by
Ellen Ullman
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I never actually made the decision to stop working. For a year after my meeting with the idiot, I told people I was “between contracts.” Then, over the next year, the state of between-ness somehow became permanent. I did volunteer work for a group that helps nonprofits with computing problems, but gradually a sort of miasmatic depression took me over, a dreary kind of fog in which it became harder and harder to do anything at all. When you’re working and hurrying to the laundry before it closes, it seems that having all the time in the world will be glorious. But then, suddenly without the structures of a job, why get up at any particular hour? Why get to sleep? It takes great internal discipline, I found, to make up each and every day for yourself. I began to tumble around in time. I went to movies in the morning. I drank in the afternoon. I began going out to dinner with friends every night. There are three or four very good restaurants in town that have come to consider me a regular. No longer having an office to go to, no place to offer the sort of formal friendliness business acquaintances give you, I found in these restaurants a substitute impersonal solace: the welcome at the reception stand, the satisfaction of being seated ahead of everyone with reservations, being treated as if I’d come home. It’s possible that those places have indeed become what I can count on as home.
Whatever guilt I felt at my extended idleness (which was considerable; my mother worked until the last months of her life) was tempered by the admiration I received from the new paper millionaires the Internet boom was creating by the thousands all around me. Young people I met admired me—though they found me a bit slow, retired as I am at forty-eight, not thirty-three. It did no good to remind them that the companies I’d worked for had had to show a profit before they could even think of going public, two consecutive quarters in a row, actual revenues in excess of costs. It seemed so quaint to them, passé, the notion of having a product, paying customers, profits. They believed the public markets should finance their fantasies. “What is your business plan for revenues?” I asked a young man I met at a party who had founded a start-up. “Go IPO!” he said.
That could have been Ethan Levin, I think, as I watch the man’s nervous swipes at his hair and remember the whole story again, like it or not. Ethan had eight times the stock options I did. He wouldn’t have had to work for the next six start-ups, wouldn’t have had to do consulting. He’d be long retired by now, well into his own life of compensated idleness. He would have traveled the world, would have sat in business-class lounges everywhere, drinking a complimentary alcoholic beverage as he watched his fortune melt away. Money as transient as electrons. Wealth as weightless as data broadcast through the air, rising and falling in currents like weather, beyond anyone’s control. Yes, that’s how it should have happened: Ethan Levin was supposed to be rich like me.
His flight was early. I had to race downstairs to meet him.
“Shitty flight” was how he greeted me. “Where’s the car?”
There are some disappointments you simply can’t let yourself feel right at the moment. There were obstacles to negotiate, after all—the luggage cart to be gotten through elevators and onto ramps, the car to be found, the Bay Bridge to be crossed—and how could I have attended to them if I’d given in to the feeling that was pulling me? An actual sort of sickness is what it felt like, an invader in my chest, some rogue organism hurtling around in me. Then anger: a flash of bitter anger.
They sat as they always did, side by side at the counter looking out into the empty hall. The same lunch: turkey on rye, no mayo, wrapped in paper on blue plastic trays.
“How’re things?” asked Ethan.
Steghman’s group was slipping its schedule; the key module being redesigned was his.
“Fine,” Steghman said. “And with you?”
Ethan’s girlfriend had slept with another man; he had to rename half his code. “Fine,” he said.
They both stared out into the hallway.
lmao
(i guess it would be easier to rename things nowadays)
Carolyn and Joanna exchanged looks. He’d been talked about, he knew, and they’d judged him to be distinctly not okay. Their neighbor was a big, strapping woman who’d run a gardening business before she took time off for the baby. “Kind of butch” was how Joanna described her, admiringly, referring to Carolyn’s physical strength and no-nonsense manner. Her husband—Ethan could never remember his name—raced and sold motorcycles, and Ethan often saw him in front of their house, stripped to his undershirt, fiddling with his collection of bikes. Husband-what’s-his-name had a wiry, muscled body—washboard stomach, great quads, tight pecs—and Ethan, who was getting more slack-muscled by the year, had to console himself with the thought that Carolyn’s husband probably wasn’t very bright.
lol. very neil
“Let’s begin,” said the other. And as the VC sat back comfortably—leg crossed ankle over knee, hands made into a steeple—Ethan realized he’d completely forgotten his name now. What did Harry say it was? And the other one—was he Night-something? Joanna had tried to teach him how to remember people’s names. Repeat them right away when you’re introduced, she’d said. Pick out an identifying characteristic and match it to the name as you’re saying it. But how was he supposed to do that while he was wondering how it would look for him to be sitting on a bright orange exercise ball? He looked from one man to the other and tried to concentrate. Both in dark suits. Both in red ties with diagonal stripes. Cuff links—God, who wore cuff links anymore? Loafers, the kind with a fringe. Mid- to late thirties, no facial hair, not much to distinguish them in a crowd. One was handsomer, Ethan decided, the other one balding.
haha this is so neil
And so the paradox: The more the debugger remained the tireless binary companion it was designed to be—answering, answering, answering without hesitation or effort late into the night—the more exhausted and hesitant the human, Ethan Levin, found himself to be. He was sinking to the debugger’s level. Thinking like it. Asking only the questions it could answer. All the while he suffered what the debugger did not have to endure: the pains of the body, the tingling wrists and fingers, the stiffness in the neck, the aching back, the numb legs. And worse, the messy wet chemistry of the emotions, the waves of anxiety that washed across him, and then, without warning, the sudden electric spikes of panic.
The migration algorithm. His creatures moving from habitat to habitat to find food. Yes: He would go back there, to the place where he’d left off programming. He would return to the point in his life when he’d last come through this section of the code, to that night when Joanna’s trip was still new and the bad things that happened were still yet to happen—no! He had to skip over that point (because now he knew too well what would indeed happen). No, he had to get to the Ethan Levin before that. To the Ethan who had first written the message. When was that? Before he’d started at Telligentsia. Who was that? An Ethan Levin still confident, still coding input screens for insurance adjusters, still happily sure of his life with Joanna McCarthy, sturdy-legged environmental activist turned administrator, who came home from riding her bike to do wonderful things to him in the shower.
sad :(
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.