Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

In my time away, I have managed a layman's guide to nucleo-tides, a miniature map of the man who so badly wanted in. I've come to the verge of declaring that the code codes only for the desire to break it. I've managed to name everything except the one thing, that evening, that Dr. Ressler knew. The Ur-text, the certain certainty that by itself motivated him, the in vivo foster parent of empiricism.

I'd seen the glow for months, but had chalked up his gradual return to solid things, to Todd's and my company. I should have known, by how quickly Dr. Ressler threw himself into Jimmy's cause, that he followed a fuller preparation, long in motion. He felt the mass packed in his abdomen. The composer knew, weeks before any physician, that the oncogene had been triggered. Information was going back under, was about to disappear again into silence. His long apprenticeship to science was soon to be rewarded with a Name Chair in oblivion. The pattern behind the pattern, the mutation shaped into something significant, the mystery, the only muse, the built-in desire for discovery, was coming home. He knew. There was a fire loose in the landscape, in the library.

The Threshold Effect

In that museum in Rotterdam where my friend's broken-off research tour of the known world took him, a room away from Brueghel's great Tower (already crumbling in mid-construction around the base) hangs its twentieth-century counterpart, the contemporary reply to the scattering of languages: Magritte's Threshold of Liberty. The painting opens on a sealed room whose walls divide into panels. Each panel is itself a painted window, hinting at what lies on the other side, beyond the pane: sky, trees, fire, lace, more windows, or just a further wooden panel, the wall the painted imitation hangs upon.

In the center of the bare room stands a cannon, a paint cannon, but about to discharge itself all the same. The painting is an enigma, an absolute cipher. It is about enigma, the screen of knowing only through language, the threshold effect, the accumulation of small variations that transform a change of degree into a change of nature. Life stands on the threshold of some new twist it will never be able to name but must live through all the same. I will get no closer to liberty than thin explanation, this diminishing metaphor of panels porting images into the closed room. But it interests me to imagine Todd standing in front of that cannon just about to fire, shatter the painted chamber, flood the place with moonlight that until that moment had been only postulate. I stand next to him in the narrow gallery, looking, waiting.

My sabbatical is up. The last text I read says that the doubling time for genetic knowledge has dropped to less than a year. Twice the field it was the day I started studying. And I've nothing to put down by way of synopsis except this belated discovery that I don't much care to die apart from him.

A Child's Guide to Surgery

The mutations we set into the system began to take effect the next morning. MOL data enterers, sitting down at their terminals, coffee cups in hand, saw on their screens the message: "Would you mind if your major medical coverage were instantly dropped? (Enter Y or N to continue)." An "N" looped them back to the identical question. A "Y" cleared the tube and put up a string of phosphors reading, "Then please make some noise about your colleague James Steadman," before freeing the terminal and dropping the users into their ordinary dialogues.

Midmorning, when the firm's remote clients began requesting digital transmissions, the modems behaved flawlessly, the reports came over the wires, and the remote printers executed the ledgers without hitch, until the bottom line. Just where the balance should have been, the slavish dot-matrix printer pasted a boldface, near-letter-quality Q:

Q: Your company is financially linked to an insurance organization that does not honor the spirit of its contractual commitments. What can you do to keep it honest?

A: Drop a line to the CEO below.

Underneath, the dumb printer knocked out the appropriate address. Two lines beneath, like the denouement sports score doled out only after the public service announcement airs, appeared the accurate but upstaged bottom line.

Surprise blits began to infiltrate banking facilities in distant parts of the city. Tellers presenting transaction receipts to customers found that the innocuous little slips, universally distributed for the express purpose of being instantly thrown away, carried the announcement that today in history a certain stroke patient in a hospital in a neighborhood across town was about to be turned out onto the street. The slips were still thrown away, but not before a few of the bottle-messages reached civilization.

By afternoon back at the MOL offices, the day shift's crisis management, printing out the first batch of the day's mass statements, noticed, after several hundred had been printed, something wrong. Each otherwise faultless statement contained, in the bottom strip of the universal financial form usually reserved for such stuff as "We wish each one of you a warm and personal New Year," the emergency signal: "A stroke victim is about to be cut loose." Just below came a random selection from the "Yes" pile Dr. Ressler and I had made from my stack of quotes of the day:

In a few years we have learned virtually to ignore things that would have petrified the world….

Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to!

For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being….

I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

Care is heavy, therefore keep you, You are care, and care must keep you.

Le vent qui éteint une lumière allume un brasier. For a rough translation, please call…

Verses-turned-viruses under the pressure of environment. Each message contained a contact where curiosity could be directed. Some quotes were canonical, others more transient. We'd clipped from Bartlett's, the daily newspaper, private stock, selecting on how well they made anonymous tragedy real. Others we picked for the roll of the words. Still others had nothing to do with Jimmy. We just liked them, favorite bits of recognition.

The first, astonished operator to notice this issue of literature all over the credit union forms may have tried to abort and restart the statement run. If so, he got exactly the same result, with whatever parameters he called up the print job. A glance at the tampered file, any attempt to list its logic, showed it scrambled beyond recognition. The daytime operations staff faced a few unacceptable choices. They could go over the thousand statements by hand with a black magic marker. This would take prohibitively long and would raise more curiosity than the snippets themselves; worse, it would not look professional. They could fail to send the batch out at all, which would result in stiff penalties for failing to meet the DP contract. Or they could send the infected financial stubs out as is and hope, as with the personal New Year's greetings, that no one paid any attention.

This they elected to do, notifying the targeted insurance executives whose numbers appeared, assuring them firm to firm that this sabotage was not the work of MOL but of some runaway individual from within. When Dr. Ressler and Todd showed up for work that evening, they were taken into police custody.

I sat home alone that night, expecting the phone to ring. I had no idea what was happening to them, although I suspected they had been rounded up. Every ten minutes I had to check myself from going over to the offices, now doubtless crawling with software experts trying to crack Dr. Ressler's Chinese box. I scoured the city news, waded through the schoolchildren slayings and neo-Nazi resurgences, but there was no mention of anomalous mass-mail hijacking. I could not see the statements going out or eavesdrop over the relay circuits. I had no way of finding out whether we'd succeeded in grazing the banking industry with our tetanus prick.