The Soul of A New Machine by Kidder Tracy

Author:Kidder, Tracy [Kidder, Tracy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780316204552
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2011-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

The days of the debugging wore on. In March West said, referring strictly to the debugging, “Most of the fear is gone now.” He was speaking only for himself, however. The team had passed through the first sharp fear. But they had designed the machine much too fast for prudence. It had features that none of the group had dealt with before. At this stage none of them dared claim to understand in detail how all the parts worked and fit together. Sufficient cause for worry about the debugging remained.

Alsing thought that even under the best circumstances, several kinds of fears inevitably attend a debugging. One was the fear of “the big mistake,” the one that would be discovered late in the game and would require a major redesign—and with it, perhaps, a fatal delay. There was “the flakey fear”: that they had designed Eagle and were debugging it in such a way that it would never be reliable or easy to build in large numbers. Rasala had that one fairly well in hand. But there was also “the bogeyman fear.” “Just something dark and nameless,” said Alsing, “that the machine just won’t ever work.” West said: “It’s the infinite page fault you didn’t anticipate. The bogeyman is the space your mind can’t comprehend.”

Once in a while, Alsing said, he suffered a form of this last anxiety. “Maybe these guys writing the microcode are really bullshit artists, so full of shit they don’t even know they’re full of shit. Maybe this whole thing is bankrupt.” Such thoughts came to him rarely, usually at night. They vanished when the sun rose. Probably they stemmed from the fact that Alsing wasn’t writing this code himself or reviewing it closely. Rasala once remarked, “Yeah, the further you get from doing it yourself, the more demons you see.”

Gradually, Rasala came to own (having acquired the title to it from West) main anxiety over the machine. Anxiety became just something he lived with, like a bad back. For a while, I engaged in a ritualized conversation with him.

“How’s the machine, Ed?”

“Ahhhh, la machine,” he would say. “Let’s see. How is it?” He would pull his chair up to the chart of whatever debugging schedule was currently hanging on his cubicle wall, and usually wound up explaining why they had fallen behind this schedule, too.

One day he answered the question differently. “The machine. It’s what everyone calls it. That’s the whole thing—to build ‘the machine.’ ” When Rasala heard that phrase, he thought of a movie called Duel, which he had seen on television a couple of years before. In it, the hero is chased by a trailer truck, for no apparent reason. Throughout the movie, as Rasala remembered it, neither the hero nor the viewer ever gets to see the truck’s driver, if there is one, but only the front end of the semi looming like a huge evil face in the hero’s rearview mirror, always threatening to drive the hero off the road, always returning just when it seems that the hero has escaped from the thing at last.

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