It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when this sense of uncanniness began, the precise moment at which UI-1017 stopped being funny—a joke we all enjoyed at Ethan Levin’s expense—and began to produce, in all of us, a feeling of unease. The change took place over the course of several weeks. The last rains of the season ended, the summer fogs had yet to begin, May came to a close under a hot dry sky. At the company picnic, in the scrubby hills of Redwood Park, the programmers began murmuring something I didn’t understand at the time. “Memory leak,” they said, looking at each other with an expression that mixed fear with accusation. Although it would be several weeks before I understood the technical meaning of the phrase, it was to my novice’s ear an oddly suggestive explanation for the cause of the bug: the idea that memory could just leak away—thoughts, ideas, plans, all fixed and arranged in the mind, somehow breaking into drops and running away like liquid mercury. Yes, the more I considered it, the more the front end’s behavior seemed a species of brain damage, memory run amok, the system, like an autistic child, freezing the keyboard and the mouse, shutting out communication with the world but going on to exist in some odd, internal state that was neither exactly dead nor alive.