Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Stockpiled deep in the magnificent kludge, buried in the cerebellum, hippocampus, corpus callosum, the device knows its own unwiring. Thought carries a little pattern of terror around inside it, the realization that it shouldn't even be around, that it will soon fall back into distributed static. "What a day," Jimmy sometimes greeted the second shift, throwing up his arms. "I should have been a chicken farmer. What else can go wrong?" He knew what else could and one day would, knew before anybody, and only his tired joke stood between him and nothing.

The map of circuits, like their mobile case, is shaped by evolution. Synapse routes that presage their own immanent shorting out must also have been selected for. What good can it possibly do to know, every paralyzing, conscious hour, that the prop holding me up to a smoky little aperture onto everything is already, even as I name the process, dissolving in a stroke or a gentle stream? Medullar terror at returning to randomness is behind every urge to pattern the world. Hardwired to fear is the breeding scream.

Desperate copulation evolved long before cerebral terror. Male dragonflies scrape a female clean of previous sperm before mating. Cheater fish slip between the throes of a thrashing couple and make their secret deposit. But the truly promiscuous, the ones who couple with everything that moves, who cannot stop propagating even to eat, who fill notebooks into the night: fear makes us father for our lives. Todd excavated me as if his organ were a fixing gauge. Learning that nothing could come of it, he left, scared off. Only wilder fear drove him temporarily back.

Natural selection edits with an eye only toward what the message says, not to what it means. It has no interest in the fittest solution, nor the most efficient. The fittest thing life could do would be to die immediately and join the overwhelming efficiency of inert space. Selection hinges on one thing alone: differential reproduction. Double faster than you die. Dissolve slower than you replicate. All organs are an attempt to leverage this edge, even this crazily immense, already unwiring circuit. I know; I can feel the pay telescope starting to flick off. By Jimmy's count, with luck, I might get six more years.

Losing the Signal

How much space might he clear away in himself for this brilliant, two-manual experiment in naming? He has no precedent, no Jeanette template, no chromosome locus synthesizing the next step. Dr. Koss is his only instructor. They test the limits of their freedom, walk openly through town, feeling the violation, not daring to believe what they do. Their walks are exercises in synchronization. Their legs cadence. They talk in overlap, complete one another's sentences, laugh at each other's jokes before they're made. A small miracle, for once in this life, not to have to explain.

She spends the night, an extended, sleepless night of semaphores. Jeanette stands peach-naked, stretches, touches her toes in morning's light, showing herself to him. "How do you like your eggs?"

He would ask: Are we wrong? Am I destroying something real and immediate in you? Are you denying your husband's sacrifice, losing the intimate, accumulated weight of your past? But her eyes are sparks, looking for affirmation of the rightness of this moment. He must not violate her joy, and says, "Ova easy."

The article appears, makes the rounds at Biology. It includes a photo of Ressler among Faces to Watch and gives a bastardized, erroneous thumbnail treatment of his mutagen investigations. It paints him as arcane, isolated — qualities that may have been requisite for serious creative effort in the past but at this hour are inimical to effective science. On pub date, log-jammed almost at solution, he wants nothing more than to be brought back into the fold, to work together with Ulrich toward some common persuasion.

The Life photo essay horrifies him: a sad, indelible feeling as he flips through the sickeningly permanent pages. Perpetual artifact, preserved in a thousand long-term vaults. A million copies faithfully reproduce his every imperfection. Too late to recant: his face, his thin nose, his words badly quoted and out of context, his arrogant self-assurance — Stuart Ressler, rising science star, split, flapped, and pinned out like a cat in undergraduate anatomy. Proliferated throughout the English-speaking world.

The fallout of bad-faith fame follows him into his first office visit following publication. Minor notoriety will not help patch matters between Ressler and his increasingly erratic office mate. Ressler braces on entering and shouts out something friendly. But Lovering just sits among the ruined piles of papers, his Baalbek of print, indifferent and still. Walking toward his desk, head down, hands in pocket, Ressler is shaken by Joe's voice, struggling to shake off catatonia. "Do you know the price we're all paying to improve the world?"

Ressler stops and faces Lovering. He chooses each word, multiplying the odds against the growing sentence a hundred thousand times per syllable. "I'm not sure what you mean, Joe."

"What I mean? The world. The world. Toot la moaned. The big picture. Come on. We're both adults. We don't have to get into semantics here." Ressler can't even respond. Scrambling through the repertoire, all inappropriate, he just bobs his head on its universal joint. "Unnatural prospect! All the way back, all the way back to fires in caves." Lovering drops into a movie monotone. "And I work for them!"

"Who do you work for, Joe?"

"Who the hell knows? Big state school. The money's been washed through so many agencies it's wetter'na Baptist, But it's the government at bottom, isn't it? All that dough."

The logic eludes Ressler. "Half the scientists in this country have worked for the government since the war."

"What do you mean, 'since'? Who told you they've stopped shooting?" Ressler backs toward his chair, out of the stumbled-upon line of fire. He can say nothing. "What does it cost to eradicate the Black Death? Ask GM. Ask Coke."

"Joe—"

"Shut up." Brutal, suppliant, drunken. "I'm talking." Ressler wants only to be out of the room, to allow the fit of latent humanity to work itself out in privacy. But Lovering won't release him. He stares at Ressler, pleading, the look of a spaniel, hindquarters smashed beneath the wheel of a car, asking why his years of service have been so rewarded. His smile changes to pity. "Education, learning, progress. You know what we're going to find out, we researchefs? We're going to finally get down to that old secret code in the cell, and the string is going to come out spelling D-U-M-B space S-H-I…"

"Joe. Would you like to go out for a beer?" Ressler's intonation is so soft it startles the man silent. The invitation sounds slightly frayed coming out of his mouth. He has forgotten how to ask the question right. But Lovering remains distracted.

"What? Out? Why? Corn as high as an elephant's eye. Big, hulking, behemoth state school, out in the middle of godforsaken nowhere." He brightens, addresses Ressler as an old friend. "I've got a job offer, you know. As soon as Sandy finds someone to replace her at her office, we're outta this hole. Someplace new, fresh, different."

"Terrific, Joe. Could be exactly what you're looking for. Where are you going?"

"Ann Arbor."

Late that evening he sees Lovering again, ducking into the department's small-animal room. The lines of cages always have an edgy hysteria to them, as if the rodents know where their cage-mates disappear to. Ressler pokes his head into the room. He watches Lovering pick up a cage, shake it. Above the animal squeaks and pleas, Ressler hears Lovering doing a poor but obligatory Cagney: "You dirty rats."

"Dr. L. Which way are you headed?"

Lovering sets the cage down quickly. "Nowhere. Why?"