And so we waited. Tick-tock, blink-blink, thirty seconds stretched themselves out one by one, a hole in human experience. Waiting for the system: life today is full of such pauses. The soft clacking of computer keys, then the voice on the telephone telling you, “Just a moment, please.” The credit-card reader instructing you “Remove card quickly!” then displaying “Processing. Please wait.” The little hourglass icon on your computer screen reminding you how time is passing and there is nothing you can do about it. The diddler at the bottom of the browser screen going back and forth, back and forth like a caged crazed animal. All the hours the computer is supposedly saving us—I don’t believe it, in the sum of things, I thought as I stood there leaning on my luggage cart. It has filled our lives with little wait states like this one, useless wait states, little slices of time in which you can’t do anything at all but stand there, sit there, hold the phone—the sort of unoccupied little slices of time no decent computer operating system would tolerate for itself. A computer, waiting like this, would find something useful to do: check for other processes wanting attention, flush a file buffer, refresh a cache, at least.

I looked behind the counter at the agent’s terminal: Yes. That damned transaction interface. The Immigration Service was one of our first customers. In 1986, they were going to “revolutionize” international arrivals with our database. And here it still was after all these years, our software, its transaction interface, that sluggish component we testers had complained about to the programmers, too slow, too slow, who’ll put up with this waiting? Ah, I saw how the immigration agent had learned to tolerate this waiting. A certain suspension of himself; an unattractive slackness in his body, his mouth; a gone-to-nowhere look in his already vague eyes. Odd how adaptable human beings are. The programmers had long accustomed themselves to waiting on machines, and then we, the software testers, soon adapted; and with every shipment of our software, out it spread like a virus to the world: human beings everywhere learning to suspend themselves, go elsewhere for little slits of time, not exactly talking or working or doing anything, since any moment—you never know which one—the system may come back, respond, give you the answer.

He took his little meal to the dining table, where he turned on the light and surrounded himself with books. The window-system manual, the UNIX operating system guide, a data sheet for the graphics workstation, specifications for the VT-200 character terminal—a circuit of technology ringing his plate. Then for the next hour, he read and ate with a childish absorption, like the pleasure of stuffing his mouth with buttered popcorn in the darkness of a movie theater. Joanna’s being gone made it all the better: Time felt spacious, unbounded. All the little accommodations he normally made for her—not reading at the table, the how-was-your-day-dear conversation—were in suspension. He dove into his manuals the way he dove into his food. Soon spaghetti was stuck to the pages of the OS guide. Bread crumbs were folded into the workstation data sheet. Everything was dotted red with tomato sauce.

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 simulation for a while.

[...]

Over the years, he’d come to understand the message as a kind of rope line he was tossing to himself, a thought sent from the present day’s Ethan to the Ethan of the future: to the Ethan Levin who would always return from whatever impossible job schedule he was afraid of now, whatever bills he had to pay, dinner he’d left half eaten, girlfriend he’d just lost or found or fought with. Here you are. He returned to the idea in progress, to the thought continued across time. The panic over his work at Telligentsia fell away. The argument with Joanna about the trip fell away. Her traveling with Ostrick, her face before she disappeared down the Jetway—none of that existed. There he was: back in the code. The code he’d started when he was twenty-three, still had a father, and knew what he wanted to do with his life. From message to message, “Here you are” to “Here you are,” the moments Ethan spent working on his simulated world came together as they always did: sequential points along a solid line, the arc of a separate, private, parallel, unfinished life.

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 schedule eased. Herring’s mutterings faded. The buzz of the lights silenced themselves. You are doing it, said a little voice in his head. You are building the system. From nothing, he thought. From scratch.

He printed an image of the screen, then pinned both sheets of paper—the original drawing, its completion in the screen image—over his desk where he would see them every day. To remind himself: that he was doing it, he was building the system. In only eight months, under his hand, it had already changed state, become actual, functioning, real. From Harry’s head to Ethan’s running code: thought that worked.

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 from academia but as … fieldwork! I would write papers. I would be invited to the next meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco. There I would tell a learned but computer-illiterate audience how programmers had to work in the relentlessly literal language of code, where one slip of a letter reduced everything to incomprehensibility. The compiler, I would tell them, is a computer program that translates the programmer’s code into a set of instructions that can be executed by the microprocessor, the chip at the heart of the machine. The compiler is the entity the programmer must talk to, the creature he or she must make understand the intentions embodied in the code. But this compiler-creature is error-intolerant to a fault; it demands a degree of exactness that is exhausting, painful for an intelligent human being. Leave out a comma, and the compiler halts, affronted at the slightest whiff of error. Fix the comma, run the compiler again, then it halts again, this time at a typo. Puns, I would say, represented a human being’s pent-up need for ambiguity. That a word could signify two things at once! And these double meanings could be simultaneously understood! What a relief from the flat-line understanding of a programmer’s conversation with the machine!

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 unrecognizable. What was I doing surrounded by compulsive punners? By programmers who spent their time working in the cramped, stripped-down language of code? All around me, nothing but artificial languages: UNIX shell scripts and C programs and database queries asked in Structure Query Language—“impoverished languages” was the term I introduced to my students when I was a graduate teaching assistant. Artificial languages as poor human inventions stripped of history, usage, experience, connotation. All the dripping suggestiveness of language—gone. Around me an entirely new world was coming into being, and it was being made out of artificial, impoverished languages.

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 with capital letters—without bothering too many people about them. I’d been a student of James McCawley, the linguist who insisted on the study of meaning, not just syntax and structure. It had ruined my academic career, according to my dissertation advisor. “The future is in computational linguistics,” he’d insisted, by which he’d meant the math of words, the formalism of language, the deduction of elemental parts of speech, like atom-splitting. When done well, the advisor insisted, computational linguistics would eventually eliminate the difference between natural and artificial language. You won’t know if you’re talking to a human being or a program, and you won’t care. “You should go into computer speech-recognition research,” the advisor had advised.

I sat and gazed back at him as his yes-nods slowly came to a halt. Was that the purpose of those nods: to tell you how you must answer? For I saw there was no other reply I could make. I was supposed to say, Yes, I was done with it. That everything I’d cared about for the last ten years was a hopeless dead end. All those articles neatly listed on my résumé, all the talks at conferences, all the colloquia and symposia and everything else with Greek plural endings—over. The years I hung in there teaching the same course over and over, just to stay inside my profession somehow—why all that meant nothing, I was supposed to say, I was such a fool, what a waste. What was more, I was supposed to be grateful for the chance to leave it all behind, for a new start, even at the bottom.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m done. I suppose I’ve said everything I had to say on the subject anyway.” Then I laughed without meaning to. “You know, the world hasn’t exactly stopped in its tracks to listen to me.”

“When you’ve come from academia, every single thing here seems odd,” Wallis said. “Which particular type of ‘odd’ are you referring to?”

“How he wanted me to disown what I studied.”

“Oh, yes,” Wallis said. “The same thing happened to me at my first job. ‘Did your fieldwork in Borneo? Not much computing there, dear!’”

I should have left it there. It might have been more pleasant for me. “Still,” I said, “it was weird. I felt like he somehow wanted me to give up my Ph.D. To renounce it.”

Wallis slid the job offer across the table.

I put my hand on the paper, still warm from the laser printer. Stock options, sick leave, vacation, more money in a year than I’d ever earned in four. At the bottom was Wallis’s neat signature, and a blank line waiting for mine.

“Well,” she said, extending a pen, a fat black fountain pen, its gold point shining in the light. “Isn’t that rather what you’re about to do?”