Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The Coding Problem

Todd woke me the next night. I rolled over and answered the phone without coming conscious. "Hello, Reference Desk."

"Hello, Reference Desk. Frank here. Did you see? We made the papers."

"The what?" Swifter than smelling salts.

"You know: today in history? All the News That Fits? Well, we're on Section A, page thirteen, column four, line number…"

"What did we do?"

"Nothing less than impede the March of Progress. 'Digital But Ripples Through System.' Special to the Times. 'A rash of electronic funds transfer problems have propagated through the banking networks in the last several days, causing serious delays throughout___'"

"Good God."

"Now, now. Let's not turn theistic under pressure. That's the first signal. From there, it's just a small step to frogs, hail, bread, and fishes."

"Shut up. Do they mention you by name? Do they say MOL?"

" 'Those most familiar with the increasingly integrated computerized transfer routes admit the difficulty in identifying one specific node where delays begin. "That's like trying to pull the culprit from a fifty-car expressway pile up," says systems analyst…'"

"So you're not sure it's really your outfit?"

"Our outfit, lady," he snickered; having come along for the vacation, I couldn't weasel out now. "I'm sure it's us. Ressler is sure. The president of MOL is sure. But nobody's suggesting as much to the Times until we've doctored all the logs."

"Don't be ridiculous. Your whole office can't be larger than twenty thousand square feet. Even the day shift only employs a couple dozen people. How much weight can you possibly swing?"

"How big is a bit?" he replied. He went on, against regulations, to list clients of the firm — credit unions and financial outfits for half a dozen Fortune 500 companies, including two productless conglomerates whose names perpetually pop up in defense bidding.

"By itself, all our screw-up did was mess up these folks' books for a week, delay a few checks, block the flow of transactions. Big deal: they shell out excuses, we get slapped with a fine, and everybody waits till the status byte returns to quo. Problem is, no CPU is an island. Listen: "The minor crisis, which industry analysts hope is now over, reveals the vulnerability of increasingly interdependent fiscal networks. Particularly sensitive are same-day overdrafts, when institutions transfer massive amounts of money they do not have, under the assumption that they will receive similar transfers to cover them in the immediate future. Any interruption along the line…'"

"Paraphrase, please."

"What do you mean, paraphrase? The thing already is a paraphrase. Every cell has to be in place for the lung to pump properly. Small inputs run up big outputs. A single snowfall in New Hampshire…"

"… can bring the entire post-Bretton Woods banking system to a standstill?"

I meant the crack facetiously, but I heard him doing the recursive algebra in his head at the other end. "Yes," he said. "With a few well-placed shoves from basic ineptitude."

I went by the first chance I had. They were still shoveling out; the place needed only the stink of manure to be the Augean stables. They had been on continuous surgical call since I'd left. Todd was as punch-drunk as he'd sounded over the phone. Dr. Ressler looked unflustered, alert, well-rested. He'd even managed to slip back into a pressed suit, thinking to intimidate the crisis into submission by proper dress. Taped to the edge of a CRT was the clipping from the Times. All other evidence was extinguished. That evening they processed the previous day's transactions, submitting alongside the standard decks supplementary bug inoculations. "Do you know what a 'fix' is?" Todd asked.

"I know you're in one."

"Spoiled my punchline. A fix is when you patch a tag to a program reading, 'Amendment 12: Amendment 11 hereafter invalid.' "

"What are you repealing, exactly?"

"History. We have to settle the Master File's nerves. Convince it the trauma it's just been through never happened."

"How do you do that?"

"Much the way Stalin edited the textbooks until Lamarck became viable," Ressler said.

Todd chuckled. "All the data are backed up. That's what these tape drives are for. Transcriptions of every day for the last six years. We went back to the last uncorrupt day and fed in the duplicate transaction files all over again, doctored to look as if they were just coming in. The professor's footwork, of course. It worked, except for a few tumors, which we are now in the process of postdating and zapping with microlasers."

"No four-day delay? No same-day overdraft foul-ups?"

"Never happened."

Ressler explained, "Electronic records, unlike organisms, aren't compelled to drag around the trace of everything their ancestors ever lived through. We can rewrite them, assign them any past at any moment. We, by contrast, are trapped in every stopgap success our bases have ever come up with, the running average of our every then."

"But how can a little flypaper dive like this cause a quake in High Finance?"

"You surprise me. I would have thought that you, of all people your age, would have picked up on the emerging, central fact of modern existence."

"Namely?"

"The smaller the thread, the tighter the weave."

"Don't get him riled up," Todd cautioned from across the room. "We still have two evenings of work to finish tonight."

But it was too late. Dr. Ressler sat me down at the console.

"What would you like to know? What wing of this incredible house of cards would you like to visit?" To hear him talk, the keyboard was, in knowledgeable hands, an index into all embraceable space — gazetteer, thesaurus, almanac, anatomy, Britannica annual all ready to respond to the least finger nudge. "Let's start in our own backyard," he said. Where all inquisitive children begin exploration. He stroked the keys, cross-hands, answering system prompts faster than I could read them. A string of coded digits snaked in front of us:

53 6F 6D 65 74 69 6D 65 73 20 66 72 6F 6D 20 68 65 72 20 65 79 65 73 20 49 20 64 69 64 20 72 65 63 65 69 76 65 20 66 61 69 72 20 73 70 65 65 63 68 6C 65 73 73 20 6D 65 73 73 61 67 65 73 00 00

"Here we are," he said. "A little fragment of the master text. This could stand for anything in creation. Bank account, tech blueprint, love letter, combination of all three. All we see is a systematic disorder."

Todd sighed, "A systematic disorder in the dress kindles in me a wantonness."

"This says nothing in its present form, but it clearly possesses the irregular regularity needed to mean something more than it says. So which do you think this scrap is," Dr. Ressler quizzed, inclining his head. "Data or instruction?"

I hadn't the slightest idea. But on second look, with encouraging nods from Todd, I noticed two features that made the choice obvious. "Data," I said quickly, once I'd caught on.

"Good woman." He knew I'd get it before I did. He hit another key and the gibberish turned into fair speechless messages.

"Shakespeare," said Todd, leaning over our shoulders. "What do I win? I recently saw French literature defined as English literature sans the Bard." Ressler did not pause from file manipulation to reply. Todd cleared his voice ironically, persisting. "Who said, 'The French for London is Paris'? Think he said it in French, originally."

"Je ne sais pas," I said. "I'm off duty." To my amazement, I found I was following Ressler's walking tour through the system. Just by long association with these two exiles, I had picked up the rudiments of programming.

He showed us how to disassemble a program, how the machine-readable switchs can be turned — by means of another program— back into the logical operators that had generated them. He spoke of a colored oil drop in a cylinder of water, spun slowly until it dispersed, colorless, throughout the fluid. Spinning the fluid carefully in reverse can bring the oil drop miraculously back out of nothing. "The process is not entirely reversible. We can't get from the driving bits all the way back up to the high-level source language. But we can begin to see the programmer's design."