Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Both men looked at me. A hopeless task, even to estimate the order of magnitude. I tried a rough, running total, falling back upon the technical reply, "Lots and lots." Ressler's eyes flashed; it was bliss to see him happy.

"And folks don't restrict themselves to meaningful combinations," Franklin objected.

"Nevertheless, passwords are trivial. One can employ the brute-force solution. Use one computer to generate all possible combinations of letters in words of given length. Then pipe the results to the computer demanding the password. Such a solution is not elegant but is as inexorable as death."

I thought out loud. "Every possible combination? Wouldn't writing the program be prohibitively difficult?"

Ressler smiled at my impeccable novitiate's thinking. He liked being reminded of the old place. He shook his head and said, "I could write that program in a dozen lines."

Todd clapped his hands. "Go to it." Ressler scribbled on a sheet of scratch paper, then showed us his handiwork:

For first letter from A to Z

For second letter from A to Z

For third letter from A to Z

…

Word = first letter + second letter 4- third letter… try word

…

Next third letter

Next second letter

Next first letter

I looked at his program, feeling the rush of forgotten terrain opening. He said, "The ellipses are for longer words. In the loop, one could start with blanks instead of A's, to include all words shorter than the number of imbedded cogs. You see__" And I did see; my first glimpse of the synthetic achievement of language. "You see that the nested loops produce words in simple combinatorial order: AAA, AAB, AAC, and so on."

"How long would it take such a program to run?" I asked, the cumbersome coordination of loops within loops dawning on me.

"Some time. Lots and lots."

"That's why God invented operators," Todd contributed.

"To speed the search, you could pipe likely lists — say our online file of the hundred and twenty thousand most common English words. That's a gamble, however. If the word is not on the list, you're left with no systematic way of picking up the pieces." At that moment, I saw in the exhausted face a look so unlikely I almost missed it. Gratitude at the chance of exchange, at stumbling across a listener after years of having no audience but himself. A look full of wonder that he was being thrown back, after everything, on the shifting ambiguity of first letter plus second letter plus third. He motioned toward the console, asking Franklin, "Do you have anything running at the moment?"

"Work, you mean? What a curious idea." Franklin turned to the keyboard. At the system prompt, he typed the command LOG.

20:36 Dumping console transactions to log. Mode brief. Begin when?

"What time did I show up tonight?" he asked Ressler, his eyes on the monitor.

"As I recall, you were here ten minutes before closing, camped over the terminal, waiting eagerly for the last remote teller to log off so that you could bring your machine down and begin the end-of-day processing." Todd winced at the portrait and typed a time. A thermal printer embedded in the tabletop began bruising a roll of paper, producing a printout that varied only in detail from the scraps that, hopeless pack rat, I scavenged for inclusion in the capsule.

Command? EOD

18:37 Begin end of day processing. Mount Sys Pack on Spindle 1, Master Client File on Spindle 2, Client Backup on Spindle 3, and scratch on Spindle 4. Oldest cycle date tape in tape drive. Hit any key when ready?

18:43 End of day underway; backing to tape…

18:58 Backup complete. Rewind tape and unthread.

19:01 Conditioning Master File…

19:20 Master File conditioned. Merging transactions…

19:42 Transactions merged. Ledgering new trans file. Running new-acct. Running purge. Running trial balance.

19:46 End of day complete. Command? PAY

19:46 Begin Tuesday pay cycle processing. Thread payroll tape, General Ledger pack on Spindle 3. Position checks in printer. Hit any key when ready?

The latest fable from Homo fabulus. Todd whistled at the history of his evening. "Do I really live this way?" "Check your partitions," Ressler said.

Command? TASKCHECK

20:38 Partition 1: Payroll check ok.

Partition 2: Report Generator check ok. No other partitions active.

"Steady as she goes. What do you have in mind?"

"Open a third partition. Give it a half a meg."

Todd gritted his teeth and shouted, papier-mâché-set style, "I don't know if the engines will stand it, Captain." He tapped a few keys. "Et voilà. Bute."

"Now. Do a part reset."

"Don't know how."

Ressler hit a key combination I missed, and the screen read:

Sys 1652 Exp Ver 4.2 partition reset login:

Ressler typed FTODD. The screen prompted for a password. "Turn around," Ressler said. Seconds later, he called, "Done."

password: xxxxxxx

System Date and Time: 12/06/83 20:40.45

User ftodd logged in.

"American Satan!" Todd shouted. "You couldn't possibly have learned that by brute force."

"No, sir."

"Selected list?" I suggested, and was rewarded by a warm no.

He let us savor the trick before confessing, "I have to admit to charlatanism here. I did not actually crack your password. I simply jumped to partition two, called up your record page, and blind-piped your password from the user profile to the unsuspecting partition."

Even his charlatanism was clever. Todd was greatly amused by the piracy. "What would Uncle Jim say if he knew you could kick this machine around?"

"Now that is more dangerous to corporate security than knowing a few passwords." He turned to me. "Your friend turns out to have an interesting password that you might be able to hit using the Short List." Just as I was about to pump him for data, Todd shouted from his place at the keyboard. Ressler gave a yelp and lunged to prevent Todd from punching any more keystrokes. But it was too late.

Command? EDIT

20:45 Entering editor in partition #3. Files belong to user ftodd:

pnotes eoderrors daybook herri

Enter name from list or new file to create: security

20:45 Opening new file: security File creation error.

Command? EDIT

Command? WHAT GIVES?

20:46: Command string not recognized.

"Interesting," Todd said, giggling nervously.

"Indeed," Ressler concurred. "Promises to be a long night."

I had no idea what was going on. I looked from one to the other. "System crash," Todd explained curtly.

Ressler pulled on his earlobe. "Yes, we have once again done what the three-thousand-page user's manual insists is impossible." He led the three of us into the command room, where the twinkling LCDs had frozen solid. He looked at Todd, shook his head. "I'm mortified. Apparently, one can simulate a duplicate of oneself, but one can't actually be in two places at the same time."

"My fault for keying away blithely. What about the Report Gen?" They looked through the two-way mirror. The printers were drifting dead in the electrical current. "And Payroll?"

Dr. Ressler scratched his head. "Fairyland."

"The long chunk it had already finished?"

"I think, friend, that as things stand, we'll be lucky to rebuild the Master File without a cold reboot."

Franklin whistled. "Well! I'll take a good system crash over a crossword any day. That's why we're working for the military-industrial complex in the first place. Right?" The two fell into flowchart, Holmesian deduction, tapping panels, toggling switches, volleying terms, injecting patches, and cross-referencing their way through the massive metal-bound manual with masochistic relish. As I couldn't contribute, I was forgotten in the intellectual excitement of the fix. They were an unlikely pair, never more at ease with one another than at this crisis moment, with a hundred essential financial trails teetering on the brink of the ether. In the unreal solitude of their shift they were at peace, cut off from all others. Even I was at best a registered alien.