Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Todd and I had spoken little in the handful of days since my return. The catalyst that brought me back was too pressing, Jimmy's hospitalization too real for us to waste time on private reconciliation. He offered no apologies, tried out no resolutions. We were both there to assist Dr. Ressler in getting Jimmy back under coverage. There was nothing to explain, to remedy. One night, seeing Jimmy for the first time since the stroke, returning to the offices to try to lose himself in an intransigent bit of machine code, Todd had weakened. "Would it be impossible for me to come home with you? One Day Only?"

I felt myself waver at his exhausted attempt at humor. "I don't think that would be a good idea."

"You do know that the lovely Ms. Martens and I are—"

"It's no business of mine." I did not want any news on the matter. Were what? Married? Divorced? History? It no longer concerned me. Annie too had tried to mumble something about intentions and ignorances and getting past misunderstandings. After the second blanket forgiveness I gave her, she stopped trying to approach me about anything but technical matters. In fact, none of us had much occasion to talk about anything except the specifics of our data terrorism. For the first time since I started visiting, actions ran ahead of words.

But that evening, as Dr. Ressler inserted the executive address list into place and Todd joined us in the control room, dusting his hands after putting the original, unedited disk packs to sleep, we were at last forced to sit down with each other as we used to, thrown back on the old, limited compensation of talk. Todd took my scribbled sheet of hieroglyphs from Dr. Ressler. As he looked it over, trying to catch up with the conversation, the professor slipped in his last bit of pedagogy for his only graduating class. "The spookiest thing about the code is its contingency. Some order in it, the symmetries of significance. But matter very well might have missed hitting upon even this configuration, no matter how large the reservoir of time it had to move around in. It might never have arrived at even this bootstrap translation had initial conditions been even a hundredth of a percent different. Or even exactly the same," he said, with a wicked glance at me, setting in motion the chain of idea-links that would eventually make me lose a year to the study of variation.

"But we got the sucker now," Todd said, facetious emphasis on the plural pronoun; nothing could be further from his field of expertise than this cryptic chart.

"Yes, we have it now," Ressler said, interpreting the phrase a little differently. "Perhaps other codes arose at the same moment, but this is the one that won out. It will never happen again; too much inertia now. Places we can't get to from here. Unlike what they teach in schools, the master builder can only proceed by patching onto existing patches."

"Having recently authored some pretty ugly kludges myself, I am glad to hear that."

Ressler extended the idea. "Efficiency and accuracy are not the same thing. Like it or not, life can only revise itself like a library saving or pitching books strictly on the basis of how frequently they've been checked out." He spoke obliquely to me, tailoring his metaphors to an end I could not then see. "We like to think of nature as unerring. In reality, everything it does is an approximate mistake. Its every calculation is short-term, a quick fix. 'Kludge' is right, Franklin." Under the shadow of what we were about to launch, the rules of decorum were changing.

"Take our species: the apex of engineering. We've all but completed our systematic destruction of the whole, buffered web. The evidence is there, for anyone paying attention. Even if we stopped this evening___ And yet, something in the joy of building — something in my inherited, egoistic firmware — still insists that we also possess the first, flawed, rough prototype that might, in time, take nature beyond the knee-jerk, blind short-term. You see, we can project, unlike any other postulate in nature, unlike nature itself. Model. Foresee. Think. But we have no one to help us make our projections wise."

He stubbed out a butt and checked his watch. "There is talk in the genetics community about the Human Genome Project. Sequencing, base by base, the entire five-thousand-volume DNA string. But whose string? Yours? This fine woman's here? What of the volumes for gray whales, horned toads, diatoms, four million species in all, lost by the thousands while we talk about them? Even the complete library, unattainable, will never begin to hint at the books, the stories the string might have produced."

Todd, my Todd, stood up, realizing what was at stake all around him. Life was suddenly too real to get out of alive. "Christ. What do we ask for, then?" Frantic, he asked the man he loved blindly, the woman he cared for a little, the general night — anyone who might answer. The question tore him like a marathoner's cramp, his rib trying to free itself from imprisonment in its side. I never loved him more than at that moment.

"What do you mean?" Ressler asked, elsewhere, years away.

"I mean: we have this office sewn up; the records are in our power. A Defense Department contractor, a major financial institution, a dozen municipal outfits. Five years of transactions. Half a billion dollars would vanish into a giant Mylar null if we say so. We could take a day of data, scramble it beyond all recognition. 'What's a day, one day, worth to you?' What do we ask for? A new Clean Air Act? Save the Whatever-it-is Seal?" Ressler chose his moment to say nothing. Todd looked at me, his voice wobbling into the shimmies. He assumed, all at once, the entire, terminal, toxic clot the race had laid over the place. The anguished understanding that he might, possessing these files, cut a deal, force a rescue on one bit of the botched job, was like alcohol in an incision. Todd was in real pain, drowning in causes. "An industry-free zone in the Antarctic? Ban the personal AK-47 from over-the-counter sale? Free food for the starving? Russians out of Afghanistan?"

"U.S. out of North America?" I suggested. It helped briefly to undo the urgency, to thin the tangible sickness calling on all sides for instant cure.

Ressler took my handmade chart back from Todd and gave it one more glance before answering. "Yes, the only question worth asking, now that we've all turned activist." This is the sense if not the sound of his words as he sang them: we have it now, have extracted knowledge from information, and it's not enough. We need to ask ourselves what we want to be when we grow up. We need that thing, that arithmetic of ecology that should have preceded knowledge, too easy, too obvious to bear repeating, too embarrassing and indicting to mention by name. The lookup code for care. "I suggest, seeing as how everything is already at stake, that we ask for the one essential in the triumvirate that life is too large and crucial to care about."

Todd looked at him without comprehension. "Meaning?"

The baggage of the gene, the curse of populations. "Keep to the original plan. Ask for Jimmy."

We sat in silence, reluctant to take the machine on-line, to bring up the doctored version of programs whose results, both digital and analog, we had no way of forecasting. Todd retrieved a sketchbook and began doing portraits, lightning contour studies as controlled as anything I'd ever seen him do. Dr. Ressler surprised us both by asking to keep two. We dragged our heels, postponing the launch for a few seconds, and we all three knew it. I half-jokingly suggested that we wait a few more days, until the anniversary of Morse's first public telegraphic message on the line between Washington and Baltimore. The notion tickled Dr. Ressler, but by that point he could only laugh gamely and say, "I dearly wish we could."