by
Ellen Ullman
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The world of pointers to pointers, arrays of pointers, pointers to structures containing pointers to strings. In comparison to which the death of Foucault meant nothing.
Or no: his death seemed perfectly timed, emblematic, a pointer backward to something I was finished with. I was suddenly glad to be rid of the drag of philosophy, freed from the whole morass of convoluted academic thinking. The cleanliness of programming was a balm. I had spent months unlearning the desire to be unique. I was trying to write code so standard in form, so common in expression, that my work, ideally, could not be distinguished from another programmer’s. I was striving for a certain clarity and simplicity, a form of impersonal beauty. To achieve an odd transparency designed to let the human reader slip past the code’s wordlike representation and see, as directly as possible, the bit written to disk, the block read from tape, the value stored in memory—the ephemeral electronic moment of what the program does. It was a release from the personal: the program, not the programmer.
And now I felt oddly whole, liberated from something that up until that moment I didn’t know I was suffering: a kind of enfeeblement I’d been imposing on myself by keeping myself separate from the work going on all around me. I’d been holding on to another reality, my lost life as a professor. I’d been belittling the programmers as uneducated dolts, beneath me; it had made me resentful and feeble and pitiful; and all because I was holding out for a life that didn’t exist.
Upstairs: He could always go upstairs and dial up his simulation. It was still running on the Telligentsia server, waiting for him as always. It didn’t care that he’d been made a fool of at work, didn’t know about the bug, had no idea that a whole company waiting for its IPO had suspended sales because of him. The simulation was his other life. Separate, preserved, autonomous. He’d go back there, pick up the thought-line he’d started so long ago, before the bug ever existed.
His cheeks went hot, his hands cold. Now he could feel how angry he was, could let the anger take him over—now that the alcohol had changed it, his anger, made it not more distant but bigger, more dramatic, heroic, like he was walking around in some other guy’s feelings. Yes, much better now, a strapping, swaggering, muscular guy, the sort who took his anger out on chins and noses.
lol
He got out the broom and started sweeping, for no reason; the lasagna stayed intact and the scattered frost would melt. It was just a way to keep getting rid of her. The last hair from her brush, the last sloughed-off skin cell, all the bits of her DNA—how long until they disappeared? He thought it would be quick. Joanna, her things, gone, just a note, a number “for emergencies.” Pack. Leave. Over. A clean break so he could get on with his life. He hadn’t expected this—the way her body was still leaving him molecule by molecule.
Ethan had made this confession without premeditation, but once it was out, he realized he wanted reassurance. He wanted this man with decades of experience to tell him bugs were normal, you couldn’t always find them right away, he wasn’t a failure. He sat back waiting for the soothing words, the sort of expiation only an old engineer like Harry Minor or Daniel Wheatley could give him, to help find the joke that would let him laugh at this particular name for fuck-up: Jester.
But Wheatley had an altogether different reaction.
He suddenly sat forward in his seat and stared at Ethan. His face was inches from Ethan’s, huge, it seemed.
“Failure? You feel like a failure?” said Wheatley. “Look, kid. It’s not about you. Who the hell really cares about you? The failure is in the system, and the fear should be not for your ego but for the people who’ll use the system. Think about them. Be afraid for them. Forget about yourself for a while and then you’ll find it, then you’ll fix your bug. Not because you’re ashamed, but because people might be in danger and you have to.”
This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Dan Wheatley was supposed to be avuncular and sustaining, his presence next to Ethan on the plane a happy accident meant to shore up his faith in the patient intelligence of good, solid engineers. Now he couldn’t wait to land, to get off this flying piece of junk, get away from this too big, too invasive man.
props to this guy
“But your stock?”
Harry gave a big laugh. “Oh, yeah. The stock. The way they keep you here, hanging. Well, fuck the stock. I never cared much about money. It’s only this place that made me want money. Fuck it. I have a house, a car, a wife who works, and about a hundred vendor-logo T-shirts. What the fuck do I need money for? The work here’s not interesting anymore. Nobody cares about really interesting stuff, or even about the quality of averagely interesting stuff. But—Fuck. I’m sorry, Ethan. I shouldn’t be saying any of this. I should be telling you this is a great place, but right now I just need new challenges.”
They sat silently. Ethan felt one question after another come up in him, then subside as already answered or unanswerable.
<3
He pointed at the screen, to a big dark area, a dead spot in Ethan Levin’s world. Slowly, as we watched, new X’s appeared, the habitat regrowing, renewing itself.
“Yeah,” I said. Then I asked: “Do the living O-creatures ever remember the ones that died?”
He squinted at me and said nothing.
“And the ones who are starving, do they know they’re going to die?”
He snorted. “Stupid.”
But I persisted. “If you’re going to simulate life—I mean, intelligent life—sooner or later you’ll have to account for the fact that the way we live has something to do with the fact that we know we’re going to die.”
I watched his eyes careen around in their sockets as if he were scanning through his program, trying to imagine what sort of C-code structures could contain memories of the dead and foreknowledge of death. Then abruptly he ran his hands through his hair and broke it off.
she is kinda obsessed with this question but i dont disagree
How long had they been at it, Ethan wondered? He was by now lying on his mattress on the floor, one arm flung over his eyes, the neighbor’s stereo crashing, and for the first time he tried to imagine the whole course of their affair. While he was at work worrying over click-and-drag: Were they necking on his sofa? When he stayed late to program the function-key settings: Were they fucking in his bed? And how far back did it go: The trip to India? Before then? A week, a month, the entire time Ethan was at Telligentsia—would he have to revise his idea of his life, and for how long? Immediately he saw that the problem of betrayal wasn’t just that it took away the idea of a pleasant future; it also robbed you of the past. Every moment became suspect. That night they didn’t say a word over Chinese food: Was it going on by then? The trip to visit his sister: Then? Or had it started even earlier, the first time he showed her the simulation, when she called it “the key to all mythologies”—did it go all the way back to there, so close to the beginning when he thought he was happy? Worse than losing Joanna was losing the sense of his own life, what had happened, what to feel about it. For his time with Joanna was now a disheveled memory, where nothing could stay as it was.
She’s waiting for him to say it’s okay, to embrace her, say he loves her, they’ll work it out. He can feel her desire like a rope tugging on him. It would make her so happy. But he can’t make her happy. All he can think is that, on paper, he should be ready for this. He’s thirty-four. He has a good-paying job, a reliable car. He lives with a woman who loves him. From the outside, everything is in place, ready, set, go, let’s have a baby. But he can’t breathe. He sees himself working at Insuracorp for the next twenty years, or someplace like it. All the while his vague hope for something else, his lost other life, drifting out of reach.
sad cus it's not really about her, just about his own dissatisfaction with his life
He went in, sat down, looked at the screen. The debugger was still running, the cursor steadily blinking. Waiting for him: suspended in the exact place he’d left it, unchanged. Here he could never disappoint; here he’d never have to feel worthless, unable to love; here there was no one and nothing to let down. All he had to do was enter a command, and everything would resume. Between one keystroke and the next, it would be as if nothing had happened—not the memories of Joanna, not his desire to blame her for everything gone wrong in his life, not the understanding that a person does not wait around, suspended, until you’re ready to have her in your life.