Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"The next day, no ad. I called the first woman, and got some poor man in the Bronx. The second number gave me one of those dee-dee-deeps." She sang the no-longer-in-service triad. "I took the subway to the lawyer's office, my stomach in my throat. Cleaned out. For rent. I even tried to go back to the buildings where the two women got their money. Nobody by that name. The police say the notarized receipt is meaningless." Annie stopped, swallowed, could not go on.

She didn't need to, except to say that the handle on the inside car door where they had her sit was broken; her door had to be opened from the outside. "These people play for keeps." Ressler and Todd had their heads down. Old, their faces said. Old, treacherous, and transparent. It took a genuine naif like Annie to get so blindly stung. Yet I had never been tested against so elaborate a setup. If the con thrived, always with new wrinkles, now out of some other uptown office or in another city, marks must be in steady supply.

In the wake of the story, Annie was the first to revert to form. She said she'd planned to give the windfall to an ecumenical food drive for Africa. "Just imagine, when I finally figured things out! You could have knocked me over with a truck."

Adaptor Hypothesis (II)

Cryptography lives in the seam between sense and randomness. Its deforming rules sow noise into a signal. But by reversing the rules, the signal reforms, like Dr. Ressler's undispersed oil drop. I can't quite put my hands through this paradox: scattered nonpattern and articulated message are somehow — what can the word mean? — equivalent.

The entire Library of Congress, encoded with a single notch on a stick, like those colossi bestriding the narrow world under whose legs we book researchers peep about, keeping one foot on each of two unspannable coasts. The straddle is its own contradiction. The mark on the stick is trivial, blank, without significance. And yet, it inscribes everything in the archive. Even more counterintuitively, the mark could fall anywhere on the stick at all. An infinity of transforming schemes: take the fraction formed by the letter string, divide by its cubed root, add.344___ Any notch at all could fold out into the Library of Congress, including all books not yet catalogued.

Such a notch would have to subdivide quantum spaces. But not even that physical catch clears things up. The rub remains: with an infinity of available enciphering keys, a meaningful string of letters can be translated into any available gibberish. So any random string of gibberish I choose already stands for that original string, provided I can locate, out of infinity, a transform that equates them.

This unsettling two-way mapping of any sense onto any nonsense works because the key — the enciphering rule — itself contains information. Information (a science unfolding just moments before Ressler hit the scientific scene) is the degree of restriction clamped onto the set of all possible messages. Information is not meaning, but can be used to reveal it. It has, as Todd's favorite living novelist notes, replaced cigarettes as the universal medium of exchange.

Knowledge might be extracted from simple clues if given the right key: an idea as old as consciousness, existing in precursor form even in animals. Codes, ciphers, impresas, enigmas, mots, emblems, all forms of enfolded text propose not just their own hidden significance but a secret system where inscribed meaning built into the half-obscuring, half-revealing world surface is revealed.

If any gibberish string can reveal not just one but all possible patterns (given an infinity of information-bearing keys), then gnosticism — arcane manipulation until pattern emerges — can't return me to source meaning. The pattern such bit-fiddling produces would say more about its own manufacture than about the subcutaneous nature I'm after. Information between cipher, key, and source is conserved. If the key is simple, then the cipher, however mysterious, will carry much of the order of the original. But if the codetext contains little information — if it is random, full of possibilities — then information must be present in the clamped-down key. The revealing key would then be as difficult to arrive at by trial as the plaintext itself.

The veil between signal and noise never lifts as easily as it falls. Any teenager can take a car apart, but few would be thrilled with a complete parts inventory for their coming-of-age gift. If signal is rich and noise deafening, then the deforming garble is practically irreversible without the formula. A hard code is like a lump of peat for an engagement stone, with the instructions: Press firmly and long. From message to code is trivial; but getting back to tonic, if the clamp on possibilities lies in a complex transposing scheme, is as entropically prohibitive as the postman springing back from the pool, the dog backing away, the letters shedding their droplets and returning to dryness.

I may never come across the clause that revokes his exile. The journey back, however much it seems a birthright, a trip I ought to be able to do blind, remains as unlikely as my making it from alien Maple and Jefferson to unknown Walnut and Monroe with nothing but a world globe. Each cognate I stumble across gives a shock of recognition: here is the grammatical clue, something I can at last make out. The nearness is uncanny. The clues are all eall mast, al meist, allr mestr. But run through the decipherer, they remain all most. No ladders lead back up from where I've been lowered. I must lie down where all the ladders start.

Science is hard, the notch intractable. It is not secret knowledge, but nominalism. Not facts; only a means of verifying the endless, tentative list. Like Lear's look there; and there. Information theory proves that for a given purpose, an optimum code exists. But it supplies no means for finding it. The purpose of investigation seems to be to find the optimal code for purpose. Nature freely hands out isomorph variants of herself. Signals jam the air — patterns not nature but the shaped equivalents of her writing. Sometimes information lies entirely in particulars, and their uniting pattern lies only a light tweak away. But if the key packs a larger fraction of crucial information than the signal, reading it remains as statistically unlikely as launching at random and hitting upon life.

How is it possible, in those cases, to recover anything? I have only the old, empirical trump: set up a local peep-holed world and watch; follow the effects, trace the shadow of the key as it encodes. Eavesdrop over the codebook. Then, with the silhouette of the transforming rule traced out, its transforms become trivial. Briefly: the thing I want to hear more than sound itself is the bliss beyond the fiddle. But the fiddle itself remains my only conveyance.

The information of an organism is spread out over its substance, processes, organization. No one part embodies the life semantic. Nowhere in my cells does it say, "Woman, thirtyish, pretty to some, deserted, unemployed, desperate to know." The code is not the gene, nor the enzymes, nor the lookup table, although these are the core of what the code knows.

All of these assembled leave a bit of information still out: I lack a key. To make the catch, I must grab the adaptor.

What are my odds of succeeding in the time remaining? By saving chance, the school where I learn to read obeys the same laws of probability constricting the codes that life writes itself in. There is a limit on the coding mechanism, on the information it contains. Evolution sets such unlikelihoods into existence that it seems, given time, universally ingenious, eternally able to one-up. In fact, it's a patch job, short-term kludges barely breaking even, ducking down blind alleys, working only with existing parts. The map is full of places that one can't get to from here. A fin might come in time to grasp marvelously as if designed for it, and a hand turn back into a fin. An air bladder, used to solve the flotation problem, might be tucked into a structure that can sustain a crawl into naked air. But nothing is a priori. Other solutions will never hit upon the particular next trick, no matter how many eons you let spin. Life on the planet could have been entirely different: billions of years of prokaryotes, unchanged since inception, stretching on steadily until the sun dies.