"Take our species: the apex of engineering. We've all but completed our systematic destruction of the whole, buffered web. The evidence is there, for anyone paying attention. Even if we stopped this evening___ And yet, something in the joy of building — something in my inherited, egoistic firmware — still insists that we also possess the first, flawed, rough prototype that might, in time, take nature beyond the knee-jerk, blind short-term. You see, we can project, unlike any other postulate in nature, unlike nature itself. Model. Foresee. Think. But we have no one to help us make our projections wise."
He stubbed out a butt and checked his watch. "There is talk in the genetics community about the Human Genome Project. Sequencing, base by base, the entire five-thousand-volume DNA string. But whose string? Yours? This fine woman's here? What of the volumes for gray whales, horned toads, diatoms, four million species in all, lost by the thousands while we talk about them? Even the complete library, unattainable, will never begin to hint at the books, the stories the string might have produced."
Todd, my Todd, stood up, realizing what was at stake all around him. Life was suddenly too real to get out of alive. "Christ. What do we ask for, then?" Frantic, he asked the man he loved blindly, the woman he cared for a little, the general night — anyone who might answer. The question tore him like a marathoner's cramp, his rib trying to free itself from imprisonment in its side. I never loved him more than at that moment.
"What do you mean?" Ressler asked, elsewhere, years away.
"I mean: we have this office sewn up; the records are in our power. A Defense Department contractor, a major financial institution, a dozen municipal outfits. Five years of transactions. Half a billion dollars would vanish into a giant Mylar null if we say so. We could take a day of data, scramble it beyond all recognition. 'What's a day, one day, worth to you?' What do we ask for? A new Clean Air Act? Save the Whatever-it-is Seal?" Ressler chose his moment to say nothing. Todd looked at me, his voice wobbling into the shimmies. He assumed, all at once, the entire, terminal, toxic clot the race had laid over the place. The anguished understanding that he might, possessing these files, cut a deal, force a rescue on one bit of the botched job, was like alcohol in an incision. Todd was in real pain, drowning in causes. "An industry-free zone in the Antarctic? Ban the personal AK-47 from over-the-counter sale? Free food for the starving? Russians out of Afghanistan?"
"U.S. out of North America?" I suggested. It helped briefly to undo the urgency, to thin the tangible sickness calling on all sides for instant cure.
Ressler took my handmade chart back from Todd and gave it one more glance before answering. "Yes, the only question worth asking, now that we've all turned activist." This is the sense if not the sound of his words as he sang them: we have it now, have extracted knowledge from information, and it's not enough. We need to ask ourselves what we want to be when we grow up. We need that thing, that arithmetic of ecology that should have preceded knowledge, too easy, too obvious to bear repeating, too embarrassing and indicting to mention by name. The lookup code for care. "I suggest, seeing as how everything is already at stake, that we ask for the one essential in the triumvirate that life is too large and crucial to care about."
Todd looked at him without comprehension. "Meaning?"
The baggage of the gene, the curse of populations. "Keep to the original plan. Ask for Jimmy."
We sat in silence, reluctant to take the machine on-line, to bring up the doctored version of programs whose results, both digital and analog, we had no way of forecasting. Todd retrieved a sketchbook and began doing portraits, lightning contour studies as controlled as anything I'd ever seen him do. Dr. Ressler surprised us both by asking to keep two. We dragged our heels, postponing the launch for a few seconds, and we all three knew it. I half-jokingly suggested that we wait a few more days, until the anniversary of Morse's first public telegraphic message on the line between Washington and Baltimore. The notion tickled Dr. Ressler, but by that point he could only laugh gamely and say, "I dearly wish we could."
Delay was no longer just a question of losing time, of being outraced by the hospital collection bureaucracy. We had systematically destroyed all chance of returning to the old program. The files were gone. We could allow the vested interests no other program to fall back upon, or our changes would be quickly suppressed before they could produce their desired effect. We could run the new version or nothing at all. And running nothing at all, as Todd pointed out, would be the equivalent of performing a lobotomy on a chunk of the city's working interests large enough to create a seizure throughout the rest of the interdependent network.
"That first remote message," Dr. Ressler asked, stubbing out another butt and starting anew. "Was it really 'What hath God wrought?'"
"That's how the books report it."
Todd snorted. "Probably backstopped. Jimmied up after the fact." His inadvertent verb stopped the conversation. He fiddled with a CRT contrast button. "Sorry. The fellow must be on my mind."
We rehearsed for the last time how we would put our claim once our variant system software was in operation. Dr. Ressler said, "We haven't talked about it yet, but we ought to try to minimize prosecution, once the project has had its run."
"Ha!" Franklin discounted. "Information Age criminals never get prosecuted. They get hired on as consultants to the DOD."
Dr. Ressler smiled; that was the precedent. "All the same, I'll link your immunity to the other conditions. Should push come to blow, you two and Annie haven't the first idea of how this bug slipped into the works. As far as you are concerned, you don't know your ASCII from your ALGOL."
"What about you?" I said, indignant at the suggestion that we scatter and leave him alone, answerable to everything.
He smiled and exhaled. "They can't do anything to me," he answered. "I'm already spoken for."
Willfully or just ordinarily oblivious, we went on to other matters. "Well, as long as I still know you for another day yet," Franklin cackled, "can I ask you one thing?"
"Name it." His voice acknowledged that he still owed us an explanation. He knew what this last petition to the Question Board would be: the same question that had started us here, before love, before knowledge, before disaster.
Todd began gingerly enough, accelerating only slowly into a semblance of courage. "I understand… I can see how one might not be able to trap certain feelings off in a side panel. I mean, I can see how, if the attraction, if the need were large enough___"
He shot me an involuntary glance. "That a person might choose to go on caring, as if…"
"As if it still counted?" Dr. Ressler assisted.
Something broke in Todd, and his urgent attachment to the man, his innate need to prove that neither of their disappearances was inevitable, flooded the room. "I can understand the torch-bearing. Celibacy. Self-denial. But son of a mother.… It seems to me that the worst thing, the worst hurt anyone could possibly have inflicted on you, shouldn't have been enough to___" He trailed off, afraid at the end to ask.
But he had as much as asked already. Dr. Ressler had only to coax him to put it into words. "Enough to do what?"
"To make you give up science." Todd's eyes swam with confusion. Shouldn't you have thrown yourself into it with redoubled effort? How could you desert the one place that might have given you some comfort?
It was Dr. Ressler's turn to be surprised. This was not the phrasing, not the question, he expected. "Oh," he said, alerted into softness. "But I never quit science."