the unmappable whole.

Who made him? Chance made him. But that wasn't the crucial issue. The second question in the catechism — why? — was, to Dr. Ressler, more important. In his short run at science, he had learned the trick of seeing every living creature as elaborate baggage for massive, miraculous, internal goings-on. Every itch, every craving, every store run, every spoken word arose in a switchboard of enzyme messages splaying out in an overflowing veil that made the sum of all water droplets tumbling over Niagara seem a simple, sophomore differential equation.

The knowledge left him mute, punctual, meticulous, polite, weakly good-humored, pained by human contact, a nibbler on food yet quietly omnivorous, good with words but only when pressed into them. Mostly, he took things in: listened. For some reason, a full understanding of enzymes left him still able to love me, to love Todd. Like all good Franciscans, he had this thing about affection for fellow creatures of chance's kingdom.

The answer my Catholic training years ago had me memorize, if I carry through the blasphemous substitution, turns out to be exactly the answer Dr. Ressler's work on the coding problem left him: Why did chance make him? To know, love, and serve it in this life. And be happy with it in the next. Only: Dr. Ressler knew— as now I do — that our chemicals, in the next life, will be stripped of their self-coding repertoire. There'll be no chance to be happy with chance. It won't be in the lexicon. No lexicon. Chance will resume its maiden name. I have only this afternoon, this moment, to decide whether to go on writing. Perhaps it's letter-answering time after all. I pull out blank sheet number five, take a sip of suspect water, feel the waiting keys under my fingers, study the sunny January outside. I feel unaccountably, blessedly free.

Winter Storm Waltzes

sea_change(odeigh,todd,ressler) if reawakened(ressler) or

in_love(todd,odeigh) and not(scared(Anyone)) and

journey (Anywhere).

Ressler knew we were sleeping together. Every indication suggested he approved. He toted in a sack full of squash and tomatoes. "For you." Plural you, in ambiguous English.

"They're beautiful," I thanked him. Todd seconded. "Where did you find such nice ones this time of year?"

"My cold storage. I grew them."

"In Manhattan?" we both asked, overlapping.

"I happen to live on the sunny side of the World Trade. Over several years, I've hauled three tons of soil up to my roof. My landlord puts up with it; she likes the beans. Organic gardening is the perfect supplement to a night position." These were the first of a steady harvest — jar, juice, fresh — that kept us fed all winter.

He was lighter than I'd ever seen him. One day, a blue Icelandic sweater in place of the impeccable fifties suit and tie. He talked longer, exchanged brighter banter — often off-colored, anthropological double entendres about how it was up to us young to provide the heat needed to get the race through the winter. It was Ressler's idea to do my computerized birthday card; he had pursued my birthday through the federal electronic statistics.