Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"Don't be taken in by the bells and whistles. We're engaged here in one of the most tediously repetitive routines known to man. The assembly line of the digital info set." He punched a few more acronyms into his CRT and hit ENTER. Behind us, discharging pneumatic libido, a punched-card reader came to life. Todd removed a rubber band from a card deck and dropped the packet in the hopper. "Antique input method," he apologized. The device sucked up the instructions, spat them out, and fell into cogitative silence.

I tried to study his face without staring. He was different on his own turf, but I couldn't say how. His melodic voice showed no surprise at my being here. "I get in early every evening. Kick these beasts around until two, three a.m. An hour for lunch." He smiled faintly. "Procedure for keeping the wheels grinding is absolutely axiomatic. Let me show you." He tapped a pen-and-ink flowchart taped to the side of a nearby cabinet. "We go in this funnel here. We follow these arrows. Human intervention at the diamonds. We get pissed out here at the bottom. Then it's time to go home." He meditated on the flow of control. He pointed at a spot on the chart and said, "You are Here."

He showed me the storage devices — waist-high spindles with removable packs resembling layer cakes under cover. "These boys will take an entire thirty-volume encyclopedia each. I hate to use the word 'gigabyte' in mixed company, but there seems no way around it." He showed me the industrial printer, screaming under its sound hood. He opened the card cage of the CPU. "When this little electroluminescent display flashes 'Help me, I'm melting,' you're in for a long night." He introduced me to a dozen other devices whose functions I instantly lost. Decollators; sequencers. Like one of those five-language bus travelogues through Rome— never quite sure where the guide's English leaves off and his German begins.

When Todd at last fell quiet I noticed the hum of the metal, hard at work on calculations that never ruffled the silky surface. Constant, low-level drone permeated the room. Noticing, he dropped to his knees and spread supplicant-style across the floor. He put his ear to the acoustical tile and tugged on my pant leg for me to do the same. Amazed at myself, I crawled down with him and did the Native American trick of listening to the ground. Sound rushed into my ear, a rumbling chorus somewhere between Hoist's Planets and Aristophanes' Frogs. He gestured me to lift my head. "Know what they're humming? 'Wake up, wake up, wake up you— Get up, get up, get up, get out of….' Synthetically, of course."

We left the computer room, the alphabet-lock door swinging shut behind us. The sudden cutoff of noise reminded me of Midwest childhood, the abrupt end of a cicada-storm outside my window on a summer's night waking me from deep sleep with its roar of silence. The suite extended in the other direction. "This is the storeroom. These are the day-shift offices. Here's the software vault: Authorized Programmers Only." Indeed, a check-in desk blocked a door affixed with the same punch-code lock that had allowed us grudging access to the machine room. Hidden in this hierarchy of offices, the rift between information-rich and information-poor.

"Here's the lunchroom," he sighed at length. We entered a twilit cubicle containing sink, refrigerator, table with plastic chairs, and microwave. He pointed to a sign on this last device reading No Metal. "Obscure political protest, I guess." He made me coffee and yogurt without asking if I wanted it. "You see," he wound up. "Not exactly the glamour of high tech I used to dream about in art school. I could teach you to do what I do in two nights, so come back at your own risk. We are not so much this monster's brain as its arms and legs."

"Speaking of 'we' …." The first substantial thing I'd said since arriving. The sound of my voice surprised me.

"Of course! The man you came here to meet." I protested that meeting wasn't necessary. I just wanted to see the man the reference works hinted at but couldn't identify, the man that could elicit concern from these otherwise self-possessed features. Todd led us down a hall that doubled back behind the main computer room and dead-ended in a fire door. He gripped the knob, looked back at me over his shoulder, and asked, "Ready?" I wasn't in the slightest.

But there was no backing out. Forcing entry, we fell forward into a black cinematic cavern blazing with point lights. Cathode rays, a glowing halo of meters, and a tower of heavily cabled boxes twinkled a Christmas of continuous bit-streams being transmitted and received. Against the opposite wall was a pane of one-way glass that revealed the computer room with its gigabyte drums and its silk-smooth calculating cases. Todd and I had not done our surveying alone. I felt spied upon, violated, caught in the act of eavesdropping.

Above the hum, as the door swung shut, I heard another sound altogether. Todd had warned me, in the seafood-and-sawdust dive. And yet, each time I'd imagined these two lost boys serving their abandoned-warehouse night shift, I never once gave their isolation so ravishing a soundtrack. Aural obsession, in such astringent surroundings, was too fantastic. The music, ground from a cheap stereo that hid its low tech in a corner, was that same crotchety keyboard exploring that same eighteenth-century glaze, testing the keys' tentative possibilities. Imitative voices chased and cascaded over one another, interleaving, pausing at pivots, only to tag-team pratfall down the scale in close-interval clashes. In the dark, this finger-probing was the most perfect sound I had ever heard.

Like a shepherd's on breaking into a buried tomb, my eyes adjusted to local dark. I made out a figure, tipped forward in a tilt-and-swivel chair behind a desk littered with electronic instruments, liquid-crystal readouts, and a vast, rack-mounted technical manual that would have been the envy of Diderot and his Encyclopedic henchmen. I knew my man right away, although I'd seen him only once the year before and once in a magazine photo at twenty-five. We surprised him in the act of turning over pages in the massive manual, not so much looking up an error fix as reading though the entire yard-wide spine from cover to cover.

As we entered the confined space and stepped toward him, he stood and unfolded himself. He was thinner and shorter than I remembered; his features, not classic, by the glow of the machine diodes possessed a resignation that, like the ambient piano trickle, was consummately beautiful. In contrast to Todd's collegiate slovenliness, he dressed in coat and tie, as if some sentient presence in all this mass of integrated chips cared how he looked. Not just presentable; immaculate. Natty.

Before Todd could do formal introductions, Dr. Ressler, with a charming outdated gesture, offered me his hand. "You know who I am. But aside from the fact that you work for the public library, once considered becoming a professional dancer, and are called Jan, I know absolutely nothing about you." You've-been-in-Afghanistan-I-perceive. It came off hilariously. That slight, dry, upward curl of his thin lips convinced me that here was the last cultivated enclave in the forsaken world. I loved being in the man's presence from the first minute.

We left the control room and stepped back into the hall where we could see and hear one another. We might have been business associates who met frequently in London or Tokyo, acting together in silent consensus. On the far side of the fire door, Dr. Ressler paid me gallant attention: "You have exactly the sort of complexion required of the quintessential wronged heroine of Victorian pornographic fiction. I regret having to be the one to offer the observation, but Franklin's reading may not yet be broad enough to allow him to do likewise." This rolled out of him intact, with only the slightest ironic hint.