The room was dark despite the afternoon hour. With a grimace I stood up from my three-monitor desk. The knuckles on my right hand were swollen and warm from the punch I’d landed on Gunnar just minutes after I’d gotten the email. I’d been so focused on the task at hand that I hadn’t even noticed the pain. It’d take a solid ten minutes to complete.Īs soon as the timer began, and there was nothing I could do but wait, my wrists and fingers throbbed. After another few minutes, I finally identified the error-a misplaced semicolon-and adjusted it, and then began the compilation. Or it would, if I could figure out why it wasn’t compiling properly. The bug I was programming would latch onto the email and trace it backward to its point of origin. Twelve hours ago I’d received an email: a picture of Dad’s fatal bike crash with two words. When I got in the flow like this, the code became an extension of my mind-my own desires and goals reified into thousands of lines of sometimes inelegant but always functional programming. I scanned through the program for what felt like the hundredth time. I’d been typing without pause through the past eight hours, and there was something wrong with the code I’d written. I leaned closer to the center monitor on my desk.
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