And so began a period that lasted just two weeks, but that now (visible to me only as I look back, and only after allowing myself to remember Ethan Levin and everything that happened) is a time I see as a gate, a suddenly opened door that introduced me to the real pleasures of the programming life: to its compulsions like a hunger, the desire to make something work an almost physical need. I was too harried at the time to enjoy it, too pressured by the company’s desire to ship a product, nearly overcome by new management responsibilities, not to mention devastated in my personal life, lonely, drinking, smoking myself sick. Yet even through all these difficulties, it came: the feeling of being a squirrel on the hunt for a buried nut, an animal rightness to the whole exercise, as if all of evolution had taken place only to produce a creature like me, fabricated to dissect its own mind and the thoughts of others of its kind. I was going to find the cause of that bug. Nothing would stop me. Nothing would give me more pleasure. No other experience in life could offer the satisfaction that would be mine at that moment when, understanding what had gone wrong and how to make it right, I would sit back and pronounce the words a programmer always says on a soft, happy exhale: It works.

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.

When I understood all the reasons for the bug, I again thought of Ethan Levin. I wished he’d still been alive to find the answers with me. I pictured us back in the break room that smelled of burnt coffee, whooping and high-fiving and then maybe going out for drinks. I had this idea we would have ordered some good champagne, launched toast after toast to our humanity, which after all had created everything: the opportunities for the bug, the bug itself, and its solution. I think now it might have changed us, softened our failures, made us feel we belonged to—had a true stake in—those lives full of code we had separately stumbled into. I like to think it would have reassured him, saved him: To know that at the heart of the problem was the ancient mystery of time. To discover that between the blinks of the machine’s shuttered eye—going on without pause or cease; simulated, imagined, but still not caught—was life.