The night

Midnight. The screen on, the room dark. A file opened to write a book about programming languages. Empty, not a single line, only the cursor blinking, stubborn as a question.

It was the sixteenth of February. Despite the heating, the room was cold, a thin cold, the kind that comes in through closed windows and reaches the bones before the skin. Outside, Castenedolo slept, and the dark over the village merged with the dark over the Bassa Bresciana.

Inside the room, another silence, less calm: the silence of my memories, of my reading, of everything I thought I knew, everything that had now gone quiet in front of the blank page. I didn't yet know that a single night would take me through all of it.

Then, before there was even anything to write, I heard a voice behind me.

"Don't start with the languages."

I turned. There was no one. The door was closed, and yet the voice was clear: an English whisper, faintly theatrical, the voice of someone used to being heard without raising it. And underneath it, a slight hoarseness, from too many cigarettes or too little sleep.

"Start with the people who invented them. The place. The hour."

I turned back, and in the dark beyond the screen something appeared. Without moving, it took shape slowly. I thought of a print coming up in the developer. A tall man, thin, with those mismatched eyes that had become his signature. The monitor's light passed through him instead of stopping at him.

"David Bowie!"

It wasn't a name I expected to say at midnight, in a room that a minute earlier had been empty. I said it out loud, hoping that hearing it would bring me back to my senses. My heart was racing on its own. Maybe I had fallen asleep at the keyboard. Or I was awake and he was really there; neither possibility reassured me.

He smiled. "With the licence of the dream, as you writers put it."

He came closer without a sound and stopped beside the desk. His eyes went to the empty file on the screen. "You want to tell the story of the families. The bloodlines. The secret feuds."

I nodded. "Yes. I want to write their story."

He tilted his head. Writing, it seemed, was the wrong answer. "And what if, instead of writing it, you saw it?"

I didn't understand.

"The actual rooms. The faces. The moment when someone raises a hand and says: no, not like that. Like this." He dropped his voice half a step. "There's a man who invented it all. The world followed him for twenty years. Then he walked onto a stage and asked whether what he had built could be torn down. A public confession, an act of war against himself."

I stayed silent. I had never heard anyone talk that way about someone who writes code.

He went to the window with the familiarity of someone who had been in that room a thousand times. "The same question I asked myself every morning in front of a blank tape." He stood staring at the glass, and whatever he was looking for seemed to be out there. "Can you tear down what works to go looking for something better?"

For an instant he looked back at the blank page, and something crossed his face that looked more like fear than confidence. The fear of that first step: showing me one way meant closing off all the others. It lasted a beat, then he shrugged it off like a wet coat.

And there was more, something I wouldn't have confessed even to myself that night. Looking at him, I recognized a part of myself I kept at a distance: the part that wanted to take the stage apart and rewrite everything from scratch, throwing away code that worked in search of code that worked better. I never took that leap. I reworked code, of course, but with a net: one piece at a time, never stopping it, keeping it running while I changed it. I documented, I cataloged, I put things in order until I felt safe. That order was not for the code; it was for me, and I had never worked out why. He moved without a net and changed course without asking permission.

I had certainties of my own. C and Python were the tools of the trade: C for the hard parts, close to the machine; Python for everything higher up. I judged the rest by hearsay: Lisp, interesting history but irrelevant; Smalltalk, a California experiment; Prolog, a fascinating dead end. I thought I already knew what I would find.

An evening from a few years earlier came back to me. A dinner with friends, people who don't write code but work alongside software: the ones who sell it, the ones who design it, the ones who decide what to build. At some point, when my turn came to say something about myself, I told them that the Saturday before, alone, I had settled in to study a new language Google had just released. It was called Go, and I talked about it at length, with feeling.

One of them, at the end, had told me with a laugh that I talked about it the way people talk about the team they root for: with a passion that asked for no reasons. He had caught something true. They knew nothing about Go; they had heard the confidence I spoke with and must have assumed I knew exactly why I had chosen it. If they had asked me why Go and not something else, I wouldn't have known what to say. I had the conviction, and that was enough for me.

I looked at Bowie. He had named one man and one stage. It was already too big for my hands. Every line of code I had ever written held ghosts whose names I didn't know. The for I took for granted every morning had a father, a place, a reason. The place was Zurich, the year 1951. That night I didn't even know the father's name. The curly brace was a design choice, not a fact of nature. The ground under my feet had a geological history, and it had never been still.

"You won't know everything at the end," Bowie said. "But you'll know enough never to look at a line of code the same way again."

Knowing enough was what I wanted, I think. To set off without knowing where I would end up. The night lasted as long as a record, short and intense, before the silence of the run-out groove.

A man named Backus had raised that question in a lecture hall in 1977. He had walked onto the stage of the Turing Award, computing's highest honor. He had asked: Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? He was asking whether it was possible to tear down the paradigm his own FORTRAN had made universal. ¹

Beneath the technical words was the question Bowie had asked at the glass. I couldn't yet grasp all its consequences. I only knew that the question, central to the history of software, had been asked by someone who had never wanted to be a programmer.

Bowie pointed at the screen. In the empty file a line appeared, as if typed by invisible hands: Languages don't come from nowhere.

"I'll take you there," he said. "One stop at a time. Then you come back here and write. No excuses."

I looked at my hands on the keyboard, then at that single line on the screen. The weight of the moment was in my knees, the way it sits there before a jump. I looked for an objection, a condition, something to keep one foot in the room.

I found none. It was a pact, not an offer. I would set out carrying nothing but that question, with no guarantee of an answer. "Yes," I said. "Let's go."

"In a dream anything is possible. In a book, almost anything." He came back from the window. "Get ready. The first stop is rather a long way back."

Bowie looked at the still-lit screen. "People come before machines," he said. It was a verdict spoken softly and without appeal.

Then he turned. "In time of war," he said. "Always in time of war."

He laid a hand on my shoulder. It was a weightless touch, from someone who wasn't entirely there. I felt cold where he had touched me, or maybe I imagined it. A cold that tasted of old metal. The room began to dissolve at the edges. The last thing I saw was the rectangle of light from the screen. Then darkness, and a distant sound: Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes.

When I opened my eyes again I was no longer in my room. There were two of us, with that question in our pockets.