Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I went and sat in the lunchroom, glanced at the day's paper, which Franklin no longer shredded. I sat quietly in the dark, trying to recover that spark I'd felt on receiving my first introduction to programming. Within my lifetime, we'd built the first prototype animal capable of behaving like any other — the universal simulating machine. The complex behavior of Todd and Ressler's computers floated on a sea of self-organizing ands, ors, and nots: a circuit-medium of living language. Strange slippage: language itself was the computer; metal and silicon were just ways of marshaling the syntax. If the driving language were properly designed, it might provide a complete, enumerable description of everything there was. Not just a description, a semantic table that animated itself. I tried to formulate, without sufficient vocabulary, the odd, momentous identity at machine level of information and instruction. Every "Thus it came to pass" harbored a secret, equivalent, "Go ye, therefore." One of the great, isolate, alert moments of my life.

In a while, Franklin came to find me. "Uncle Jimmy was right; I should have asked the charming Ms. O'Deigh out to eat. Listen to one's elders; everything they tell you is right."

"I'm not going anywhere," I said.

"It's digital devastation in there. Don't look! Think the Bosch nightmare of your choosing. I might get out by nine a.m. If I'm lucky." He was in no more hurry to go home than he was to die. He never finished on time anyway. His second-shift vocation was innate, self-inflicted, a desire for perpetual distraction from real work, the thing calling out to be done. "A shame, too," he said softly, tilting my head back. "I'd thought I might be able to visit, tonight."

"Come by whenever you feel like," I said, deliberately misinterpreting. "I'll be awake."

He shrugged; the matter was digital, out of his hands. He let me out by way of the fire exit, disabling the alarm behind me. I felt him, his split, how much he would have given not to hold back. He restrained me at the door. "Got an exit visa?"

"Passwords are trivial," I said, kissing him good night. The kiss lingered, a simultaneous interpreter between visiting heads of state. It contained whole grammars, self-generating syntaxes. No longer just a description; it lived like a command.

Quote of the Day

In the expansion each day brought, I had little time for reparations. I visited Tuckwell one Sunday. Overdue, unable to put it off any longer, I returned to the old apartment for the first time since clearing out. I couldn't believe I'd lived here recently, come back every day to the settlement. I found Keith in the posture of eighty million other American males at that moment: crapped out in front of the football game. Apparently, nightly news no longer produced sufficient threat to satisfy his addiction to event. He was talking back to the set, also a national prerequisite. Only Keithy performed the pathetic act in a style all his own, turning the sound off and delivering his own play-by-play into the roarless apartment.

"Ol' Staubach ran for daylight as if an entire detachment of Mujahadin were on his ass. Secondary's fallen apart. The best lack all conviction. This is the moment when the entire offensive line must look over that brink at the inner bogeyman. Of course, none of this has any bearing on reality. All Ethiopia could live for a week on these teams' boiled shoulder pads. You think that troubles Roger? Nope. The old pro sacrifices his body, plunges ahead for no gain."

"Hi," I said. He studied the play. "I came to say hello. Roger Staubach retired four years ago after playing eleven seasons,"

Keith gave me a suspicious look. "How can you be sure?"

"Forgotten already? Forty percent of my livelihood is sports trivia."

We couldn't talk there; the place was too loaded. I hauled him out of the apartment, hanging on to keep him from breaking away. We ducked into the nearest greasy spoon. He was in bad shape, worse than I had thought. We ordered coffee. Tuckwell floated unopened sugar packs on the surface of his. He waited, made me ask him how he had been. At length, he gave me a manila folder he'd brought along. "Birthday present." he claimed passively; it wasn't my birthday. The folder housed a mounted ad: a grainy aerial photo that Franklin could have drawn freehand. Photorealism from his No. 2 pencil was child's play.

On second look, I recognized it as a vaguely familiar military document I'd seen reprinted. Tuckwell wouldn't identify; he wanted audience participation. Given the time I'd spent on Twenty Questions in my life, I had no patience for it then. But I'd long ago learned that when Keith got a bee up his ass, all I could do was let it cross-pollinate. I set the image on the table: a construction site, an empty lot a week before the circus comes to town. Muddy ground recently torn up, with man-made craters filled with water. A few pieces of blurry equipment, corrugated tin sheds. Superimposed on the photo was a system of arrows and Acronymese. I managed to ignore Tuckwell's pointed silence long enough to concentrate. Aerial view, construction site, strategic arrows: I did my quiz-show contestant stint. "U—2 shot of Cuba, twenty-one years ago."

"Very good. Natural-born uncoverer. And what do you remember about said incident?"

"Keithy, I was just nine years old. I swear I had nothing to do with it."

"Don't be a Hoosier." We sat and looked at the icon, knowing that another word would spell disaster. To self-conscious effect, he took out of his rucksack an acetate overlay. He handed it to me, saying, "Forgot something." I spread the overlay over the photo, and the scene was transformed. It now read, in fancy, living color, 40-point type: "DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE OTHER GUY IS UP TO?"

Keith was wired by now. A wrong guess was worse than none, so I set the composite image down and folded my hands. He explained that his outfit had been hired to free-lance this ad; it would hit the stands in three big-circulation glossies next month. His eyes gleamed. "The bastard will sell, " he chuckled. "Apotheosis of vending by fear. Paranoia — our supreme erotic desire. Everyone secretly adores having his worst nightmares orchestrated."

"I thought we bought things we liked."

"Wake up, lady."

"Who's the client?" I asked. "What's the product?"

"God damn it, O'Deigh. Who in hell cares? Haven't you figured this game out yet? Nobody sells products. They sell slogans."

He was right: I thought of all the times patrons had asked me to identify forgotten commodities by dimly remembered sales pitches. The best display in adland, the ne plus ultra of mottodom, was; "The Best Motto Money Can Buy."

We stared at the reconnaissance, pretending to sip at our tepid, distracting narcotic. I could stand it no longer. "A beautiful lettering job. The layout's nice. What would you like me to say?" I had come to try to be kind, but was not prepared to find kindness so messy. I could think of nothing to say that would extricate us.

But I had misread Keith — flunked the economics of compassion. Before I knew what was happening, he was hissing at me, "You want me to quit my job? Make some difference? Go chain myself to the fence at Lawrence Livermore?" He began racing along a mental tangent angle I could not intercept. "You think I don't know what's at stake? You're the one; you don't have the slightest sense of what we're up against. You, with all the facts. You won't sum them up. Look at this." He smacked the photo with a violent backhand. " 'Twenty-one years back.' You still haven't the slightest idea what we're looking at."

I knew I was looking at a triumph of late-day, calculated despair. I knew the sort of product the photo promoted, the market distraction we have inserted between every desire and its itch: the ultimate bottled water, a salt elixir that creates more thirst than it gratifies. I'd heard him deliver the same speech when we lived together, but never so distraughtly, never with such solid supporting evidence.