When I understood all this, I was elated, hysterical with happiness, and began to shout, “I found it! I found it!” over and over again. And I kept shouting even after Mara Margolies’s face, startled to find me so insane, rose over the top of our partition. Because the world suddenly felt right again—human, bounded, knowable. We did not live surrounded by demons. There were no taunting jesters, no vexing spirits. We lived in a world of our own making, which we could tinker with and control. I had never felt such a sense of command in the whole of my life: I know how this thing works, I thought, how it works for real and to the bottom. I know how the actual, physical world—a mouse moving across a pad—is seen by the code, how the program turns dumb pixels into windows and buttons and menus, anything we humans want them to be. The world of stories rejoined the world of machine-states. We were in tune: human and tool back on the same side. I was a thinking animal at the peak of my powers, I thought. By God, I wanted to pound my chest and bellow.