I brought in my massive card box the following evening, years of trivia typed up on three-by-fives. He sat down with me and in fifteen minutes taught me the criterion by which I could divide the stack into two piles, Yes and No. In the samples we sorted together, one by Swift caught his eye. Dr. Ressler instantly taped it to the front of the CPU. It inspired him throughout the most difficult parts of subsequent decoding:
I have heard of a man who had a mind to sell his house, and therefore carried a piece of brick in his pocket, which he shewed as a pattern to encourage purchasers.
After they had deciphered the system logic, Dr. Ressler duplicated the relevant programs and data files. Then came the task of building the mutation, the exactly similar, only different system. Ressler carefully selected locations where they might place the needed patches — electronic detours and amendments. The point was to make their baby look, feel, and behave exactly the same as the template, the original operating system. But be the serpent underneath.
It seemed to take weeks. Every night I arrived expecting to hear that Jimmy had been turned out, that the hospital was suing his mother for immediate payment, or that our project to avert that scenario had been uncovered. In reality, the insertion of program patches went quickly, and the bulk of the replacement code actually got written in the few days between the founding of the Library of Congress on April 24 and the combined Lusitania sinking/Nazi surrender on May 7–8.
Live testing of the modifications — bringing them on-line on scores of remote terminals — was the most difficult and dangerous part. An insignificantly small alteration, whose logic is impeccable in isolation, can have unforeseen consequences that multiply out of control when dropped in the middle of a complex system. It came down either to testing a number of changes in one batch, which increased the chance of untraceable bugs, or to tracing the effects of single differences, which took far more time and showed little about the combined behavior. And each on-line test increased the odds of our being discovered.
For live testing, Annie was indispensable. As a remote terminal user herself, she could report to Dr. Ressler the effects of the modifications at a typical station. She could also enter keystrokes remotely, sequences that triggered a routine, set in motion as if by accident. This made it possible to invoke and trace changes during a normal day without irregularities back in the computer room. Annie did this in full knowledge of the risks, aware that her complicity violated the state criminal code if none of God's own minor statutes. We each loved Jimmy after our own fashion.
The operation involved some degree of what white-collar espionage calls backstopping: dummying up the record after the fact. Todd, the artist, enjoyed this part: creating on the text editor bogus console logs that looked exactly like real ones. Faking labels and directory histories for the packs they experimented on. Going into the low-level driver software and altering the dates on modified files. "Do you remember that Holmes story where the bad guys create the complete, simulated, subterranean bank vault one story above the real one? That's what we're up to. Hijacking an entire office."
I hadn't seen him in such spirits since Jimmy's stroke; no, before — since we began living together. As they closed in on debugging the last subtle change they meant to introduce into the machine, I saw how much the two of them enjoyed the work, enjoyed one another, the exertion. It was an elaborate game, an intellectual challenge, momentarily divorced from real-world consequences, the emergency motive. They got carried up in the charge of making it work, making it ingenious. The life-or-death matter became play, lab for lab's sake: what would happen if we put the patch here? Wouldn't it be prettier if we rebuilt the allocation table? Why not read the records directly from the cross-index?
They were both vital for a few days. Strong and inventive with effort. Alive. Franklin earned momentary respite from feeling that he'd personally crippled Jimmy. And Dr. Ressler had, here at the end, finally found an outlet, a call to put to use that superlative skill in pattern-searching and manipulation that had always been his second nature. The young post-doc would never, in a lifetime, have imagined this experiment. But after a long detour, it was his belated return to biology. To Life Science.
Canon at the Ninth
He leaves the Biology Building, walking slowly, too slowly to get anywhere, strolling into the middle of the place he's been trying to reach from the start, from before childhood. The last click of in vitro reverberates in his head with the clang of a meter-thick cell door being thrown wide open. Sprung in the open air, he explores its layout, feels its foliage, wholly foreign yet still familiar. The landscape he has lucked into is wider, more surprising than he ever imagined. A difficult passage in arriving, blind alleys and doublings back that he could never retrace, reroute, so obvious is this place in retrospect.
Ressler feeds into pedestrian turbulence, the passing hour between classes. People scowl at him for failing to get out of their way, or smile tolerantly at his distraction. He cannot quite take in his breakthrough, cannot believe that his own mental construct— string-and-cardboard mock-up, manipulation of the available tools — has led him to this threshold. Research, that inefficient recombination of insufficiencies, has rewarded him with the one prize every researcher lives for but never expects: a chance to locate part of the palpable world's terrain, to summarize some fraction of the solidity that cares nothing for theory, to say something definitive about their real home, to speak some word about the grammar carried around in every oblivious mote, down there, inside.
His idea is simplicity itself: they must feed the in vitro decoder a stripped-down signal of their own devising that will yield a message beyond ambiguity. The peal of the carillon just now breaking out of the university bell tower rings a change in him, slows his walk further. The waves of enabled air circle him, bang up against one another, create in him a standing crest of astonishment and gratitude. He cannot accept his good fortune, the odds against it. For a moment, he has been appointed caretaker of the entire, immensely delicate experiment, trustee of the living possibility. Whatever happens from here, he will be glad to have — well, just this once — to have made a joyful noise.
The decoding can be done. He glimpses the necessary process and knows it will work. What's more, this afternoon, walking aimlessly across the quad in May air, Ressler understands that this work, the lookup table — that rung of the hierarchy linking the life principle with slavish molecular mechanics — will, the minute it is published, be turned to further work, extrapolated, taken farther afield than he can now guess. Ideas are as self-exploiting as tissue. Everyone ever pressed into service — Mendel, Avery, Crick, Cyfer — is but a primitive precursor. The problem each has worked on, the postulate passing through their hands, mutates with every generation. It must, to remain viable. The concerns of those working on the codon table will soon appear as blunt and unsubtle as those old biological models of animism and spontaneous generation.
The future of his science sweeps across Ressler with physical certainty: in a very few years, the Sunday-school work of cryptography will go public, enter commercial politics. Too much need always hinges on knowledge for it ever to remain uncorrupt, objective, a source of meditative awe. After wonder always comes the scramble, the applications for patents. Perhaps, he thinks, unable to keep from grinning at the oblivious undergrads who pass him under the sycamores, it won't be patents at all. Perhaps it will be copyrights, like books and magazines: genes written, amended, and edited like any other text. Only alive. Cold goose flesh runs up his back at the word that profit requires and biology refuses to mention: improvement. Everything life has ever been, this magnificent accident of doubling, error, and feedback, changes forever in this minute, makes an incalculable macro-step of fatal evolution here, now, as he walks across the quad.