Chapter 1

The light sits quietly on the floor, forming an elongated image of the window, complete with bars, crosses, a shadow of the partially lowered shade, and a dark splotchy area where the security sticker refracted the light incompletely. Brian leans back against the springs of his black, executive chair and stares at the flickering monitor. He’s been searching for an elusive programming bug over the last few hours without success. As he hits the compile key combination, he lifts himself off the sticky chair, peeling his shorts away from the leather, and realigns himself with the back of the chair, his back not quite flat, his legs at an angle, and the chair leaning at an angle to relieve the strain on his neck from his slouched posture.

As the hard drive churns his changes, Brian watches an ant crawl over a pile of scribbled notepads covering his desk. He’d seen his first ant in his apartment just days ago—he had been watching television sharing a bowl of Rice Krispies with Spongebob Squarepants, sitting on the floor, leaning against the front of the couch, the remote in reach, when he noticed movement on the rug by the television. When he saw the ant, he had been angling his cereal to catch the last Krispy in the remaining scoop of milk, a muted commercial flickering on the screen. After finding the first ant, he had scanned the rug and found three more. At this he had stood up, losing the carefully arranged spoonful of milky- and sugary-goodness, and began looking for more.

In the days since Brian found the first ants, his vacuum had sucked up hundreds more. He sometimes felt his anti-ant procedures were not effective, imaging that the ants crawled down the vacuum tube at night and continued their lives, unaffected by their brief incarceration. Brian kept promising himself that he would empty the vacuum bag to ensure this wouldn’t happen, but somehow the vacuum, with its overfilled body bag, sat in the living room, the furniture arranged haphazardly around it to allow for optimal vacuum-pushing room.

Brian reaches out and catches the ant crawling on the desk between his forefinger and thumb, and squashes it, leaving the ant on his thumb for inspection. The ant unrolls itself and begins crawling down his finger. Brian again catches the ant between his fingers and this time squashes and rolls the bug into an unmoving blob. His desk is covered with crumbs from the many meals he has taken while working. He thinks briefly about cleaning the desk, but decides that vacuuming the floor later would be enough. He subscribes to a theory he developed after remembering a Discovery channel show or perhaps an article from one of the science magazines he subscribes to—Brian figures once he reads, sees, or hears information, he is free to accept it and apply it to one of his comprehensive theories of life, and then claim the theory, and their factual basis, as his own creation—that explained that ants remembered their paths by leaving behind scent trails. According to Brian’s reasoning, the sucking power of the vacuum should be enough to remove the trail and confuse the ants.

“Hey, do you think ants can commit suicide?” Brian asks, continuing to smack at the keys as he experiments with changes to different class definitions on the screen.

“Ants committing suicide? You’ve got to lay off the stuff, Brian. Their brains are too small, the ants’ brain, that is. You need to be much smarter to realize how fucked up life is.”

“The vacuuming is working, you know. You were wrong. Except for this little guy,” Brian holds out his finger with the unmoving ant, “I haven’t seen an ant in a day or two.” He flicks the ant onto the rug, watching it to ensure that it is truly dead before turning back to the screen.

“How do you think they’d do it?”

“Do what?”

“Kill themselves.”

“Swords,” Brian says, “they’d each use tiny swords, you know. They’d have to after realizing their scent trail back to their homes had been obliterated.” Brian smiles at the thought. “You’ve seen the movies where insects were exceptionally powerful for their size. You know, like Spiderman. They’d easily be able to lift the swords.”

“Spiders aren’t insects, Brian. Speaking of spiders, did you call Miranda?”

“The real question is what would they do with the sword. I would think the ants would be rather creative—no simple suicides for them. First they’d slice off five of their legs, leaving only the one wielding the sword attached.”

“Again, you’re thinking of spiders. Ants have fewer legs.”

“Then they’d decapitate themselves; it would be quite a sight. Their carcass would be left with only one wiggling leg, five legs scattered about the wiggling carcass, and a head somewhere close by. Too bad ants don’t bleed. It would be much more artistic if they did. Maybe after vacuuming I should start leaving tiny swords lying about.”

Brian watches the lines of code dance across the screen as he scrolls and switches between the living files. He reaches out for a can of Coca-Cola from the desk, shakes it, and tries another and another until he finds one with remaining soda. He raises his chin and tips the can over, emptying the final, warm drops into his open throat. He crushes the can slightly and puts it back on the desk, in the middle of the forest of cans, all of which were crushed in one degree or another, and continues to search the code.

“How’s it coming?”

“Just about to try some changes. Give me a sec.,” Brian says.

He changes one of the lines, hits the save button, followed by the compile key combination, and watches the computer crunch the changes.

“I’m still a bit behind schedule,” Brian points to his calendar hanging on the wall by an oversized nail. The first twenty days of the month were crossed out. Brian’s eyes wanders up to Ms. June, of the fundraising wives of firemen, who is pictured lying on a sparkling red Corvette, wearing a red one-piece bathing suit, along with her (then) husband’s helmet. Brian doesn’t think a marriage could survive a semi-nude posing for a calendar—come to think of it, Brian doesn’t think a marriage could survive a romantic stroll in the park. Brian has found rather creative uses for the marker he uses to keep track of the days. Two voluptuous ovals are drawn over Ms. June’s rather scanty breasts, complete with tiny nipple-dots.

“Very tasteful.”

“Thanks.”

“Do you think you’re going to beat them?”

“Of course. Who else is working eighteen hour days?”

“They all are.”

“No. They’re all pretending to work eighteen-hour days. Remember, I used to work in those sweatshops. While they’re in the office all day, the amount they actually do is pathetic. They sit around in meetings, discussing the rosy future, planning their next conquest, feeding the programmers, or at least the people who pretend to be programmers, veggie-burgers wrapped in lettuce and mayo and trail mix like Scooby-snacks every time they see a flashy blink or hear a pleasant-sounding beep. I’m surprised the world hasn’t realized how overrated these people are. Can you imagine the number of stock options these people are getting? Compare that to the actual skill they possess. It’s amazing anyone actually believes in them. I can’t wait for the explosion of reality to hit the college dropouts. Giving up promising careers to plaster themselves as walking billboards in the hopes of cashing-in on the options. Five years ago these people, including the so-called programmers, wouldn’t have known the difference between HTML and…. You know, something clever.”

“Yeah. Something clever. You get very worked up whenever we discuss this. I’m thinking you’re jealousy. What would Ms. June think?”

“Ms. June doesn’t think. She doesn’t need to with those the big boobies I’ve provided for her, you know.”

“I’ve never heard you complain about mine.”

“You’re sick.”

Where he expected, the program broke. He steps through the breakpoint until he finds the offending line. Something is wrong. The watch variables are off. He glances at the code, jumping to a few calling files, and finds the mistake: the subtraction is backwards. He corrects it and continues. Baby steps: correct the mistakes, recompile, rework the code until it made sense, appeals to him, recompile, experiment, work.

Brian continues to hack away, not even noticing the orderly line of ants heading to and away from the crumbs on his desk.

***

After running out to a nearby health store for a packaged avocado and bean sandwich, Brian is back in front of his computer. The wrapper and empty chip bag are still on his desk, and he sips the heavily sugared iced-tea from a waxed cup. It is the good stuff: made from powder instead of seeped. Brian has little respect for seeped tea; if he wanted real tea, he’d drink it hot. Besides being more acrid than its heated counterpart, the sugar in the seeped, cold tea is never fully dissolved. The only thing going for it is the higher caffeine content, at least according to Brian’s current theory on caffeinated drinks. After drinking the six-pack of Coke, which he adds to his growing forest of crushed cans, Brian isn’t concerned about the caffeine.

He had needed the break after becoming bogged down in a part of the code that worked, but was missing something. There was no order; it wasn’t Right. The avocado and sickly sweet tea makes him anxious, but he feels his brain heating up, imagining his neurons shooting more often, calculating, reaching out to the source where Rightness waits. His mind is cranking with the slight edge he needs. He scans the code, switching between the different files, functions, classes, and locates it. He reworks the class definition for the offending object, and starts programming the code, cutting and pasting to reuse the old class functions. He smiles. The Rightness had been missing from the code. It had worked, but it wasn’t Right. His discovery is in itself a form of happiness. Brian believes it is similar to the feeling that artists have when they apply the last stroke to their painting. It is a ridiculous question to ask them how they know when the painting is done. They just know it—usually because of the Rightness; although, sometimes, in worlds Brian does not like to think about, it’s because their handler demands it, similar to the managers Brian had when he worked as a programmer. To think that a manager, years removed from the art that is programming, that is, if they ever programmed—in his mind, most of them went after a useless MBA after working as a fast-food manager for three years. The part of the code he is analyzing is now Right. Of course, as often happens with code, while it might be Right, it certainly didn’t work. The Rightness is structure and planning, the working is grunt work and debugging. He doesn’t confuse the two and knows which he would rather concentrate on, but understood that both are important.

Brian misses being able to share his successes with others. To show someone who understands, or even pretends to understand, the resulting structure and feel their approval: That’s what he misses. It is the hardest part of working alone.

Chapter 2

“What’s your first memory of needing approval?”

“Are you studying psychology now? I don’t crave approval,” Brian says, “It just helps motivate me, like as a goal, you know.”

“I don’t believe in psychology, remember? Not everything is caused by my attraction to my mother and desire to kill my father. Okay, do you remember when you realized you needed this motivation?”

Brian is now in his unconscious debugging mode. He could debug a program with little thought. He compiles, runs, tests, and then fixes the errors, compiling again, until no noticeable bug is left. This is where most would-be programmers fail. They believe that if you are a good programmer, you don’t have any bugs in the first place. What they don’t understand is that bugs are part of the process, perhaps a less interesting part, but nonetheless a part. Accepting bugs and experimenting with solutions, or at least code to find the bugs, is the art of debugging. It is the programmers who sit in fear of this moment, the finding of the error, that fail. They refuse to conduct the experiments necessary to find the bugs, instead believing that good programmers intuitively know where the bugs are and don’t need to experiment and fail. Failure is part of the scientific process, and part of programming. Brian knew this when he typed in his first BASIC program as a kid, and spent hours comparing the code to the printed listing to find his mistakes.

“What were you saying?”

“We were almost talking about your need for approval.”

“Mrs. Corncoff,” Brian says, “besides my parents, all of my approval-memories are more of a feeling than an actual recounting, hers is the earliest, concrete memory.”

“What about her? She was a rather bitter woman, wasn’t she?”

The phone rang. Brian makes one last change to the code before reluctantly looking away from the screen. He glances at the caller-ID, seeing the private designation that signifies his sister, and picks up the phone, pressing the talk-button in a single practiced motion.

“Y’ello?” Brian reaches down and catches an ant crawling near the phone. He watches it struggle under his fingers before pressing it against his desk and flicking it on to the rug.

“Hey, Bry. How goes it?” Miranda asks.

“It goes.”

“I’m glad to hear it. And how is your pursuit of world domination?”

“Going.”

“Rebecca came down with a cold yesterday. She must have gotten it from Will. They’ve been at each other’s throats all weekend, probably because they were trapped inside thanks to the storms. Being cooped up is not good for them. Shel almost had a fit.”

“Uh huh.” Brian positions his neck and cheek to hold the phone, leaving his hands free, he continues debugging.

“I decided to send her to school anyway. You should have heard her scream this morning. That was my first clue that she was well enough to go to school. Sick people can’t scream that loudly. I might have let her stay home, but it’s Shel’s day off and I couldn’t get in touch with her. And Dan, well, you know Dan, he’s out town or the country, or something. I haven’t heard from him in a few days ago, but he knows he can’t miss Sunday’s luncheon and the tournament.”

“Humm. Dan’s been traveling a lot lately, you know. Bad for the kids.”

“Will’s piano tutor finally came back yesterday. I don’t know why I pay that woman. She’s absent more than she’s here, and then all she does is yell at Will for not practicing. Perhaps if she was around more, he would practice. I’ll talk to Dan about her when he gets back. You really should get out more.

“I spoke with my therapist about you, and she thinks your asocial behavior is not normal. If you’d like, I can set you up with an appointment. She’s really wonderful. There’s a spa next to her office and her receptionist can set up a treatment before or after you see her. It’s really quite wonderful.”

“Yeah. Just what I need, more distractions.”

“That’s sarcasm, right? You don’t want an appointment?”

“Ah, Captain Obvious strikes again.”

“Very funny. Shel is making a brisket on Friday. Any special orders?”

“No meat.”

“Seriously, Brian. You’re too skinny. You need meat. If I had your metabolism, I’d be eating meat three times a day, chicken fried in tasty animal fat. One would think we’d have similar genes. I guess I’m the fat one in the family. I can take it, I guess.”

“Yes, you’re a monster, a ninety-pound monster. Miranda, one of these days you’re going to accept my dietary restrictions. You’d understand if you had my stomach.”

“I think she’s going to make fresh bread, asparagus, as well as a truly dreadful shortcake. I swear, after all the money I spent sending her to Fredrick’s school you’d think she would be able to make a decent dessert. It’s really pathetic. Old dog, new tricks, you know the saying.”

“Sayings. Yes.”

“Well, I have to go pick up the children from school. I’ll see you on Friday. Don’t forget.”

“Tell them I said ‘hi.’”

“Will do. And make sure you eat something. You can’t live on soda.”

“Humm, soda is good for me. It helps keep me going; you know, on my way to conquer the world and everything. Bye.”

“You sure you don’t want an appointment?” Brian presses the talk button and sits the phone vertically on the desk.

Brian continues to experiment away, searching for the same bug he’s been unable to locate for last hour.

“Back to Mrs. Corncob.”

“That’s not her name. I need to concentrate on this.”

“You always tell me you can debug unconsciously? You losing your touch?”

Brian feels around for a can and takes a sip. He saves his work and stands up and walks into the living room. The ottoman, lily green and shaped like an uneven baguette, partially blocks the living room from the dining room along the wall leading from the study, leaving only a small space to enter the living room. Before his ant problem, the ottoman had been next to his couch, sufficiently spaced from the couch to allow his feet to either lay flat on the floor or up on the ottoman comfortably. The curved ottoman’s end fits perfectly with the couch to form a completed ellipse when the arms and backs are removed. Brian had moved the ottoman to allow access for the vacuum. Piled on the ottoman was yesterday’s washed and partially folded laundry. Brian never has problems finding the motivation for putting up the wash, thanks to his boxer-limitation and washer and dryer combination located in a closet of his apartment. It’s the folding that he fijnds painful. The white wash almost never made it out of the dryer except when it is time to dry the colors. At that point, Brian piles the whites on top of the previous week’s whites on his ancient, but still serviceable, leather recliner. Even if he manages to fold the whites or colors, he rarely places the inexpertly folded clothing into his bedroom drawers.

Brian sits down on the couch and reaches for the remote, activating first the ReplayTV, and then the television. As the machines warm up, Brian searches the rug, but finds only laundry balls from yesterday’s wash. Once the TV powers up, he flips through the recorded shows, knowing, even before he starts, that nothing new has been recorded because the indication was not illuminated. He searches the channel guide, selecting first sitcom reruns, before changing to WB cartoons. He sits there for fifteen minutes before turning both machines off again. Daytime TV sucks. He returns to his computer and starts pounding away again.

At 3:30 a.m. his phone rings. Brian reaches over and bangs the sleep button of his alarm clock. Confused at the continued ringing, Brian sat up; he realized the ringing was coming from the phone, and picked up the receiver on the fourth ring, just before his answering machine would have went off—the thought of which, even in his fuzzy mind state, sent pangs of laziness shooting through his weary bones. To turn off the answering machine would have required Brian to get up, which is a daunting prospect at this time of night. The thought of talking to someone while the answering machine was recording was just as painful. Not the actual recording itself, since a press of a button would delete the message. It was instead the horrendous echoing that would have forced him to leave his warm womb-like bed that was scary. “Y’ello?”

“What’s going on, Chickadee?”

“Jeannette?

“And who were you expecting?”

“At,” Brian turns his neck to his clock radio, tangling the curly wire attaching the receiver to the phone around his arm, and pulling the phone off of the nightstand with a loud crash. “3:30am, I would be expecting other no one.”

“There is another one?”

“You know what I meant.” Brian stifles a yawn. “What’s going on?”

“Just getting home.”

“You sound tipsy.”

“I was out with some friends. Can you believe John? He cancelled on me again. We were supposed to meet at Yammis, in the village, and he never showed. Have you ever been to Yammis? It’s near Yosemite and the Lava Bar. I know Benjamin, the owner, quite well—he used to work for my mother. Or at least that’s what he claims. I’ve never actually asked her about him. Come to think of it, I doubt he’s the type my mother would allow to hang around her. Hmph. Anyway, John now claims he left a message on my cell, but I haven’t heard it yet. It would probably help if I checked my messages, but that’s beyond the point now. He didn’t show up again, is what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Fascinating.”

“He’s going through a lot. He’s working crazy hours on his current CD, flying back and forth to L.A. almost every other day, and his family problems, like usual, keep resurfacing. They want to be involved in his life or some other silliness. It’s amazing the nerve of them. After everything they put him through.”

“I’m heading to Miranda’s on Friday.”

“I heard some of the songs from his CD. It’s even better than the last one he produced. Hold on, I have another call. Hell….” Jeanette’s voice disappeared with a double click. Brian lay back down, rearranging the cords and placing the phone near his ear on the bed. He closed his eyes and tried to place himself back in the dream world he had been awakened from. He was a secret agent—or maybe an airplane pilot—wandering behind a large barn—or perhaps an alley—searching for a large box—or, more likely, a lost, jeweled earring. He had to have the bracelet otherwise he couldn’t buy the alarm clock box, which he needed. He really needed. He remembered dispatching two rather ugly fellows with a number of martial arts screams and perhaps a punch or two. He approached a storekeeper, who was busy sweeping a wooden porch. Swaying over the porch was a wooden sign, stenciled in red was the word “Nails,” the white paint peeling off the sign’s edges. Brian began asking her questions about the earring.

“Are you even listening?” Brian barely makes out Jeanette’s distant voice and rouses himself enough to put the receiver against his head.

“Yeah. You were talking about CDs or BLTs or something like that. Who was on the other line?”

“Oh nobody. Just a friend.”

“You have strange friends, if they call you at this time of the morning.”

“It was Tammy. She was out with me tonight. I introduced her to a friend, and I think the two of them hit it off.” Brian could imagine the satisfied smirk on Jeannette’s face. “They went home together and she wanted to make sure I didn’t mind. Of course I don’t. He’s just a friend, and any friend of mine is available for Tammy.”

“Is she hot?”

“Tammy?”

“No, your friend. Of course, Tammy.”

“I’m not going to feed your lesbian fantasies tonight, Brian. Tammy and I did sleep together the other night, when John was visiting.”

“I thought you said you weren’t going to feed my fantasies?”

“I was so drunk, John and I had sex with Tammy in the bed. I’m not sure if Tammy joined in or not. It was a strange night. We didn’t videotape it, however. Sorry. Besides, she’s not your type. She’s tall, good-looking, and she comes from the same neighborhood as me.”

“So she’s rich.”

“Shut up. You know I hate it when you say that.”

“What, rich?”

“Let’s not get into it now.”

“If you insist. Why wouldn’t she like me? I’m tall, ugly, but I’ve got a good job.”

“You’re unemployed working out of your apartment twenty hours a day on a project that you won’t tell anyone about. Yeah, I’m sure my friends are just lining up to get to know you.”

“You wouldn’t say that if I wasn’t ugly.”

“You said it, not me. Anyways, I was talking about John’s new CD.”

“I don’t want to hear about it anymore.”

“He hopes to have it finished soon so he can come for an extended visit—that is, if his family will leave him alone. His family is just as fucked up as mine.”

“So you’ve told me. How about those jeweled boxes?”

“What are you talking about? Wake up and entertain me!”

Brian sat up against his bed’s headboard. He lifted the cover over his head, the dry, sock smell overwhelmed him a moment, before seductively dragging his head back to the waiting pillow. The bottom sheet already had been kicked off the bed during his sleep. “I’ve been thinking about my project lately and its value to the world.”

“And this is the project that will change the world and make you famous and accepted?”

“I’m already accepted.”

“But not famous.”

“I don’t think I want to be famous, to tell you the truth.”

“Wait. You usually lie to me? If you do, please don’t tell me. Let me live in a world where Brian speaks only truths.”

“Fuck off.”

“When and where?”

“Seriously. Work with me here. I’m having doubts about its value. I feel it’s mostly about feeding my ego, you know, more than anything else. I spend so much time pounding away that maybe I’m after something else.”

“And what’s wrong with feeding your ego? You’re a guy—supposedly. Aren’t you Neanderthals all about feeding egos and other hungers?”

“Yeah. Other hungers. I’m a gratification-junkie, you know. It all started back in elementary school.”

“Wait. Is this going to be another Brian-history lesson? I’m not sure if I want any more details about your life. There’s only so much I can take—if you’ll wait, I’ll go get a few more drinks and we can discuss it, unless this is an infatuation with a teacher. I’m not sure I can handle that right now.”

“Forget it. We can go back to talking about John’s CD.”

“Excellent. He’s really approaching a new genre of music—it takes Rock and puts it on its head. Think heavy guitar, speak-lyrics, and a melodious back-up chorus. No drums. The third song is dark; you’d like it. It’s about the suicide of a girlfriend.”

“I need to get back to bed. I have to do important things tomorrow.”

“Important?”

“Forget it. Night.”

“Sure, just leave me wondering about your elementary school obsession. I don’t mind.” Click.

At seven in the morning, Brian woke up. He grabbed a chocolate-chip cookie—the good type, bought from the supermarket’s bakery—off the top of his refrigerator. He ate two more before drinking a few gulps of orange juice straight from the ingeniously designed plastic spout struck through the cardboard carton. He thought about taking a vitamin, but decided against it. Brian believed he had to be in the mood for the vitamin, otherwise it’s all wasted. It wouldn’t be wasted if he could take the tasty, chewable sugary ones. He can’t, however, buy those in the store because of the many strange looks he imagines he would receive (he hasn’t tried). Brian knew that 90% of the time, people thought about themselves. And yet, if everyone was thinking about oneself all the time—including thinking about what others are thinking of them—then there’s little opportunity for people to judge what others are buying. That reassuring fact did not provide the necessary comfort to allow Brian to purchase cartoon character vitamins. Maybe one day.

He turns on the light in his study and bangs the mouse to wake-up the computer. He was in the middle of important work yesterday when he started to fall asleep and dragged himself to the bed. The computer comes to life, with a churn and a beep, the screen clacking and flickering before showing his work.

Brian pours life through his keyboard into the computer’s memory. It’s an experience he wishes he could share with everyone. He

Snippets

Bill stared at the screen with the lines of code called out to him. He grabbed a can of Tab from the desk, shuck it, and tried another and another until he found one with remaining soda. He tipped the can over, emptying the final, warm drops into his open mouth. He put the can back on the desk, in the middle of the forest of cans, and continued to glance at the code.

He changed one of the lines and hit the compile button, leaning back in his chair with his arms over his head, he stretched while the computer crunched the changes. He watched the warnings build up until the screen blanked and his program appeared. He clicked a few of the menu options and watched the images appear. His mind followed the function calls as his eyes watched the changing images on the screen.

Where he expected, the program broke. He stepped through the breakpoint until he came to the offending line. Something was wrong. The watch variables were off. He glanced at the code, jumping to a few calling files, and found the mistake: the subtraction was backwards. He corrected it and recompiled.

He leaned back in his chair and stared out the window. It was summer outside, but you couldn’t tell that from where Bill sat. The window looked out across a shallow alley between two buildings to a brick wall. The owners of the other building didn’t think it was necessary to put windows on this side of the building. This was a good indication that the building across the way was built after his.

An ant crawled over the pile of scribbled notes on the desk. Bill reached out and squashed the bug between his fingers. He rolled the carcass up into a small ball and flicked it onto the commercial rug. The ants were drawn to the food and drinks he left lying around the room. He wasn’t a slob but it was difficult not to leave his food leavings in the room. Besides his bed, which he spent fewer and fewer hours in every night, he spent most of his time in the computer room. Getting the program done meant everything. At least that’s what he told himself. He had been working on the program for almost a year now. He originally had a partner, but the partner was more interested in marketing the idea and organizing how it’s created, rather than actually programming it. He had told him he was going to go off on his own to finish it. He hadn’t look for another partner since then.

People think the worst part of his job is working alone. They’re wrong, however. It’s not working alone that troubles Bill. He rather likes the solitude.

As his hard drive continues to grind, he thinks back

The light sat quietly on the floor, forming an elongated image of the window, complete with bars and crosses, and a dark splotchy area where the security sticker refracted the light incompletely. Brian sits in his black, leather chair, leaning back against its springs, and staring at the flickering monitor. He lifted himself off the chair momentarily, feeling his shorts peel from the leather, before realigning himself to the back of the chair, his back not quite flat against the chair’s back, his legs at an angle, and the chair tipped to the appropriate angle where his neck wasn’t strained from its not quite erect posture.

Brian watched as the light burned across his rust-colored rug, half-expecting the area where the light past to smolder as the heat left it. He heard the slight beep from the computer that alerted to him to the completion of the compilation. Using the tiptoes of his feet, he turned his chair until he faced the computer, his hands curling naturally into the QWERTY-approved position. He glanced down at the motion of his hand, thinking how strange it must have been to be the first man—there was little doubt in his mind that it was a man—to put the alphabet on the keys of a typewriter. Did he know that in the future this orientation would be the de facto standard for not only the telegraphs and typewriters, but also the now ubiquous computers? His musings did not distract him from looking up at the screen to translate the computer’s findings.

The instructions scrolled down the computer screen as Brian manipulated the arrow and page keys. The syntax was illuminated in different categories of shades: greens, reds, blues, grays. He located the offending line with a keystroke and stared at it, his eyes wandering across the function, attempting to determine what caused the beep.

Jane heard a large crash. She glanced over to the

The bile rose in my throat as I stared, eyes scanning the scene in an attempt to memorize everything that was happening. The first images that seared in my mind was the abrupt way my mother had landed on the floor, her head cocked back and turned toward the wall, her arms held close, hugging her chest, her hands grabbing her shoulder blades with a dying woman’s grip. Blood

I heard the hard drive grind away, taking the code I inputted and turning it a collection of binary code that the computer not only understood by could execute. It’s amazing to think of it like that. There is a type of death in the successful compilation of a computer program. It doesn’t mean it will work, of course. Programming is like art. You attempt to find the perfect organization, the rightness that appeals to you. Once that is discovered—its discovery is not always easy and there are many paths of getting there and many resulting conclusions—you know it. You feel it, like finding gold at the bottom of a stream. There is no doubt. I was heading there, on my way to finding it.

The screen blinked and the computer beeped. It was done. I took a deep drink from a glass, letting the warmed soda fizzle in at the back of my mouth before swallowing. I hit the death key combination, and the computer responded like a well-heeled dog. My program began executing. I watched the screen, pictured the calculations, and grinned at the results. The test strings appeared as I had asked, prayed even. I couldn’t help but be satisfied.

I heard the jingling of keys at the door. I blocked the sound out, declaring, disbelieving that it wasn’t going to interrupt my flow. But it did

Brian watched as the light burned across his rust-colored rug, half-expecting the area where the light past to smolder as the heat left it. He heard the slight beep from the computer that alerted to him to the completion of the compilation. Using the tiptoes of his feet, he turned his chair until he faced the computer, his hands curling naturally into the QWERTY-approved position. He glanced down at the motion of his hand, thinking how strange it must have been to be the first man—there was little doubt in his mind that it was a man—to put the alphabet on the keys of a typewriter. Did he know that in the future this orientation would be the de facto standard for not only the telegraphs and typewriters, but also the now computers? His musings did not distract him from looking up at the screen to translate the computer’s findings.

The instructions scrolled down the computer screen as Brian manipulated the arrow and page keys. The syntax was illuminated in different categories of shades: greens, reds, blues, grays. He located the offending line with a keystroke and stared at it, his eyes wandering across the function, attempting to determine what caused the beep.

Jane heard a large crash. She glanced over to the

• **Brian had since discovered the amazing efficient of the ants. Brian had discovered this efficiency when he noticed a large crumb covered After dropping some crumbs on the kitchen floor, Brian had returned to findBrian thought seriously about allowing them to go about their business and clean his apartment, figuring someone should clean it. He ended up dismissing the free cleaning service idea when he thought of the ants crawling over his body. A most unpleasant thought. He had not sat on the living room floor since his initial discovery; instead he sat on the couch believing its height would protect him from the diminutive ants, despite finding four ants on it the night before.