The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  I went straight from the warehouse to the branch, looking as rumpled as my friend the creationist had when she left to intercede with the creator. Back at work, greeted by Mr. Scott’s sardonic eyebrow at my having at last deigned to return from extended vacation, I got down to addressing my own backlog—the public sector’s most urgent questions.

  THE QUESTION BOARD

  How many dimples on a golf ball? My neighbor refuses to turn his stereo down; what legal recourse do I have? Is intelligence inherited? Where did goose-stepping originate? Can we afford to stand idly by? A farmer has a fox, a chicken, and a bag of feed; how …? What is the highest form of life that can be cloned? Why ‘Big Apple’? What happened to Amelia Earhart? What’s the most fundamental particle in nature? Does acupuncture work? What causes inflation? Who are the eleven thousand Virgins and where can I meet one? What can I do but move from sorrow to defeat? Why sixty seconds in a minute? Why not 5,380? Who made those statues in the South Pacific? Which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? What is the name of the projecting blocks supporting a roof beam? “Croatoan”? How many people in this century have died for political reasons? How many were going to St. Ives? When did the Age of Enlightenment end? Who calls so loud? Or se’ tu quel Virgilio? Is it possible to service domestic debt by adjusting foreign exchange rates? Which is better, Harvard or Yale? How many secretaries of state has this country had? What child is this who laid to rest on Mary’s lap is sleeping? Where is the oldest-known surface on earth? Can one still join the French Foreign Legion? What was the name of that Eisenhower aide who got in trouble over a coat? What kind of coat? What’s the difference between the United States and a carton of yogurt? Kennst du das Land? Kennst du es wohl? What is the common name for the family Chrysomelidae? Will machines ever think? Is my tap water poison? What about radon? Acid rain? The greenhouse effect? DES? Dioxins? The ozone? What the hand dare seize the fire? Did he smile his work to see? Is it true blondes have more fun? What’s your sign? Will you still love me tomorrow? What causes cancer? Who turned out the lights? What is this world? What asketh man to have? Who told you you were naked? When will it suffice? What’s a heaven for?

  THE CODING PROBLEM

  Todd woke me the next night. I rolled over and answered the phone without coming conscious. “Hello, Reference Desk.”

  “Hello, Reference Desk. Frank here. Did you see? We made the papers.”

  “The what?” Swifter than smelling salts.

  “You know: today in history? All the News That Fits? Well, we’re on Section A, page thirteen, column four, line number …”

  “What did we do?”

  “Nothing less than impede the March of Progress. ‘Digital Blit Ripples Through System.’ Special to the Times. ‘A rash of electronic funds transfer problems have propagated through the banking networks in the last several days, causing serious delays throughout …’”

  “Good God.”

  “Now, now. Let’s not turn theistic under pressure. That’s the first signal. From there, it’s just a small step to frogs, hail, bread, and fishes.”

  “Shut up. Do they mention you by name? Do they say MOL?”

  “‘Those most familiar with the increasingly integrated computerized transfer routes admit the difficulty in identifying one specific node where delays begin. “That’s like trying to pull the culprit from a fifty-car expressway pile up,” says systems analyst …”’

  “So you’re not sure it’s really your outfit?”

  “Our outfit, lady,” he snickered; having come along for the vacation, I couldn’t weasel out now. “I’m sure it’s us. Ressler is sure. The president of MOL is sure. But nobody’s suggesting as much to the Times until we’ve doctored all the logs.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Your whole office can’t be larger than twenty thousand square feet. Even the day shift only employs a couple dozen people. How much weight can you possibly swing?”

  “How big is a bit?” he replied. He went on, against regulations, to list clients of the firm—credit unions and financial outfits for half a dozen Fortune 500 companies, including two productless conglomerates whose names perpetually pop up in defense bidding.

  “By itself, all our screw-up did was mess up these folks’ books for a week, delay a few checks, block the flow of transactions. Big deal: they shell out excuses, we get slapped with a fine, and everybody waits till the status byte returns to quo. Problem is, no CPU is an island. Listen: ‘The minor crisis, which industry analysts hope is now over, reveals the vulnerability of increasingly interdependent fiscal networks. Particularly sensitive are same-day overdrafts, when institutions transfer massive amounts of money they do not have, under the assumption that they will receive similar transfers to cover them in the immediate future. Any interruption along the line …’.”

  “Paraphrase, please.”

  “What do you mean, paraphrase? The thing already is a paraphrase. Every cell has to be in place for the lung to pump properly. Small inputs run up big outputs. A single snowfall in New Hampshire …”

  “… can bring the entire post-Bretton Woods banking system to a standstill?”

  I meant the crack facetiously, but I heard him doing the recursive algebra in his head at the other end. “Yes,” he said. “With a few well-placed shoves from basic ineptitude.”

  I went by the first chance I had. They were still shoveling out; the place needed only the stink of manure to be the Augean stables. They had been on continuous surgical call since I’d left. Todd was as punch-drunk as he’d sounded over the phone. Dr. Ressler looked unflustered, alert, well-rested. He’d even managed to slip back into a pressed suit, thinking to intimidate the crisis into submission by proper dress. Taped to the edge of a CRT was the clipping from the Times. All other evidence was extinguished. That evening they processed the previous day’s transactions, submitting alongside the standard decks supplementary bug inoculations. “Do you know what a ‘fix’ is?” Todd asked.

  “I know you’re in one.”

  “Spoiled my punchline. A fix is when you patch a tag to a program reading, ‘Amendment 12: Amendment 11 hereafter invalid.’”

  “What are you repealing, exactly?”

  “History. We have to settle the Master File’s nerves. Convince it the trauma it’s just been through never happened.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “Much the way Stalin edited the textbooks until Lamarck became viable,” Ressler said.

  Todd chuckled. “All the data are backed up. That’s what these tape drives are for. Transcriptions of every day for the last six years. We went back to the last uncorrupt day and fed in the duplicate transaction files all over again, doctored to look as if they were just coming in. The professor’s footwork, of course. It worked, except for a few tumors, which we are now in the process of postdating and zapping with microlasers.”

  “No four-day delay? No same-day overdraft foul-ups?”

  “Never happened.”

  Ressler explained, “Electronic records, unlike organisms, aren’t compelled to drag around the trace of everything their ancestors ever lived through. We can rewrite them, assign them any past at any moment. We, by contrast, are trapped in every stopgap success our bases have ever come up with, the running average of our every then.”

  “But how can a little flypaper dive like this cause a quake in High Finance?”

  “You surprise me. I would have thought that you, of all people your age, would have picked up on the emerging, central fact of modern existence.”

  “Namely?”

  “The smaller the thread, the tighter the weave.”

  “Don’t get him riled up,” Todd cautioned from across the room. “We still have two evenings of work to finish tonight.”

  But it was too late. Dr. Ressler sat me down at the console. “What would you like to know? What wing of this incredible house of cards would you like to visit?” To hear him talk, the keyboard was, in knowledgeable hands, an index into all embraceable
space—gazetteer, thesaurus, almanac, anatomy, Britannica annual all ready to respond to the least finger nudge. “Let’s start in our own backyard,” he said. Where all inquisitive children begin exploration. He stroked the keys, cross-hands, answering system prompts faster than I could read them. A string of coded digits snaked in front of us:

  53 6F 6D 65 74 69 6D 65 73 20 66 72 6F 6D 20 68 65 72 20 65 79 65 73 20 49 20 64 69 64 20 72 65 63 65 69 76 65 20 66 61 69 72 20 73 70 65 65 63 68 6C 65 73 73 20 6D 65 73 73 61 67 65 73 00 00

  “Here we are,” he said. “A little fragment of the master text. This could stand for anything in creation. Bank account, tech blue-print, love letter, combination of all three. All we see is a systematic disorder.”

  Todd sighed, “A systematic disorder in the dress kindles in me a wantonness.”

  “This says nothing in its present form, but it clearly possesses the irregular regularity needed to mean something more than it says. So which do you think this scrap is,” Dr. Ressler quizzed, inclining his head. “Data or instruction?”

  I hadn’t the slightest idea. But on second look, with encouraging nods from Todd, I noticed two features that made the choice obvious. “Data,” I said quickly, once I’d caught on.

  “Good woman.” He knew I’d get it before I did. He hit another key and the gibberish turned into fair speechless messages.

  “Shakespeare,” said Todd, leaning over our shoulders. “What do I win? I recently saw French literature defined as English literature sans the Bard.” Ressler did not pause from file manipulation to reply. Todd cleared his voice ironically, persisting. “Who said, ‘The French for London is Paris’? Think he said it in French, originally.”

  “Je ne sais pas,” I said. “I’m off duty.” To my amazement, I found I was following Ressler’s walking tour through the system. Just by long association with these two exiles, I had picked up the rudiments of programming.

  He showed us how to disassemble a program, how the machine-readable switchs can be turned—by means of another program—back into the logical operators that had generated them. He spoke of a colored oil drop in a cylinder of water, spun slowly until it dispersed, colorless, throughout the fluid. Spinning the fluid carefully in reverse can bring the oil drop miraculously back out of nothing. “The process is not entirely reversible. We can’t get from the driving bits all the way back up to the high-level source language. But we can begin to see the programmer’s design.”

  He demonstrated some structures. While condition Y applies, do X. Do this if these conditions are met, otherwise do that. For all values in the list L, run routine R. Go here. Test that. Change the other thing. When done, return. He showed me how to build a patch: save down all current values that must remain the same. Change a byte or two so that it branches to a space in the program left blank for that purpose. Write your appended routine there, and then pop back, restoring all previously saved values.

  These generic commands, he explained, were the meat and potatoes of procedural languages. Procedural languages—those that mapped out every route the machine could take—were the lingua franca of business computing. Business, Ressler showed me, as he pulled up the skeleton keys to the programs they used to process their hundred thousand clients’ health, education, finance, and welfare, was nearing its finest hour. “The logical conduits on silicon have done to the ebb and flow of capital what the Dutch waterworks did to the Zuider Zee.”

  “Speaking of the Dutch,” Todd interrupted, growing desperate, “I’d love to get caught up tonight. Wooden Shoe?”

  Ressler sent him out for grocery-store wine. By the time Todd came back, we were navigating through the Federal Reserve via MOL’s linkup with a battalion of bank mainframes. Under his arpeggiating fingers, portals opened, rabbit holes that we disappeared down before they closed over us. I could no longer keep track of imbedded levels, just whose system prompts we were responding to. We tunneled deep into the web, far from home.

  “I had no idea,” I said. “When you make the link, it’s just as if you were sitting in front of the other machine in some other office?”

  “With semiconductors, physical locations become arbitrary. Half our work takes place at remote sites. That’s why this suite can be so small.”

  “These machines talk to one another? Without chaperon?”

  He smiled. “Under the supervision of procedural languages.”

  “Can you get anywhere from anywhere else?”

  “Not yet. Think of the U.S. highway system in the twenties. Lots of the local infrastructure, but the expressways still going in. Still, one can swing quite a distance along existing vines.” He got us onto a system that allowed us entry to yet another nested net; in no time we were browsing machines in Washington, Oak Ridge, San Francisco. The effect was dizzying. For a man who’d stayed home for twenty years, he got out a lot.

  For my benefit, he pulled up a sampler of bibliographic services, retrieval banks now creating the largest revolution in my discipline since Alexandria burned. Our branch had not yet entered the future, and I had yet to play personally with the first generation of living Reference Desks. Christmas all over again. “Go ahead,” he said. “Ask it anything.”

  I typed: “MACHINE; INTELLIGENCE,” and got back a bibliography as long as a Mannerist Madonna’s neck. I highlighted one of the titles and got the full text. The strangest sensation came over me—the recovery of a lost domain, the bafflement of childhood, a displaced hope older than memory. What might we yet see, name, feel?

  “In the future, you’ll be able to type, ‘What happens to nuclein when it’s boiled in water for forty hours?’ and the thing will come back, ‘According to a study by Albrecht Hessel in 18 …’ The next step will be getting it to print articles that haven’t been written yet.”

  I couldn’t tell how serious he was. “All of this is assembled with only Ifs, Thens, Gosubs, and Elses?”

  “No. These make ingenious use of tools that a person can really love.” And he described, in tantalizing sketch, the new declarative languages. He made them sound like returns to the Ur-tongue. They relied not on rules but on simple assertions about the nature of things in the defined world. They blurred the distinction between data and instruction, set the machine free to serve as inference engine.

  “Which is DNA, procedural or declarative?”

  Dr. Ressler smiled soundlessly and looked at his watch. “Short answer or long?”

  I felt what had been tearing at my heart the last several weeks, why it hurt progressively worse each time I saw him. He had grown ready to teach, undertake again, discover. Something in Todd’s and my blundering, slow courtship had tricked him into thinking this time it could go right. I sensed in the way his eyes grabbed at every word thrown his way that he had recovered a capacity for application. But there was nothing for him to apply himself to. He had awakened for nothing, for a wrong number. A roof-gardener, harvest brought in for the year, receiving unsolicited seed catalogs in the depths of winter.

  “It’s a grim irony,” he said, waving toward the screen, “that just as we are closing in on the perfect taxonomy we’ve always been after, we may already have spoiled the data beyond recognition. And yet, our effort to bring it on-line is beautiful. Beautiful in the way that a child’s first book, all folded and crayoned over, is beautiful.” He tilted his head oddly, and I realized he had in mind one particular child, whose conspicuous absence at last informed him, here at the end of the day, that he had never had a real home.

  We were still at the bibliographic prompt that for the last several minutes had kept me as rapt as a toy chemistry set. Abstractedly, he typed a woman’s name—last name, comma, first. After a pause just longer than anguish, the system responded, “6 Match(es).” He turned away. When he could speak again, his voice was controlled. “See what one can find? And the first integrated circuit was invented just twenty-five years ago.” The year I left the game, he didn’t add. He hit a few stop-key combinations, backing us out of binary pontoons, dropp
ing all carriers until we returned to the dingy suite.

  When I left, sad beyond provocation, I gave Todd a duplicate key to my place. “Come tonight. Anytime. Move in if you can.”

  He woke me up when he came in. We had a few unreal hours before I had to go to work. Ice had paisleyed over the panes with a second, opaque window. In hard February, I paid the price for my place’s turn-ofthe-century quaintness. Fuel ran a hundred-meter hurdle up through the Victorian insulation into the freezing night. We held one another, wanting the relieving friction but not daring to rub—like a retriever trained to carry the shot bird back in its jaws without salivating. “Do you think …?” I tried to ask, still glazed in sleep. “Is it possible … he still loves this woman?” For the first time since fullness had taken me, I thought of Tuckwell, alone in our old place, in front of that breathtaking view of skyline.

  Todd answered me with such an answer. I never knew him. I never had the first idea of what men were. “Love is a pyramiding scheme,” he said, and pressed my hands together until they hurt. “He never loved her more than tonight.”

  FRAILTY AND OTHER FIXED CONSTANTS

  The world churns out a tune Ressler just now learns to hear. The U.S. at last lifts Explorer I into orbit. It begins testing at Eniwetok and rejects a Polish proposal to make Central Europe nuclear-free. The Sixth Fleet doubles its presence in the Middle East; by summer’s end, American troops will land there. Emergency forces will be in the Caribbean by spring. Veep Nixon’s goodwill tour in Latin America will provoke open hostility. The army announces the STRAC, a 150,000-troop acronym committed to winning limited war “anywhere in the world.”

  One, frail fermata in that dissonant strain: Van Cliburn wins the Tschaikovsky competition, making him the most popular Texan in Georgia. Vaughan Williams dies just after the debut of his final symphony, a last holdout against Boulez and Berio. “Jailhouse Rock,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” and “Purple People Eater” (thinly disguised political allegory) top the pops. To the casual listener, the synthesized bass is lost in a ravishing circle of chords, lovely terror, a broken horizontal stream rushing toward greater complication. Sheer counterpoint is loosed upon the world.