Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Dr. Ressler's eyes measured the extent of Frank's desperation. For a moment, he seemed about to attack. Instead, he relaxed and lit a cigarette. "Ah! The postwar solution. No, we're too close to terrorism as it stands. We can do this thing more effectively without violence or property damage." He shrugged, having said everything needed about the superiority of legitimate retaliation. And Todd acquiesced.

Combining the words supplied by Jimmy's horrifying dictation with their own batch of gradually acquired contraband knowledge, Dr. Ressler and his graduate assistant went to work on a last recombination. They raided the program listings room and before the new manager could reinstate punch-lock security, they copied all the sections of the system software they needed, stashing the copies each night in the bottom of stockroom supply boxes.

For all they had taught themselves about how the system worked, how to make it jump through hoops, they now had to figure out why it did what it did, to trace its internal logic at machine level. For four nights running, program listings littering the computer room, they dissected the routines and procedures. They raced the clock. Jimmy's mother had seen a lawyer, who had convinced the increasingly nervous hospital to restrain itself and keep the man stabilized under care while his mother looked into every conceivable financial strategy for meeting the unmeetable bill. We had no idea of how much time we had for the delicate surgery we meant to pull off.

I was there every night. I hunched over the listings alongside them, threw in my guesses as to what fit where, ran back and forth to the massive, meter-long documentation manual. They accepted my help, but when they talked, they clearly talked to each other. They were men, in the end, and had begun, in challenge, to discover just what the other might be capable of. When their eyes locked on a piece of particularly tangled code, I could sense that they threw themselves into the untangling not just for Jimmy but to earn and keep the love of the other.

In addition to helping speed things up, I wanted to leave my fingerprints in the affair, to stand implicated alongside them. Dr. Ressler allowed me that chance, giving me a list of two dozen credit unions and financial institutions, all clients of MOL. I was to check Who Owns Whom, and establish which if any had parent-child connections to the insurance company in question. He wanted to make his bullet as precise, discriminating, and manageable as possible. "Oh," he added, as I left to do the assignment. "We'll also need your entire index card collection from the last five years." I laughed.

The financial audit was trivial but surprising. A few hours of legwork in the stacks confirmed the classic postindustrial para-noiac's fantasy: four of the two dozen names on the list belonged to the same tier of the same sprawling hierarchy of ownership as our insurance company target. "I thought we might snag a couple," Dr. Ressler said mildly, when I gave him the results that evening. "Contracts and kickbacks tying together one big happy family."

"I personally think the Trilateral Commission is behind us all," Todd said, not lifting his head from the listing where he traced calling routines with colored pencils.

Dr. Ressler chuckled. "Maybe. The world certainly is more connected than anyone supposes. Perhaps in another few years, we'll all be owned by one little old lady in Kansas City." He thanked me for the work. Looking over the list of linked businesses, he grew apprehensive. "Can you get names? Addresses?"

"Child's play," I assured him. What could be simpler?

"And the quote cards? Your collection of 'Today in History'?"

"You really want those? I thought you were joking."

"Not at all. They're instrumental."

I brought in my massive card box the following evening, years of trivia typed up on three-by-fives. He sat down with me and in fifteen minutes taught me the criterion by which I could divide the stack into two piles, Yes and No. In the samples we sorted together, one by Swift caught his eye. Dr. Ressler instantly taped it to the front of the CPU. It inspired him throughout the most difficult parts of subsequent decoding:

I have heard of a man who had a mind to sell his house, and therefore carried a piece of brick in his pocket, which he shewed as a pattern to encourage purchasers.

After they had deciphered the system logic, Dr. Ressler duplicated the relevant programs and data files. Then came the task of building the mutation, the exactly similar, only different system. Ressler carefully selected locations where they might place the needed patches — electronic detours and amendments. The point was to make their baby look, feel, and behave exactly the same as the template, the original operating system. But be the serpent underneath.

It seemed to take weeks. Every night I arrived expecting to hear that Jimmy had been turned out, that the hospital was suing his mother for immediate payment, or that our project to avert that scenario had been uncovered. In reality, the insertion of program patches went quickly, and the bulk of the replacement code actually got written in the few days between the founding of the Library of Congress on April 24 and the combined Lusitania sinking/Nazi surrender on May 7–8.

Live testing of the modifications — bringing them on-line on scores of remote terminals — was the most difficult and dangerous part. An insignificantly small alteration, whose logic is impeccable in isolation, can have unforeseen consequences that multiply out of control when dropped in the middle of a complex system. It came down either to testing a number of changes in one batch, which increased the chance of untraceable bugs, or to tracing the effects of single differences, which took far more time and showed little about the combined behavior. And each on-line test increased the odds of our being discovered.

For live testing, Annie was indispensable. As a remote terminal user herself, she could report to Dr. Ressler the effects of the modifications at a typical station. She could also enter keystrokes remotely, sequences that triggered a routine, set in motion as if by accident. This made it possible to invoke and trace changes during a normal day without irregularities back in the computer room. Annie did this in full knowledge of the risks, aware that her complicity violated the state criminal code if none of God's own minor statutes. We each loved Jimmy after our own fashion.

The operation involved some degree of what white-collar espionage calls backstopping: dummying up the record after the fact. Todd, the artist, enjoyed this part: creating on the text editor bogus console logs that looked exactly like real ones. Faking labels and directory histories for the packs they experimented on. Going into the low-level driver software and altering the dates on modified files. "Do you remember that Holmes story where the bad guys create the complete, simulated, subterranean bank vault one story above the real one? That's what we're up to. Hijacking an entire office."

I hadn't seen him in such spirits since Jimmy's stroke; no, before — since we began living together. As they closed in on debugging the last subtle change they meant to introduce into the machine, I saw how much the two of them enjoyed the work, enjoyed one another, the exertion. It was an elaborate game, an intellectual challenge, momentarily divorced from real-world consequences, the emergency motive. They got carried up in the charge of making it work, making it ingenious. The life-or-death matter became play, lab for lab's sake: what would happen if we put the patch here? Wouldn't it be prettier if we rebuilt the allocation table? Why not read the records directly from the cross-index?

They were both vital for a few days. Strong and inventive with effort. Alive. Franklin earned momentary respite from feeling that he'd personally crippled Jimmy. And Dr. Ressler had, here at the end, finally found an outlet, a call to put to use that superlative skill in pattern-searching and manipulation that had always been his second nature. The young post-doc would never, in a lifetime, have imagined this experiment. But after a long detour, it was his belated return to biology. To Life Science.