Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Delay was no longer just a question of losing time, of being outraced by the hospital collection bureaucracy. We had systematically destroyed all chance of returning to the old program. The files were gone. We could allow the vested interests no other program to fall back upon, or our changes would be quickly suppressed before they could produce their desired effect. We could run the new version or nothing at all. And running nothing at all, as Todd pointed out, would be the equivalent of performing a lobotomy on a chunk of the city's working interests large enough to create a seizure throughout the rest of the interdependent network.

"That first remote message," Dr. Ressler asked, stubbing out another butt and starting anew. "Was it really 'What hath God wrought?'"

"That's how the books report it."

Todd snorted. "Probably backstopped. Jimmied up after the fact." His inadvertent verb stopped the conversation. He fiddled with a CRT contrast button. "Sorry. The fellow must be on my mind."

We rehearsed for the last time how we would put our claim once our variant system software was in operation. Dr. Ressler said, "We haven't talked about it yet, but we ought to try to minimize prosecution, once the project has had its run."

"Ha!" Franklin discounted. "Information Age criminals never get prosecuted. They get hired on as consultants to the DOD."

Dr. Ressler smiled; that was the precedent. "All the same, I'll link your immunity to the other conditions. Should push come to blow, you two and Annie haven't the first idea of how this bug slipped into the works. As far as you are concerned, you don't know your ASCII from your ALGOL."

"What about you?" I said, indignant at the suggestion that we scatter and leave him alone, answerable to everything.

He smiled and exhaled. "They can't do anything to me," he answered. "I'm already spoken for."

Willfully or just ordinarily oblivious, we went on to other matters. "Well, as long as I still know you for another day yet," Franklin cackled, "can I ask you one thing?"

"Name it." His voice acknowledged that he still owed us an explanation. He knew what this last petition to the Question Board would be: the same question that had started us here, before love, before knowledge, before disaster.

Todd began gingerly enough, accelerating only slowly into a semblance of courage. "I understand… I can see how one might not be able to trap certain feelings off in a side panel. I mean, I can see how, if the attraction, if the need were large enough___"

He shot me an involuntary glance. "That a person might choose to go on caring, as if…"

"As if it still counted?" Dr. Ressler assisted.

Something broke in Todd, and his urgent attachment to the man, his innate need to prove that neither of their disappearances was inevitable, flooded the room. "I can understand the torch-bearing. Celibacy. Self-denial. But son of a mother. … It seems to me that the worst thing, the worst hurt anyone could possibly have inflicted on you, shouldn't have been enough to___" He trailed off, afraid at the end to ask.

But he had as much as asked already. Dr. Ressler had only to coax him to put it into words. "Enough to do what?"

"To make you give up science." Todd's eyes swam with confusion. Shouldn't you have thrown yourself into it with redoubled effort? How could you desert the one place that might have given you some comfort?

It was Dr. Ressler's turn to be surprised. This was not the phrasing, not the question, he expected. "Oh," he said, alerted into softness. "But I never quit science."

Franklin and I exchanged astonishments. Todd dismissed him bitterly. "I mean something more than keeping up with the journals."

"So do I." The professor returned a self-conscious grin. "Look. Analysis depends on breaking down complex hierarchies into understandable parts. That's indispensable to good science, and I did it for years. Even got a paper out of it, as you junior sleuths insist on reminding me. But analysis is just part of the method. When you catch a glimpse of your smallest, discrete components, and even these don't explain the pattern you are after, sometimes the situation calls out for another motion, a synthetic cycle.

"Remember John Von Neumann?" he asked. " 'Yes, it is obvious'? The sharpest systematic intellect of the century. Games theory, contributions to quantum mechanics, father of digital computer software." He gestured through the two-way mirror into the computer room, suggesting that something of those old language generations still floated around in the newest machines. "Codeveloper of the hydrogen bomb and advocate of the preemptive strike. Once told Life, 'If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?' Claimed to have invented a whole mathematical discipline while riding in a taxi cab. Wrote a pivotal book, published posthumously by my old I-state research university, called Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, in which he proves that machines can be made complex enough to copy themselves.

"Von Neumann, the cleverest product evolution has yet offered, thought that the language of the functioning brain was not the language of logic and mathematics. The only way we would ever be able to see the way the switches all assembled the messages they sent among themselves would be to create an analog to the language of the central nervous system." He fell silent, perhaps wondering whether sheer cleverness is ever enough. "The firmware language of the brain. That's what I have spent the last twenty-five years pursuing."

The revelation stunned us. Todd rubbed his temples. "I don't get it. No institution? No grant? No laboratory? What are you doing here?"

Ressler laughed. "It's not a particularly popular or accredited line of research these days." He held up a finger, holding the floor. He went to his attache case, brought it back to the table, and unzipped it. It poured forth, like a flushed warren, long, stiff, manila-colored, heavily penciled-over scores. Musical scores. "This one is a woodwind octet," he announced self-consciously. "Look here. I stole this bit from Berg. But he stole a similar bit from Bach, so I'm safe from lawsuit."

Todd flipped through the penciled staves, looking for some explanatory key. I collected myself first. "You're a composer," I said, a thrill coursing at the forbidden word.

"Yes, I guess I am." He sounded as startled by the revelation as we were. "I even went back to school awhile, although the pieces have remained hopelessly amateur."

"And?" I asked. I could not help myself, took his hand between mine. Nothing he could say or do would ever surprise me again. "Research results? Anything to write the journals about?" Could there really be another language, cleaner than math, closer to our insides than words?

He answered me figure for figure. "Precious few conclusions, so far. Soft, slow passages more effective when contrasted with loud, fast ones. Nothing much more definitive. But bear in mind, the field is still in its infancy."

Todd, recovering his wits at last, plied him with enthusiastic questions. What had he written, and how much? Lieder, chamber works, symphonic? Problems of instrumentation and registration, color, timbre. The trade-off of genre. Tonal? Serial? Aleatoric? I tried to follow this tech shoptalk but found myself hearing something else, absolutely silent: a monk, late twentieth century, working in total isolation, locked in a cell for longer than I could imagine, a lifetime, just composing, trying to emulate, recreate, variegate, state, consecrate the sound he had once heard while standing on his front porch on a spring morning, about to enter, thinking his love waited for him inside. I thought of all the experimental, heuristic, and botched compositions that kept him company over long years, and how, whatever the orchestration, form, choice of language, all pieces amounted to love songs, not just to a lost woman, but to a world whose pattern he could not help wanting to save.