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.

What is it about the normally withdrawn person that makes his sudden affections so compelling? For me, I think, it was the sense that this was only the start of much more to come, as if, after all the disappointments, you have suddenly found the entryway into this closed-off creature, a gate, a fount—a veritable bulging lava dome, out of which will shortly issue great waves of hot flowing loving passion! Or maybe it was nothing more than an evil kind of operant conditioning, the way you can drive a little lab rat crazy by giving it rewards at inconsistent, apparently random intervals. I glowed with happiness to learn he was crazy about me. And then I immediately looked down at my clothes, wondering: Is it this short skirt that got his attention? At my shoes: The boots? My hair? This new scarf? Was it the effect of the luggage cart I’d managed to snare without paying for it, which so satisfied James’s basic needs for bargains in all his transactions? I suppose it’s what comes of being raised, as I was, by parents who pay attention to you when they feel like it: you become nervous and superstitious, wondering what it is about this particular moment that makes you more lovable than in all those other moments when it seems you should have been equally lovable. In the hope of winning affection again, you wind up making painfully ridiculous associations. I wore that skirt the next two times I picked James up at the airport. I never again showed up at the gate without a luggage cart, even if I had to pay for it and lie about finding it for free.

You tell yourself: you
can use this later, this
humiliation.

I went home to my nasty habits: poem-writing, smoking, tequila-swilling.

A story maybe.

Second cigarette. Third shot.

Or a joke.

The name of a variable is really a symbolic name for its address in memory, he said. And the “type” of the data says how much space it occupies: characters get one byte; the size of integers and floating-point numbers (numbers with decimal places) is determined by the particular hardware. There are also long integers and short ones, he said, and double-precision floating-point types. And the difference is their size in memory. So the declaration of the variable, he concluded, allocates space in memory, at a particular location, with a particular width in bytes, the symbolic name simply pointing to the beginning of where it lives.
This information had a startling effect on me. All those variable names I had seen strewn across the code—wincount, filename, user_id—were suddenly revealed as conveniences, human-readable words, whose true form was a series of bits indicating where in the machine’s memory the value of the variable could be found. It’s one thing to think you know that there is something called computer “memory”; it was quite another for me to understand how it related, precisely, to the text of the program. For the first time, I understood there was a mapping between the symbolic words of the code and the physical existence of the machine. And something in me shifted. I decided I already knew far too much about words—fifteen linguistics-practicing years of thinking and wondering over and studying words. Now I wanted to know more about the machine.
I began reading ahead in the book. I took it home, read it late at night, enjoyed the conversational, collegial style of Kernighan and Ritchie as they described the language they had created, the language in which the UNIX operating system itself was written. I began looking forward to my skinny-bearded-man, to the next topic on the videotape. I began losing track of other things: I was late paying bills, left novels with the bookmark stalled halfway, forgot to return phone calls to friends. When James made two trips home, I was glad to see him but not sorry to see him go. I suppose the world was going on as it usually did—half a million Iranian troops were still poised to invade Iraq, Russian troops kept battling the mujahideen in Afghanistan, civil war raged on in El Salvador, Gloria Steinem inexorably turned fifty, the fleshy face of Democratic presidential hopeful Walter Mondale began appearing on the covers of the newsweeklies—but little of it reached me. I was learning about structures.

June turned to July. I began staying late in the evenings. I stopped calling friends altogether. The Democrats speculated that Mondale might choose Geraldine Ferrarro as his running mate, making her the first-ever woman to run for the vice presidency of the United States—but it barely moved me. The newspapers moldered on the doorstep. I stopped listening to the radio, watching the news. I was learning about functions.

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.