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Oh, I should give it up, I knew. I was stuck in a nineteenth-century idea of the Real and the True, which I should confine to my journal writing and poetry scribbling. There I could indulge my tiresome need for the Essential and the Transcendent—for all those philosophical German words that began w…

As I made my way to my cubicle, I had one of the startled, queasy moments that sometimes came over me during my first years at Telligentsia. It was a feeling of displacement, the sense that I had landed in the middle of a newly forming planet where the laws of evolution were suddenly changed and un…

My first reaction to programmer punning had been a certain curiosity. The reason for compulsive punning among computer people seemed interesting, ripe for study. Perhaps this would be my ticket to tenure, I thought. My time spent as a “quality-assurance engineer” would not be seen as falling away f…

A light sweat spread across his chest, a rush of heat it took him a moment to recognize as pleasure. He looked from the screen to the paper, the paper back to the screen, and was aware of himself sitting in the middle, between them, the means whereby one had become the other. The press of the sched…

He sent the simulation back into the dark of the machine, opened a code file, and searched for the phrase “Here you are,” his code marker, the words he always used to note the last place he’d been in the code. And below it, the message he always left himself when he was about to stop working on the…