It happened while I was in the middle of an argument with Bradley Thorne. I had come across a bug of his, some anomalous behavior in a window, nothing major, a level-three. “It’s not my bug! Not my bug!” he was shouting. “It says right here it is!” I responded, holding up the printout of the code. “Created by Bradley Thorne,” I read from the header. “Last mod Bradley Thorne.” He squinted at the listing. Mara Margolies was his primary tester, and I had watched her go through this countless times with him: his terrifying forgetfulness, as if he had never before laid eyes upon this code. Thorne was famous for his “code production,” lines of code written by the thousands, a prowess he had apparently achieved by not much bothering to remember what he’d typed. “This code can’t possibly be responsible for that window!” he was shouting. “It says right on the header it is!” I was shouting back. [...]

Debugging: what an odd word. As if “bugging” were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes. One by one: find a bug, fix it. Bug: supposedly named for an actual moth that found its way into an early computer, an insect invader attracted to the light of glowing vacuum tubes, a moth that flapped about in the circuitry and brought down a machine. But the term surely has an older, deeper origin. Fly in the ointment, shoo fly, bug-infested, bug-ridden, buggin’ out, don’t bug me—the whole human uneasiness with the vast, separate branch of evolution that produced the teeming creatures who outnumber us, plague us, and will likely survive our disappearance from the earth. Their mindless success humbles us. A parallel universe without reason. From the Welsh: a hobgoblin, a specter.

I never actually made the decision to stop working. For a year after my meeting with the idiot, I told people I was “between contracts.” Then, over the next year, the state of between-ness somehow became permanent. I did volunteer work for a group that helps nonprofits with computing problems, but gradually a sort of miasmatic depression took me over, a dreary kind of fog in which it became harder and harder to do anything at all. When you’re working and hurrying to the laundry before it closes, it seems that having all the time in the world will be glorious. But then, suddenly without the structures of a job, why get up at any particular hour? Why get to sleep? It takes great internal discipline, I found, to make up each and every day for yourself. I began to tumble around in time. I went to movies in the morning. I drank in the afternoon. I began going out to dinner with friends every night. There are three or four very good restaurants in town that have come to consider me a regular. No longer having an office to go to, no place to offer the sort of formal friendliness business acquaintances give you, I found in these restaurants a substitute impersonal solace: the welcome at the reception stand, the satisfaction of being seated ahead of everyone with reservations, being treated as if I’d come home. It’s possible that those places have indeed become what I can count on as home.

Whatever guilt I felt at my extended idleness (which was considerable; my mother worked until the last months of her life) was tempered by the admiration I received from the new paper millionaires the Internet boom was creating by the thousands all around me. Young people I met admired me—though they found me a bit slow, retired as I am at forty-eight, not thirty-three. It did no good to remind them that the companies I’d worked for had had to show a profit before they could even think of going public, two consecutive quarters in a row, actual revenues in excess of costs. It seemed so quaint to them, passé, the notion of having a product, paying customers, profits. They believed the public markets should finance their fantasies. “What is your business plan for revenues?” I asked a young man I met at a party who had founded a start-up. “Go IPO!” he said.

That could have been Ethan Levin, I think, as I watch the man’s nervous swipes at his hair and remember the whole story again, like it or not. Ethan had eight times the stock options I did. He wouldn’t have had to work for the next six start-ups, wouldn’t have had to do consulting. He’d be long retired by now, well into his own life of compensated idleness. He would have traveled the world, would have sat in business-class lounges everywhere, drinking a complimentary alcoholic beverage as he watched his fortune melt away. Money as transient as electrons. Wealth as weightless as data broadcast through the air, rising and falling in currents like weather, beyond anyone’s control. Yes, that’s how it should have happened: Ethan Levin was supposed to be rich like me.

His flight was early. I had to race downstairs to meet him.

“Shitty flight” was how he greeted me. “Where’s the car?”

There are some disappointments you simply can’t let yourself feel right at the moment. There were obstacles to negotiate, after all—the luggage cart to be gotten through elevators and onto ramps, the car to be found, the Bay Bridge to be crossed—and how could I have attended to them if I’d given in to the feeling that was pulling me? An actual sort of sickness is what it felt like, an invader in my chest, some rogue organism hurtling around in me. Then anger: a flash of bitter anger.

They sat as they always did, side by side at the counter looking out into the empty hall. The same lunch: turkey on rye, no mayo, wrapped in paper on blue plastic trays.

“How’re things?” asked Ethan.

Steghman’s group was slipping its schedule; the key module being redesigned was his.

“Fine,” Steghman said. “And with you?”

Ethan’s girlfriend had slept with another man; he had to rename half his code. “Fine,” he said.

They both stared out into the hallway.

Carolyn and Joanna exchanged looks. He’d been talked about, he knew, and they’d judged him to be distinctly not okay. Their neighbor was a big, strapping woman who’d run a gardening business before she took time off for the baby. “Kind of butch” was how Joanna described her, admiringly, referring to Carolyn’s physical strength and no-nonsense manner. Her husband—Ethan could never remember his name—raced and sold motorcycles, and Ethan often saw him in front of their house, stripped to his undershirt, fiddling with his collection of bikes. Husband-what’s-his-name had a wiry, muscled body—washboard stomach, great quads, tight pecs—and Ethan, who was getting more slack-muscled by the year, had to console himself with the thought that Carolyn’s husband probably wasn’t very bright.

“Let’s begin,” said the other. And as the VC sat back comfortably—leg crossed ankle over knee, hands made into a steeple—Ethan realized he’d completely forgotten his name now. What did Harry say it was? And the other one—was he Night-something? Joanna had tried to teach him how to remember people’s names. Repeat them right away when you’re introduced, she’d said. Pick out an identifying characteristic and match it to the name as you’re saying it. But how was he supposed to do that while he was wondering how it would look for him to be sitting on a bright orange exercise ball? He looked from one man to the other and tried to concentrate. Both in dark suits. Both in red ties with diagonal stripes. Cuff links—God, who wore cuff links anymore? Loafers, the kind with a fringe. Mid- to late thirties, no facial hair, not much to distinguish them in a crowd. One was handsomer, Ethan decided, the other one balding.

And so the paradox: The more the debugger remained the tireless binary companion it was designed to be—answering, answering, answering without hesitation or effort late into the night—the more exhausted and hesitant the human, Ethan Levin, found himself to be. He was sinking to the debugger’s level. Thinking like it. Asking only the questions it could answer. All the while he suffered what the debugger did not have to endure: the pains of the body, the tingling wrists and fingers, the stiffness in the neck, the aching back, the numb legs. And worse, the messy wet chemistry of the emotions, the waves of anxiety that washed across him, and then, without warning, the sudden electric spikes of panic.