Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

He owes no one anything but compassion. His lone accountability is solely to the code. This woman was long ago inscribed in his genotype. She is his working out, his text made flesh, made enzyme. He will join himself to her, however pointless that deposit. He cannot do otherwise. She is underneath, around him: he feels her organic list. Her voiced breath dissolves into syllables, self-defense shouts, bird's cooing. He pins her, presses a spot in her back that touches off further thrashing. Their sure lives in this moment end. Even if they escape this writhing, they can never again be safe. She heaves again. The base of Ressler's brain floods with chemical keys he will not, not ever, neither viscerally nor in mind, recapture.

Jeanette's pumping leaves her spent. Then, as suddenly, she is crazy again to pump, elude pursuers. The force of her desperation frightens him. What bloody business has she come to transact? She rolls against him, thighs first felinely soft, now shoving with a drive that would be rid of itself, of all its tensile load. Ressler cushions, absorbs, protects her from her own tranced rage, keeping this speaker-in-tongues from crashing against the sharp corners of their makeshift pew.

She is only here, nowhere else but her body, manning her cartilage factory. She spasms, an enormous sustained cramp that runs from the nape of her neck along her whole length, at last pulling the arch of her foot taut, from Romanesque to gothic. She is only here, in frenzied pleasure, knowing she will take it like this only once in life. Frenzy enough for both of them: he is lost to the dictates in the master program, locked onto her, coupled, forever sacrificed, shutting out last objections and letting the old sarabande in.

Her face, when the shock of the last muscular lift comes on it, is surprised, flushed out of the thicket in ancestral wonder. All an "O" of astonishment — her eyes, mouth, fingers circling his arms, her labia concentrated around him, drawing him over the edge into his own, rounded O. Sustained effort, every minute of recent months is here made real. Here, only here. Then, the collapse back on confusion and particulars.

They glide at the end, after violent discharge, released to familiars. His cells swim into her, spend. But for a brief ever, molecular memory of the deed persists in muscle, fades through shoulders, torso, limbs, limbic system like immense pipe-organ fundamentals banging around in the baroque dome an eternity before slipping back to nave level, sinking through flagstones into the crypt. He lies capitulate on the floor next to Mrs. Koss, sharing the last shred of companionship left them. They are free of the chief anxiety in animal delight: she can have no child. But facing a worse eventuality.

Jeanette Koss, still in the dream of remembered recklessness, stiffens, comes unstunned. She tries to sit, look at him. She succeeds painfully, staring as if he has just revealed himself. How can you do that to me? She closes her eyes again, lies down, and places a delicate, stray hand between her legs, as if that will keep the somatic impression of their animal abandon from leaking out with his semen. This long, undulating modesty, endless current of hair, hand pressed innocently and curiously to the pudenda. Residual image from the generic feminine.

She does not need to look at him to know what he sees. She smiles through closed lids, uses one finger to explore the passage he has just inhabited, withdraws it with a globe of milky, opaque fluid. She draws it to her mouth, places the drop on the tip of her tongue. Eyes still closed, she turns her lips up and pronounces, "Millions of stukaryotes." He kisses her and she passes the taste perversely back. She hums, piano in pleasure, already wanting more. She closes her eyes, tasting, recalling.

The memory, this woman passing one unsolicited secret name to him now and for good on the exposed lab floor, will be as suddenly lost, taken from him. More than he can endure. But Jeanette only drifts her hand back under her stained olive dress, between her absorbing thighs.

Trace Mutagen

"Let's give Uncle Jimmy a raise." I picture him alert, playful in front of the console, perched on the edge of a techno-chair, ready to write his graffiti into the system at the first nod from the professor. MOL was again in the clear. Ressler and Todd had returned the Master Fille to working order. The auditors had come and gone, dragging their trails behind them. They had given the restoration a clean bill of health. The console log carried no trace of catastrophe. We passed the anniversary of the Maine, that explosion half-made in the American press. Ours was the opposite engineering feat: from out of real burst, erasure. The sense of delivery from disaster was still so strong that Todd's manic suggestion seemed a simple extension. "Who would know?" he asked. "The easiest thing in the world."

"What does ease have to do with anything?" Ressler replied. The two of them had developed an elliptical way of talking to each other over long nights alone. Members only. I listened but was locked out in the static.

"Tell me he doesn't deserve one," Franklin said.

"He does. Unquestionably. After what we've put him through." Ressler collected forms from the printer and collated them with amusement. "But he's not on our payroll."

"Of course not. Good data-processing procedures. Send your own checks to be cut out of house. Simple safety." Ressler's objection was so transparent that Frank didn't even counter it: one can get to any machine from any machine, if one knows the sesames. And Ressler had taught us those. Franklin talked through the steps hypothetically. "We could penny-shave him. Take every salary we handle. Round the fractional cents down, pitch the remainder into Jimmy's account. No one is out more than a partial cent, and Jimmy is___" He did a calculation in the air. "Lots richer."

Ressler detached the day's log, folded it carefully for the archives. "Penny shaving means a permanent program patch."

"We could do it."

"Again, possibility is not the point. The manipulation leaves a permanent print."

"Snake the code around. Relative-address Jimmy's record so that his name isn't sitting in broad daylight. Make the siphon look like something else, an error trap."

"If someone writes the program, another can always read it. Logic is easier to trace than to scramble."

Franklin twaddled with his contrast knob. "What if we just went and injected a new figure directly into his salary field?"

"Exactly," Ressler said. "Why get ingenious, when you can accomplish the same thing by simpler means?"

"But would it work? I mean, if we cleaned up after it? Balanced all the cross-sums?"

"Never underestimate the power of bureaucracy to believe what their electronic ledgers tell them."

"So you're in, then?"

"No." Dissociating himself from the suggestion, Ressler thwacked his stack of forms in exasperation. "Good God! Pope was right on the money about knowledge. You can't teach a kid anything these days." With an affectionate shake of the head, he left us alone to our own devices.

"It could be done, you know," Todd murmured defensively. He riffled idly across linked data lines as he'd watched Ressler do. He punched up a prohibited, distant file, flexing his apprentice prowess. "We give him a one-time bonus. Flat fee. We enter the change in a way that could be mistaken for a Mylar typo. If the tinkering should be traced back to us — assuming the unlikelihood of anyone noticing — we can always say it was a piece of driftwood from our recent flood."

I watched him perform the surgery. He inserted a paper clip into the console print head to keep it from logging. Then, with a simple record edit, he turned the trick. Unreal. What was he changing? Just screens. Alphanumerics on the CRT. "There." He lifted his fingers from the keys long enough to warm them. "How's that for moral compromise?" He backed out to the system, signed on again locally, and returned to the familiar operations prompt. He rolled the printer platen back over the blank transcript and removed the paper clip. What could be simpler? "How's that for victimless crime?"