Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

He demonstrated some structures. While condition Y applies, do X. Do this if these conditions are met, otherwise do that. For all values in the list L, run routine R. Go here. Test that. Change the other thing. When done, return. He showed me how to build a patch: save down all current values that must remain the same. Change a byte or two so that it branches to a space in the program left blank for that purpose. Write your appended routine there, and then pop back, restoring all previously saved values.

These generic commands, he explained, were the meat and potatoes of procedural languages. Procedural languages — those that mapped out every route the machine could take — were the lingua franca of business computing. Business, Ressler showed me, as he pulled up the skeleton keys to the programs they used to process their hundred thousand clients' health, education, finance, and welfare, was nearing its finest hour. "The logical conduits on silicon have done to the ebb and flow of capital what the Dutch waterworks did to the Zuider Zee."

"Speaking of the Dutch," Todd interrupted, growing desperate, "I'd love to get caught up tonight. Wooden Shoe?"

Ressler sent him out for grocery-store wine. By the time Todd came back, we were navigating through the Federal Reserve via MOL's linkup with a battalion of bank mainframes. Under his ar-peggiating fingers, portals opened, rabbit holes that we disappeared down before they closed over us. I could no longer keep track of imbedded levels, just whose system prompts we were responding to. We tunneled deep into the web, far from home.

"I had no idea," I said. "When you make the link, it's just as if you were sitting in front of the other machine in some other office?"

"With semiconductors, physical locations become arbitrary. Half our work takes place at remote sites. That's why this suite can be so small."

"These machines talk to one another? Without chaperon?"

He Smiled. "Under the supervision of procedural languages."

"Can you get anywhere from anywhere else?"

"Not yet. Think of the U.S. highway system in the twenties. Lots of the local infrastructure, but the expressways still going in. Still, one can swing quite a distance along existing vines." He got us onto a system that allowed us entry to yet another nested net; in no time we were browsing machines in Washington, Oak Ridge, San Francisco. The effect was dizzying. For a man who'd stayed home for twenty years, he got out a lot.

For my benefit, he pulled up a sampler of bibliographic services, retrieval banks now creating the largest revolution in my discipline since Alexandria burned. Our branch had not yet entered the future, and I had yet to play personally with the first generation of living Reference Desks. Christmas all over again. "Go ahead," he said. "Ask it anything."

I typed: "MACHINE; INTELLIGENCE," and got back a bibliography as long as a Mannerist Madonna's neck. I highlighted one of the titles and got the full text. The strangest sensation came over me — the recovery of a lost domain, the bafflement of childhood, a displaced hope older than memory. What might we yet see, name, feel?

"In the future, you'll be able to type, 'What happens to nuclein when it's boiled in water for forty hours?' and the thing will come back, 'According to a study by Albrecht Hessel in 18___' The next step will be getting it to print articles that haven't been written yet."

I couldn't tell how serious he was. "All of this is assembled with only Ifs, Thens, Gosubs, and Elses?"

"No. These make ingenious use of tools that a person can really love." And he described, in tantalizing sketch, the new declarative languages. He made them sound like returns to the Ur-tongue. They relied not on rules but on simple assertions about the nature of things in the defined world. They blurred the distinction between data and instruction, set the machine free to serve as inference engine.

"Which is DNA, procedural or declarative?"

Dr. Ressler smiled soundlessly and looked at his watch. "Short answer or long?"

I felt what had been tearing at my heart the last several weeks, why it hurt progressively worse each time I saw him. He had grown ready to teach, undertake again, discover. Something in Todd's and my blundering, slow courtship had tricked him into thinking this time it could go right. I sensed in the way his eyes grabbed at every word thrown his way that he had recovered a capacity for application. But there was nothing for him to apply himself to. He had awakened for nothing, for a wrong number. A roof-gardener, harvest brought in for the year, receiving unsolicited seed catalogs in the depths of winter.

"It's a grim irony," he said, waving toward the screen, "that just as we are closing in on the perfect taxonomy we've always been after, we may already have spoiled the data beyond recognition. And yet, our effort to bring it on-line is beautiful. Beautiful in the way that a child's first book, all folded and crayoned over, is beautiful." He tilted his head oddly, and I realized he had in mind one particular child, whose conspicuous absence at last informed him, here at the end of the day, that he had never had a real home.

We were still at the bibliographic prompt that for the last several minutes had kept me as rapt as a toy chemistry set. Abstractedly, he typed a woman's name — last name, comma, first. After a pause just longer than anguish, the system responded, "6 Match(es)." He turned away. When he could speak again, his voice was controlled. "See what one can find? And the first integrated circuit was invented just twenty-five years ago." The year I left the game, he didn't add. He hit a few stop-key combinations, backing us out of binary pontoons, dropping all carriers until we returned to the dingy suite.

When I left, sad beyond provocation, I gave Todd a duplicate key to my place. "Come tonight. Anytime. Move in if you can."

He woke me up when he came in. We had a few unreal hours before I had to go to work. Ice had paisleyed over the panes with a second, opaque window. In hard February, I paid the price for my place's turn-of-the-century quaintness. Fuel ran a hundred-meter hurdle up through the Victorian insulation into the freezing night. We held one another, wanting the relieving friction but not daring to rub — like a retriever trained to carry the shot bird back in its jaws without salivating. "Do you think…?" I tried to ask, still glazed in sleep. "Is it possible… he still loves this woman?" For the first time since fullness had taken me, I thought of Tuckwell, alone in our old place, in front of that breathtaking view of skyline.

Todd answered me with such an answer. I never knew him. I never had the first idea of what men were. "Love is a pyramiding scheme," he said, and pressed my hands together until they hurt. "He never loved her more than tonight."

Frailty and Other Fixed Constants

The world churns out a tune Ressler just now learns to hear. The U.S. at last lifts Explorer I into orbit. It begins testing at Eniwetok and rejects a Polish proposal to make Central Europe nuclear-free. The Sixth Fleet doubles its presence in the Middle East; by summer's end, American troops will land there. Emergency forces will be in the Caribbean by spring. Veep Nixon's goodwill tour in Latin America will provoke open hostility. The army announces the STRAC, a 150,000-troop acronym committed to winning limited war "anywhere in the world."

One, frail fermata in that dissonant strain: Van Cliburn wins the Tschaikovsky competition, making him the most popular Texan in Georgia. Vaughan Williams dies just after the debut of his final symphony, a last holdout against Boulez and Berio. "Jailhouse Rock," "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands," and "Purple People Eater" (thinly disguised political allegory) top the pops. To the casual listener, the synthesized bass is lost in a ravishing circle of chords, lovely terror, a broken horizontal stream rushing toward greater complication. Sheer counterpoint is loosed upon the world.