Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

What he had done, how he had chosen to spend his energies, really was science. A way of looking, reverencing. And the purpose of all science, like living, which amounts to the same thing, was not the accumulation of gnostic power, fixing of formulas for the names of God, stockpiling brutal efficiency, accomplishing the sadistic myth of progress. The purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it.

I did not know the letter names yet, but I gathered that this biologist had discovered that A, T, G, and C spelled out endless variations on the old Socratic imperative in the cells. To say that the variants came from the same command was not to say they came to the same thing. Each still had to be identified in its particular texture. For that, one could only remain alert, stay flexible, keep deep down, work. All human effort now hung on the verge of revealing something unexpected, from the simplest of beginnings. The system ran undeniably toward randomness, but along the way, a steady stream of new nuances accumulated, each complete in its complexity, each incorporating the issuing theme. Dear Goldberg, play me one of my variations.

And at that moment, losing the thread of the conversation, I blurted out that colossal contemporary irrelevance: "Have you had any pieces performed?"

Dr. Ressler looked as nervously delighted as a little boy about to do his talent show number. "Opus One debuts tomorrow," he declared. "The sole work by which I hope to be remembered."

He punched up the system time on the screen, and we were struck by the work still left to do before the arrival of the day shift. "Oh Jesus," Todd let out.

The geneticist-turned-musical-recombiner threw his portfolio back together. "Sorry. My fault. That's what happens when you begin to solve the globe's problems. Before you know it, it's a quarter to six in the morning."

We fell to the cleanup tasks. I shredded the printouts of our last-minute test runs. Todd dummied up a console log, leaving no clues about the nature of the program that would soon be executing. And Dr. Ressler performed his coup de grace. He selected, at random, a string of zeroes and ones deep in the system firmware. Using it as a cryptographic key, he ran the sequence against the program code of the impostor routines, storing down the scrambled product. Then he manually single-stepped into the loading procedure a pointer back to that random sequence, so that the scrambled programs would be deciphered into intelligible code when and only when they fed into the machine at run-time. When the corporate programmers went into the packs the next day to list the files and see where the unexpected behavior came from, they would find only gibberish. The trick was not uncrackable, but would slow the reversing process down.

The self-enciphering spread across acres of digital storage. "All right," he said, when the task came up complete. He took a deep breath and lifted a significant eyebrow. "Time to collect the songbooks." Our bit of genetic engineering was done. For better or worse, Franklin brought down the last remnant of old firmware. We held our breaths like rocket scientists as he attempted to boot the complete, new system. The status indications flashed one by one across the console without producing any unexpected warnings. Up came what seemed to be the old, original cold-start screen.

Ressler, ensuring that his name would be the only one traceable to this new boot, used two fingers to type it in. The screen prompted "password: " and echoed its demure x's as he entered his. It waited an ungodly whole minute, long enough for us to realize that a crash now would leave us with Jimmy on the street, his mother without a mortgage, and the three of us plus Annie in prison. Then, having put the fear of God in us, the system at last decided to flash:

System Date and Time: 05/15/84 06:35.45

User sressler logged in.

Last user logout was 00/00/00 at 00:00.00

Command?

Uncanny. We had created a new species, registering its own day one. No previous user. Ressler had even added the humorous touch of patching in a new version number for our new animal. But when he answered the command prompt with the standard request to bring up the start of the day's on-line processing tasks, up came what cosmetically resembled in every respect the old operating system. And yet it was only a simulation.

We breathed again. At least it ran. If the wrinkles we had introduced behaved in context the way they tested out in isolation, we were in business. Ressler grinned, as if Opus One had never caused him the least stress. "Looks good on this end." He produced, from behind the CPU where he had stashed it who knows how long before, a bottle of our old favorite drugstore vintage and the requisite paper cups. "To our friend's physical therapy," he proposed. And we clinked wax rims.

"To musicians and physicians," Todd added, and we sipped again.

Two sips to the wind, it was my turn. "To the language of the central nervous system."

At the Cadence

What would I add to the list of things we did that night? How would I interpret the account, two years and a handful of evenings after the fact? We thought to engage in a very old-fashioned gesture, or one so modern as to still be, like music, in its infancy. We acted according to a new complex mathematics, one dependent on the tiniest initial tweaks. The attempt was an absurd mismatch of scale — the notion that the entire community was accountable to the infinitesimal principle of a single life.

I would say: at the same moment that we tried to bring our premise into being, we were also testing its validity, objectively, if not without passion. We worked on the same problem that had occupied Dr. Ressler from earliest adulthood. Now that he had half-unraveled it, he concluded that the bulk of the text down at ATCG level was still in the infinitive: to look, to want, to stand amazed. We simply read those verbs out loud, extending the synonym list. To try. To investigate.

On the day I heard about Dr. Ressler's death, I posted a quote, one of my last, about the God of the scientists making men in his own image and setting them here with the single command to go and figure out how everything worked. Tonight, I would sneak fugitively into the library and add a complementary quote by the same author: "Trouble throughout the modern age has as a rule started with the natural sciences__" Or better: "Everything has become perishable except perhaps the human heart."

I learned that night, as we put our last touches on the on-line replacement, that science, the chief, most miraculous project of the modern world, the source of all the trouble, was itself a self-reproducing automaton. Empirical wonder did not stop short of those forbidden infinitives, to protect, to hope, to assist. They too were embedded deep in the coding problem. In order to say "Copy me," the string had first to say "Read me." Naturally such a command would result in time in the need to do science. What else could it become?

Doing science was simply a question of getting up the courage of curiosity. But the courage that made Dr. Ressler automatically interfere on Jimmy's behalf would have paralyzed Todd and me had we recognized its source. I can't pretend I had no idea. He hinted at it — his personal immunity, his already being spoken for. It's there, obvious, in his toss-off about being remembered by posterity. But that evening, while we finished our entry for the science fair, these were just words I couldn't afford to make sense of.

Tonight, the project that enlisted me is all but ready for print. I have finished my book lookup; the self-assigned homework is done. I have retrieved from the stacks the gist, at least, of what his science thought to retrieve from the world. I can now hear, in the set of variations, the shattering process he spent a life listening to. Like the best of reductionists, I can pull it apart into base molecules that, through a circus tumbling act governed by physical law, learn how to fill every conceivable niche of sound. All this, and it hasn't even come down to the wire; by the time-honored creative method of not eating, I have enough reserves left to start the job search or finance a full-scale retreat to the blood relations in Elkhart.