Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I hardly dared believe it: our happiness made him happy. A quiet, remarkable last process started up in him. He experimented successfully with a beard. Once when Annie treated us to guitar, he forced us all into descant, benevolently dictating which lines to take. "Do you know 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes'?" he asked. Annie shook her head, embarrassed for him. "How about 'Soap Gets in Your Ears'?"

He brought in a pack of art postcards and quizzed Todd. He suckered us into outrageous debates: whether Vaughan's "I saw Eternity the other night" might be treatable these days by a few milligrams of something from Hoffman-La Roche. Whether Marx's class warfare might in the future be fought between information-rich and information-poor. He would dismiss Todd early. "Nothing left I can't run through these rough beasts myself. Take this woman to live the life she deserves." He would give me a gentlemanly cheek-brush of the lips, saying, "Your quote for tomorrow is Alain-Fournier," supplying edition and page.

quote_of_day(alain-fournier,edition(Y,page(X1)),"I still say 'our' house though it is ours no longer").

knows(jimmy,news) and curious(jimmy), knows(annie,news) and unchanged(annie).

My new relation to Todd seemed to be public knowledge. Even Uncle Jimmy asked me confidentially, "What's this I hear about you and my junior staff cohabiting?" Todd, delighted, took up the euphemism as buzzword of the hour: "Let's go cohabit the cafeteria." "Care to cohabit a little after I get off tonight?" Jimmy's trusting grin was tinged around the edges with a droop suggesting he would have preferred Todd and me to altar the thing legitimately. Jimmy was from another time. His mother, patiently invalided at the other end of the phone, probably understood the cohabiting world better than he.

Annie too began treating us as a couple. "Look at you two, both in maroon. Cute as two peas in a pie." She told us we ought to wear more maroon; maroon was a largely misunderstood color. Annie's acknowledgment capped it: romance discloses more than it knows. Everyone saw what we were up to but us.

reawakened(ressler) if

Dr. Ressler paced the digital warehouse, slipping deeper into human ways. During machine lulls, over paper cups of wine, he volunteered topics rather than just politely annotating ours. He'd bring us colored bits of the world's specificity: "Listen to this," he said, sporting a shampoo label. " 'Lather, rinse, repeat.' An infinite loop." He made us try the Dial-an-Atheist number, laughing broadly when we discovered it was disconnected. He roped us into working difficult British crosswords where puns, imbeddings, weddings, retrograde inversions, anagrams, counterpoints, and subtle substitutions combined in fluid wordplay that seemed beyond human ingenuity to invent let alone solve.

Imperceptibly he thawed. He told terrific stories of scientists. An aged teacher who'd spent seventeen years in Morgan's fruit fly room. A colleague who left his research team to surface, years later, as codeveloper of the first artificially intelligent encyclopedia. The famous Swiss botanist Nägeli, whose habit of tasting bacterial cultures was a great source of information but shortened his life. So it would go until, at the end of an evening, I would realize that we hadn't had to draw the man out once.

astonished(todd) or scared(todd).

Frank was unable to believe the turnaround. As Ressler grew daily more voluminous, Franklin clammed up, afraid to say anything that might dispel the fragile moment. "Did you see the man?" he'd ask later in bed. "Searching through his pockets for clippings to give me? Like a third-base coach giving signs!" The clipping-gifts were superfluous; Todd's notebooks had closed. He no longer needed them. The companionship they'd substituted for had sprung to life.

Frank would play the fool out of sheer terror. While the mainframes processed end-of-day transactions, he'd bait his mentor with silly challenges. "How high can you count on your fingers?" He whispered in my ear the proud target thirty-five, one hand standing for digits and the other for groups of six. Ressler paused a few polite minutes before responding with 1,024—each digit a single place in binary notation. Todd sulked. "Yeah, well… anything higher?"

"Always," confided Ressler. And they took to the problem together, like competing cousins at a family reunion, chucking the softball, testing each other's arms.

"It says here," Franker announced one night, "that we have genetics to thank for the killer bees heading north o' the border from down Mexico way." He spoke the word from Ressler's past, sidling up surreptitiously to the conspicuously avoided issue.

Dr. Ressler nodded, not at all reluctant to take up the topic. "That's right. An attempt to tame an aggressive African strain with a docile South American one backfired. One of hundreds of plagues we've initiated by improving the ecosystem. Transplanted gypsy moths; imported rat-catching cats that destroy South Pacific islands; mongooses overrunning the West Indies: cures worse than the diseases. This one's especially damning. We haven't just replaced one pest with another. We've created a new one to call our own." He huddled us around the console, created a workspace, and whipped up a Mendelian genetics lab, a field where we could put our creations to the test. A simple simulation, but complex enough to prove his point. "There are a lot more ways to fall off the tightrope than to inch forward."

Ressler, the author of every declaration fed into the machine, was often surprised by the executing program's outcome. Todd and I, who had to have each line explained to us, were floored to see self-modifying behavior built from a few innocent assertions. I learned not only the danger of intervening in systems too complex to predict, but about declarative programming, the thin line between determined and emergent, the ability to surprise. Looking down at Dr. Ressler, newly bearded, Icelandic blue, typing keys, leading us with infinite patience through the nuances of his composition, I knew the world had lost in him not just a scientist of the first order, but something more important: a gifted teacher.

We ran the simulation many times, each time failing to steer the model toward anything but collapse. Todd threw up his hands. "The discerning intellect of Man bested by bees. I've a suggestion: we greet the little buggers at the border. Instantly upon their crossing the Rio Grande, we lavish them with Walkmen, warm-up suits, the whole nine yards. They'll shed their asocial ways in a flick of the Zippo — get ahead, secure the Mercedes, et cetera. Adieu national panic."

Still, the conclusion of the ecosimulation distressed Todd's Renaissance belief in the perfectability of the natural world. "You aren't suggesting we stop cross-breeding?"

"No," Ressler affirmed.

"Or that we quit with all this inheritance and population dynamics stuff?"

"No again."

"But we aren't yet ready to build a better mouse?"

"No."

This last answer was ambiguous: No, we're not ready? No, we never will be? No, that's not what I mean? But Franklin was afraid to pursue the point. I could hear him form and reject delicate questions in his head. At last he blurted out, "Bacteria engineered to protect potatoes from freezing?"

An art-history ABD specializing in obscure 450-year-old panelists, the spokesman for technological progress, versus a Ph.D. in molecular genetics, once the comer to keep one's eye on, cautioning that the possible and the desirable were not the same. Ressler fielded Todd's question without flinching. He ran his hand lightly over his head, smoothing his hair. He seemed not a minute over thirty. He was spoiling for something — not for a fight. For the mystery and heft and specificity of conversation. "If we're to do recombinant DNA, you'll need more background."