Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

When my doorbell went off, I almost tore a ligament. I opened without even checking. It was the last visitor I expected: Annie. "You shouldn't be here," I shouted. But I wasn't about to let her leave, now that she was. Annie was pale with excitement. Acting publicly and illegally, taking legitimation from the cause itself, was so new to her that she shook to talk about it. She was discovering the thermodynamics of pressure politics and wanted, that very evening, to expand into it like nature filling its abhorred vacuum.

I gave her the apartment tour. She was as surprised at my assemblage of escapist Victoriana as her lover Todd had once been erotically charged by it. She kept snatching looks between me and all the embroidery, as if I were having her on. We sat in the living room pouring drinks, the radio news on low in the background, polling the air for waves from the pebble we'd chucked into it. Annie was transformed on activism: could we succeed in saving Jimmy? If insurance companies ran at a profit, wasn't that essentially exploitative? Weren't the central money centers the same ones who were fanning the fires in Central America and Africa? I told her I didn't know.

I didn't mind her talking. It filled the space. At one point she stopped and, complete non sequitur, announced, "You know. I've been thinking a lot about all the talks you and I used to have. You might be right about at least one thing. Species don't hold static. They don't keep still." The first awful concession: she wasn't admitting anything else. But she let me know, made me take responsibility for ruining her faith for good.

When she made to leave, I walked her to the door. There— having written down everything else from that year, I can hardly suppress this — we fell into a fumbling, confused moment, and all at once found ourselves kissing. I don't know who I was putting my mouth to. But Annie was definitely kissing me, attaching to me by her hands with the same excitement of discovery she'd had on arriving. We struggled and broke off. She looked at me, imploring, needing, hoping I might now ask her back in. I stood still and let her leave as if nothing had been transacted.

On day two of the information blitz, the mechanical messages were shuffled and sent out again a little differently. Dr. Ressler had inserted a clever routine that made sure, even though the idea-genes were distributed randomly, that no target received the same message twice. The enhanced statements went out to a new batch of recipients. Our doctored programs also began dispatching little-known facts: premium-to-payment ratios for major medical plans in the U.S.; number of days in a hospital bed required to wipe out average life savings.

I went to work but could concentrate on nothing. Ignorance of what was happening to Todd and Ressler together with my anxiety over Jimmy incapacitated me. I remember going to pieces over a trio of submissions left in the question submission box: Q: How old is the minicam? Q: How many rats are living under Brooklyn? Q: Should we go to Mars? That afternoon I was picked up for questioning.

Annie was interrogated separately, as well as a first-shift data entry clerk, completely innocent. Both were released in hours. I do not know what the others said. Aware that Dr. Ressler must certainly have been somewhere nearby, denying that anyone else had any involvement in the matter, I laid out exactly what I'd done and why. I said I had no idea at all how to stop the runaway software. That much was true.

For safety's sake, only Dr. Ressler knew. He had written the patches so that they would all unwrite themselves like the magician's self-vanishing knot the instant a certain word was typed at the command prompt on the system console. The word existed nowhere but in his memory. I don't know what Ressler told the authorities, but I know that he stopped short of dealing for Jimmy's reinstatement, a proffered swap that would have converted us all into felons.

I'm not sure which terrified the vested interests more: the suggestion that masses of sensitive data might be threatened — a notion that none of our messages even hinted at — or the acute embarrassment produced throughout the financial sector by this amateur theatrical showering of Milton and Robert Browning on the upper stories of the gleaming, inviolable World Trade buildings. In any case, no one had any use for me as soon as it became clear I could not help them stop the flow of messages. They sent me home over my own protests of guilt.

The press, a day late, caught wind of the event, and I was videotaped in conjunction with the story, walking down Vernon Boulevard. I felt strangely exhilarated, dosed with questions I had no intention of answering. That rush accounts for my looking so unlike myself in the pictures on file. Beautiful. At home the next morning, I watched myself on the breakfast sampler of area news. An hour after the spot aired, I got a call from Keith, enormously amused by the escapade. "I did my part, doll. Called the front desk of the villainous outfit for a full explanation the minute I saw your pretty mug interfering with our agency's morning spots." Suddenly scared, not at what would happen to me but aí what would never happen again, I begged Keithy to stay in touch. "Never fear. Every Christmas, a card. Like clockwork."

I don't know how many bewildered New Yorkers phoned in for a gloss on Beaumarchais or a verification on our claims figures. Perhaps a mildly curious couple dozen. Public rallying on the stroke victim's behalf amounted statistically to nil. Naturally. Ours was an equivocal case at best. Had the press not picked it up, it would have been less than insignificant, less than those people with the sandwich boards crammed with schizophrenically tiny writing who parade their imagined grievances in front of City Hall every day for twenty years. The city is full of suffering causes beyond affordability.

The press, for its part, barely mentioned Jimmy except as a side-thread to the paisley, surreal cloth. What they found locally sensational was that this mailing campaign had been a computer crime, then still a novelty. Reporters circled with weird fascination around the violated machine, its ephemeral files, the proximity of Dr. Ressler's virus to a network of sensitive information. When the hacks asked our targeted insurer for a comment, a self-assured executive, who'd had a full day to look over the paper trail on the matter and who thought that discretion was the better part of value, shrugged in front of the camera and said, "The man is covered. There was a clerical foul-up between ourselves and the hospital that we cleared up some time back. I don't understand any of it."

Neither did seven eighths of the sane world, let alone half of the breakfast television audience. We were a brief, bizarre human-interest trailer, one of those thirty-second spots that mitigate the impact of the day's real news. Our act of criminal conscience was newsworthy only until the mass of continuous diversion that passes for current event rendered it archaic trivia-game stuff. We would join the marginal list of those instantly forgotten local celebs that well-informed people, if they recall at all, suspect themselves of inventing. On day three, when the whole eccentricity was already dead, a city news reader closed the books on the story by reciting a canonical quote meant to parody our statement telegrams: "Across the wires, the electric message came/'He is no better, he is much the same.'"

At the same moment that the company spokesman denied any payment problem, Dr. Ressler surrendered the unscrambling word. They released him and Todd, a transaction that never would have happened had the two of them not been the only ones able to return the system to listable, patch-free status quo. Both were instantly fired, ironically losing, along with all other benefits, the coverage they had won back for Jimmy.