by
Ellen Ullman
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
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.
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.
<3
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.
He had to find it. This jester, this tease, this invader that lurked like a virus in some secret body cells between outbreaks—he had this idea that if he fixed it, he could repair his life. Yes, everything would be better then. He could handle the schedule, the layoffs, the night administrator’s music that smashed its way down the hall every night at eleven, even finding Joanna in bed with another man—they’d all be manageable, common failures, he thought, setbacks anyone could understand, if only it weren’t for this bug, this flaw, this break in his understanding of how the world was made.