Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The feasibility of each inherited variation — theme elaborated by mutation — breeds out until there is no more single epic but four million variant variorum editions, each matched to the shelf where it finds itself. Yet the code, the language life writes itself in, is universal for every living thing, taking hold once and spinning, telling in all places at all times an eerie, inconceivably implausible story of how in the beginning there was a little water, ammonia, and methane, all trapped by trivial rules, and at the end, this woman saying over and over to herself, I want to tell you, I want to tell.

The scrim lifted, this is what Dr. Ressler saw. The text of a living thing, the tender, delicate, unlikely apparatus for unfolding it, does not stand for or represent or disfigure the shape of the world; it is just a set of possible, implementable maybes about what one might do about it. Nature seems to favor the what-if. Once over the complexity barrier, the simple account promotes itself to simulation. That is the magic of language: every word waits to come true. Description gives way to postulate, is refined by experiment into singing celebration. The same opaque, heavy-handed system that kept him one step away from what those emblems stand for permits this. No saying how; I've been in molecular linguistics long enough to know that language, like economics and love, is wonderful in practice, but just won't work out in theory.

The notebooks I've been keeping for you, friend, if they go on long enough, might become something new, not the thing I wanted to get at, but a live thing all the same, a living thing's living offspring. Would you approve of them? Could all this stuff still move you? To think so has become my life, what all this science writing hopes for. Every sentence ever written down is sent into the world to be winnowed or thrive according to the same accountability principle as those cistrons and their experimental apparatus. Does a given combination of words push close? Do they resonate? Or are they more noise, divorcibles, permutations to dispense with? Does the line shout out, beat around the edges of something real? Do the words make sense? Do we find ourselves arriving back at them late one surprise night, after years of traveling, thinking them dead? Is this phrase worth the ink it expends? Is it what I mean, something I need? Unshakable bits of the original Question Board. Months after quitting, I'm still working on the thing. Still pasting together. I have something almost right, something to say for no one's but your ears, if I could only reach you.

But it's stupid, to write as if he could read this. How could he know what has happened, how far I have come, how I would share him now with anyone, under any conditions, so long as I had a fraction of him to converse with? He couldn't, can't, doesn't, won't: choose your modality. Last he heard, I crossed him off, cut the tin-can string. "It has been so long since he has heard from me that he might easily conclude that I too am dead."

But I know something of him. He is here. Beached on the same island I am. I could walk to him overland if I had a map, an X to mark his spot, that Flemish, reflexive construction he once wrote me: "You Find Yourself Here." Frank, there is no other way to you but this.

The man you wanted me to name for you: his metaphors, too, were from the start just genes, as "gene" is the most successful metaphor his science has yet made to name life's notes toward a theory of experience. Dozens of words he scattered on us while alive still live. See? They keep me up at night, typing. This is what one woman might do with them. Todd, my mate, my husband, could I reach you, I would tell you how I have discovered what he was after — the secret subjunctive — and what discovery did to him. I would say how I have heard him, alone in this laboratory, his school, singing to himself. How I have made out, at last, what tune he wanted to pass on, the tune I want to sing you, the only notes worth moving mouth to mimic, and what the snippet means in our vocabulary. Franklin, just as you asked me: I have identified your friend.

Nomenclature

By spring, Ressler's trio has the kinks in cell-free synthesis ironed out. Uncanny: they can fractionate the inanimate building blocks, assemble them under controlled conditions, add a coded messenger, slip in the distilled adaptor, and — the nearest thing to golem-making to date— manufacture proteins, bring into being the plaintext product of the cell. It is not yet creating life. But their procedure is a close functional simulation.

They can take a chaotic soup of free aminos and arrange them, from out of a staggering number of linear permutations, into a sequence that gives them enzymatic sense. Granted, the information they introduce is not theirs, nor can they read it either before or after translation. They cannot compare the bit they submit and the batch output. The text is too complex, the print too fine.

They stand, all but there, confronting one last unskirtable hurdle. They can cause the code to be broken, eavesdrop on the process, but they can't get close enough to read the code book. For weeks, neither Koss, Botkin, nor Ressler has been able to supply any fresh suggestions. Ressler concludes that they are in need of new blood. He tries out the problem on his office mate. Since assaulting Ressler that day outside Ulrich's office, Lovering has been unreadably neutral. Enough time has passed to try reestablishing relations. This intellectual problem is Ressler's peace offering. Lovering declines the proffered branch, polite but indifferent, too busy to be bothered. To leave Lovering an honorable out, Ressler jokes, "Maybe your girlfriend would like to take a shot at the problem." When Lovering jerks his head up from his desk, eyes burning, Ressler regrets the miscalculation.

He takes a slow walk to the Woytowichs', a path he has lately reopened. They will never replace the Blakes, but they are nevertheless — what is the word? — contact. The prodigious Ivy has an undeniable fascination about her rapid development. This time Dan and Renée are between diaper changes. He and Dan trade project stumbling blocks. It gives Ressler no pleasure to hear that the ILLIAC project is just as seriously log-jammed.

"The kid's program is fine," Woyty admires. "It's terrific what he can make that machine do, after only a few months. But after every run that closes in on an occurrence of the pattern we're after, Joey changes his blessed instruction deck again. The program keeps expanding, like those radioactive tomatoes Botany is always growing. Exceptions to the latest exception-handling. The do-loops have grown do-loops on them several nests thick. Very Ptolemaic."

Ressler suggests that they might be engineering their desired result. Dan nods gravely at the possibility. Then, as if hitting on a remedy, he says, "Hey. Come take a look at this." Ressler follows Dan into the infant's bedroom. There, father arranges Ivy on the rug and sets in front of her four brightly colored blocks — rose, powder blue, eucalyptus, lemon — boldly imprinted with oversized letters. "Find the A, Ivy. Come on, little girl." Singsong, he coaches, "A is for ap-ple, aard-vark, an-gi-o-sperm."

Ivy is off and crawling. Stretching out a system of muscles she can still but pitifully coordinate, she falls on the correct block. Ressler remains guarded. "One in four." Can she repeat?

Woyty laughs confidently. He returns the child to the starting point, shuffles the blocks, and says, "Can you show me the C, Ivy? Sure you can. C is for cat and cactus___"

"Cuneiform," Ressler suggests. "Codon." The baby, unperturbed, heaves herself against the correct letter in question. Ressler's eyes light, fueled from a source far away. Still in the crib, Ivy knows her alphabet. Is it real learning or just conditioning? The question, at this level, is meaningless. The scientists sit on the nursery floor. Daniel exercises his daughter's arms, strokes the hamhock smoothness of her back, stimulating the nerve connections to solidify into a network. Ressler relates the in vitro successes and describes the block they now knock up against. They can produce plaintext proteins from ciphertext nucleic acid. But analysis cannot yet tell them within acceptable margin of error how the sequences correspond.