The relentlessly repeating thirty-two-note Base traces out that same unintentional contradiction in terms that Dr. Ressler read to us from the operations manual on the night we sat down to commit our crime. "These two procedures are exactly similar." "Exactly similar" elicited a laugh. But shouldn't "the same" get the same? "A is the same as B." Impossible. What Ressler listened to in that tightly bound, symmetry-laced catalog of unity was how nothing was the same as anything else. Each living thing defied taxonomy. Everything was its own, unique, irreducible classification.
The Goldbergs were his closest metaphor to the coding problem he gave his life to studying. Exactly similar, with one exception. Bach liked to inscribe his compositions with the triplet SDG, Soli Dei Gloria. To God alone the glory. Even this secularly commissioned soporific possesses the religious wonder at being joyously articulate, alive to extend the pattern. But in Ressler's hierarchy of transitional rungs, the thing beyond the composer, on the other side of the threshold from articulate breath, was only dumb designless matter, arising from and led only by the shape of experience. The world's pattern was not assembled for the mind's comprehension; rather the other way around. And that made the metaphor more miraculous.
To play the piece — to buzz the length of the keyboard for an hour, to barrage, to cross over, careen dangerously — requires only a feat of digital dexterity. Just hit the right notes at the right time, and the thing virtually plays itself. To compose it, Bach insisted, required only that one work as hard as he did. To hear in the organizing software the unique, unspecifiable odds against any metaphor ever arising on this earth out of nothing, out of mere notes, requires something more. It needs the conviction, in a third favorite phrase of the provincial choirmaster, that all things must be possible, sayable, particular, real.
A Terrorist's Primer
When we returned to MOL from visiting Jimmy, Dr. Ressler set to work on the second-to-the-last experiment he would ever be involved in. He laid out the contour of his plan. "What we're looking for is a program exactly similar to this operating system." The work required over the next several days steadied Todd, gave his hands something to eradicate. We all resolved to do anything needed to keep from abandoning Jimmy to the world.
The office was in a shambles since Jimmy's stroke. The daily processing was getting out, but only just. The day shift ran on automatic, and the least irregularity would have chucked the whole operation into chaos. While Jimmy's crippling was still novel enough to play on imaginations, the staff to a person worked until the work got done, without compensation. But gradually imagination failed, folks tired of reality, and self-interest set in. Management appointed an "interim" replacement, more eager than competent. And under this blanket of confusion, Todd and Ressler, never very supervised to begin with, had free rein to implant our seed into the on-line processing.
MOL had been suspicious enough of the original irregularity to begin inquiries, inquiries quickly and discreetly canceled in light of their role in Jimmy's stroke. The insurers had dodged a million-dollar bullet; the chronology of Jimmy's skipped premium and high-profile disaster was drilled into them. All surreptitious attempts to backdate reinstatement, to sneak Jimmy in the electronic side door, were out of the question.
Frank, getting the gist of Ressler's plan, wanted to dispose of it in favor of the less subtle, more expeditious, full-frontal approach. "The easiest thing in the world: we buy a bulk tape eraser from the hobby electronics store, change the combinations, barricade ourselves in, take a few Master File packs hostage, and give them forty-eight hours to cover the man's indefinite hospital stay."
Dr. Ressler's eyes measured the extent of Frank's desperation. For a moment, he seemed about to attack. Instead, he relaxed and lit a cigarette. "Ah! The postwar solution. No, we're too close to terrorism as it stands. We can do this thing more effectively without violence or property damage." He shrugged, having said everything needed about the superiority of legitimate retaliation. And Todd acquiesced.
Combining the words supplied by Jimmy's horrifying dictation with their own batch of gradually acquired contraband knowledge, Dr. Ressler and his graduate assistant went to work on a last recombination. They raided the program listings room and before the new manager could reinstate punch-lock security, they copied all the sections of the system software they needed, stashing the copies each night in the bottom of stockroom supply boxes.
For all they had taught themselves about how the system worked, how to make it jump through hoops, they now had to figure out why it did what it did, to trace its internal logic at machine level. For four nights running, program listings littering the computer room, they dissected the routines and procedures. They raced the clock. Jimmy's mother had seen a lawyer, who had convinced the increasingly nervous hospital to restrain itself and keep the man stabilized under care while his mother looked into every conceivable financial strategy for meeting the unmeetable bill. We had no idea of how much time we had for the delicate surgery we meant to pull off.
I was there every night. I hunched over the listings alongside them, threw in my guesses as to what fit where, ran back and forth to the massive, meter-long documentation manual. They accepted my help, but when they talked, they clearly talked to each other. They were men, in the end, and had begun, in challenge, to discover just what the other might be capable of. When their eyes locked on a piece of particularly tangled code, I could sense that they threw themselves into the untangling not just for Jimmy but to earn and keep the love of the other.
In addition to helping speed things up, I wanted to leave my fingerprints in the affair, to stand implicated alongside them. Dr. Ressler allowed me that chance, giving me a list of two dozen credit unions and financial institutions, all clients of MOL. I was to check Who Owns Whom, and establish which if any had parent-child connections to the insurance company in question. He wanted to make his bullet as precise, discriminating, and manageable as possible. "Oh," he added, as I left to do the assignment. "We'll also need your entire index card collection from the last five years." I laughed.
The financial audit was trivial but surprising. A few hours of legwork in the stacks confirmed the classic postindustrial para-noiac's fantasy: four of the two dozen names on the list belonged to the same tier of the same sprawling hierarchy of ownership as our insurance company target. "I thought we might snag a couple," Dr. Ressler said mildly, when I gave him the results that evening. "Contracts and kickbacks tying together one big happy family."
"I personally think the Trilateral Commission is behind us all," Todd said, not lifting his head from the listing where he traced calling routines with colored pencils.
Dr. Ressler chuckled. "Maybe. The world certainly is more connected than anyone supposes. Perhaps in another few years, we'll all be owned by one little old lady in Kansas City." He thanked me for the work. Looking over the list of linked businesses, he grew apprehensive. "Can you get names? Addresses?"
"Child's play," I assured him. What could be simpler?
"And the quote cards? Your collection of 'Today in History'?"
"You really want those? I thought you were joking."
"Not at all. They're instrumental."