Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

They now know the tube must include synthesis-active RNA messenger chains as well as ribosomes. They'll also need an energy source, ATP, and the raw amino building blocks. Their technique is still crude: throw them together; see what you get. On evidence, he is no less culpable than Ulrich, perhaps even more stained by faith, hope, and love — the old triumverate keeping life perpetually on the trail of its own suspected order.

But he is not ready to tell Botkin or Koss the wildest of his suspicions: the double helix somehow codes not only for its own messenger, but also for the elusive adaptor, the ribosome assembly line, and all the enzymes needed to recognize the adaptor, affix the amino acids, promote the growing chain, and trim the finished proteins. Enzyme-trimming enzymes. Ribosome-building ribosomes. Synthesis must itself be synthesized. The machine is as self-bootstrapping, as self -selfing as consciousness itself. Why not? Consciousness, the thirst for exchange and research, is just the self-selfing chain writ large, considering, synthesizing itself.

Why so complex a path? Why so many intermediaries? And how can everything come from four simple bases? Ressler, even now, closing in on tendering a first, tentative model of the arrangement, is blocked by his own unspeakable desire to ambush the experiment, wreak the control by introducing the irreducible variable of personality. He hears it in the deep cell's core, lapping at the heart of comprehension. Despite the danger, he cannot help it. He must make a little room in himself for himself, for the same mistaken guide that now leads half of Cyfer astray, for that terrible Pauline triplet. And of those three, most of all love.

Self Help

Each passing day has payoffs. Ressler, Koss, and Botkin daily refine the bottled-synthesis technique. He sees one perhaps uncrossable barrier in front of them. On that day when they can finally drop a stretch of active RNA into the chemical mix and have it produce its isomorphic protein, the resulting sequence will still be beyond direct chemical correlation with its source; they might still require Ulrich's ILLIAC bulldozing for any hope at analysis.

Fat chance that Levering will be forthcoming with his do-loops for the competition's sake. Ressler learned programming as a tyro undergrad — how to octal-toggle machine code directly into Core an instruction at a time. Worse than annihilating on the nerves; not surprising that the average software cowboy ran into a breakpoint at thirty-two, sent home with smoke steaming from the circuitry. Even punching cumbersome codes into Hollerith columns seemed small improvement. While it did save wear on the neural nodes, coding remained hell and debugging impossible.

It was with the zeal of a convert that he welcomed the work of Von Neumann and others, who lumped common machine instructions together and made them available as macro commands. Assemblers — programs that take macros and generate machine-executable code — still strike him as miraculous kludges, like the first wind-catching membrane stealing upon those lizards that had been hopping about in trees. Released, the analogy spread like disease. Full-fledged compilers were upon him before he finished graduate school. Compilers, of course, are themselves written in assembly language, giving the whole tower of Boolean babel more than a facade's resemblance to the House That Jack Built. Code-writing code. Program-designing programs. Uncomfortably like the thing they built this tool to help examine. Why stop there? Why not assembler-assemblers? Application-generating applications? Jacob's Ladders off and runging, climbing themselves; tools that turn the trick of replication. Among the projects that the Lovering-Ulrich-Woytowich pattern-matching program time-shares ILLIAC with is one to write a high-level ALGOL language compiler. In ALGOL.

Without further refinement of their cell-free system, Ressler, Koss, and Botkin will have to stay on good terms with Joe, something that grows increasingly difficult with the man's expanding personal triumphs. Lovering, finding his vocation in programming, is on the ascendant. His well-being is consolidated by the devotion of the much-touted Sandy. Ressler has still not met the woman, but to hear Joe speak of her, she is all sweet surprise and variety personified.

The accounts Lovering sprinkles liberally over his office mate are ludicrously effusive. The woman lisps in numbers. She's built like a shit brickhouse, although Joe produces no photos to substantiate. She plays Mozart with the proper smidgen of rubato. And she understands Lovering's own abstruse work, without his yet conceding to bring her around the lab. "I explained the gist of the coding problem to her the other night. Granted, she didn't take in all its particulars. Who can? But in her own words — without any formal training — she came up with this beautifully intuitive formulation of framing."

"How does she feel about code degeneracy?" Ressler asks. The man's adoration of the woman grates on him. He wants to shake him violently until the blathering stops. But for reasons Ressler's reason more than comprehends, the most he can level against the self-deceiving fellow is gentle kidding.

"Go on, laugh. She anticipated the proof against overlap."

"Jesus, Joe. You'd better go nuptial. When's the date?"

"Just after yours, Dr. Ressler." Miffed, Lovering addresses his card-punch forms.

"Seriously. With a woman like this falling into your hands, you ought to cleave, be fruitful, and multiply. If they let Dr. and Mrs. Woytowich do it, surely…"

"Who says we ain't cleaving?" Lovering looks up slyly. "I told you, Sandy doesn't believe in licensing love. We've talked it over, and neither of us sees why we have to pander to the boojwah by going through with dress-ups. That's a socializing trick, all that paper signing. The only party to profit from marriage as it is currently defined in middle-class America is the State. We've drawn up our own contract."

"Joey, I can't help thinking that you've chosen the wrong moment in history to make an experiment in alternative mores. Just yesterday I read about this minister who was defrocked for using the word 'sex' when preaching the seventh commandment."

"How can they hurt us? We've just put a payment down on a house. We move this weekend. It has a room for her piano, and a garden plot, and…"

Botkin knocks softly and enters. Hearing the conversation she unwittingly walks into, she sits by Ressler's desk like a frightened undergraduate. Ressler says, "A house. That's nice, Joe. But how are you going to go about making babies?"

"Stuart! And you claim to be a biologist. Historically speaking, there have been some very impressive genomes born out of wedlock."

"Who you calling a bastard?" Woyty calls from the doorway. He enters, evening the gnostics and nominalists in the room. He has come hunting down Lovering with more sequences to key in. But he capitalizes on the opportunity to sentence the party to baby pictures. Seven-pound Ivy Woytowich looks to Ressler exactly the way every newborn looks: a hive of tube worms attacking a soft-boiled beet.

"Sandy's already made it plain that I'm free to sample other women, so long as all my offspring are with her."

" 'A miss for pleasure and a wife for breed,'" Botkin supplies. "As far as I have ever heard, we are the only species who seek out nonprocreative liaisons. Who get distressed when the surrogates accidentally do the job they substitute for. Do you suppose we succeed in tricking our genes into irrelevant pleasure? Or do they still get the surreptitious last laugh?"

"What is this woman talking about?" Lovering asks the other men. Ressler knows. Botkin looks so sadly at him that she must certainly have guessed everything there is to guess about who is fooling whom.