I love the way a computer program doesn’t just describe something: it is the thing.

Words between people—normal language—is like a glaze over the realness of action and being. A bubble, not something you can touch or count on. But code is the doing, is the thing: words and syntax and rules creating their own world, their own existence. Everything the code needs is there, inside the computer.

I tap this semester’s passkey into the door on Baldwin Lab. I get access to the lab because I’m taking freshman Computer Syntax 101, although it’s a bullshit class; I could do most of the assignments in my sleep. This is where I come, though, when I don’t want to go home and face Sheila the Mother, or when Veronica is busy with Jack.

Down the hallway, there’s a grody water cooler, and then the lab, with its twenty Apple IIs and ten terminals hooked into the MUD, a broken clock, no windows, and three rules:

1. No food or drink

2. Save it to a floppy because it will get deleted

3. Don’t touch anyone else’s keyboard

The TA on duty doesn’t care if I work on personal projects, or if I listen to my Walkman with Television or the Clash turned up to eighteen. The glow of the monitor screen washes without judgment over my ripped jeans, my band T-shirts, my dyed-black hair. It feels like freedom.

When I told you, on our weekly call sometime near the start of high school, that I was taking Computer Basics, you got so excited, thinking I was learning BASIC. Back then, I didn’t even know what a programming language was. I sat there, coiling the phone cord around my fingers in Bubbe’s kitchen, which was the only place I called you from, because of Sheila. You described the possibilities of machine learning, and it was like you were speaking to me not from the East Coast, but from somewhere else in time, from some other world.

“You’re going to love it,” you said. “It’s the language of the future.”