Chapter 9
The Sentence
Marcus didn’t want to use Fleming.
“Rooms with whiteboards make people give answers,” he said. “I don’t want answers.”
So on Tuesday morning the three of them walked along the towpath of the Regent’s Canal, east from King’s Cross, past moored narrowboats with smoke coming from their chimneys and a man feeding swans from a paper bag. Sam walked between them with his hands in the pockets of a parka that looked too thin for February. He’d clearly been told by somebody, Josh probably, that this was important, and was braced for it.
For the first ten minutes Marcus asked him nothing about Escalation at all.
He asked Sam where he’d grown up (Luton), what his parents did (his dad drove for a delivery firm, his mum worked in a school kitchen), and whether he had brothers or sisters (two younger sisters, one about to start university, the first after him). He asked how Sam had got into computers.
“I don’t know, really. I just liked it.” Sam shrugged inside the parka. “I had this old laptop my uncle gave me when I was fourteen. It barely worked. I wanted to make a thing that worked out Pokémon battle damage, because the calculators online were rubbish, and I didn’t know how to code, so I looked it up.” He smiled slightly, despite himself. “It took me about four months. It was so bad. It was one file, three thousand lines, everything was a global variable. But it worked. I remember the first time it gave the right number for a critical hit. I literally shouted. My mum came upstairs because she thought I’d hurt myself.”
“What did it feel like?”
Sam glanced at him, surprised. “What, getting it right?”
“Yes.”
“Um.” He thought about it. “Like I’d built something out of nothing, I suppose. Like it was mine. Nobody gave it to me, I just kept bashing at it until it did what I wanted. And then I understood it, all of it, every bit, because I’d made every bit.” He laughed, embarrassed. “Sorry, that’s a weird answer.”
“It’s an excellent answer,” Marcus said. “Is that why you did a computer science degree?”
“Yeah. Basically. My parents were so proud. Nobody in my family had been to uni. My dad tells everyone I’ve gone into computers.” He said it with an affectionate imitation of his father’s voice. “He thinks I’m basically a scientist.”
“And what did you think you were going to be?”
Sam was quiet for a few paces.
“A programmer, I guess. A proper one.” He kicked a stone off the edge of the towpath and watched it plop into the canal. “Like my lecturers talked about. Like the people in the books. Someone who really knows how things work, all the way down. You start off writing small bits, you get them wrong, someone senior tears your code apart in review, and you get better. And then after a few years you’re the person who knows.”
“And then you came to Meridian.”
“Yeah.” The smile had gone.
Marcus didn’t push. They walked on past the gasholders, which had been turned into flats, and the canal opened out a little by a lock. A heron was standing on the lock gate, perfectly still.
“Tell me about your first week,” Marcus said.
“It was good. Everyone was really nice.” Sam said it automatically, then seemed to hear himself. “No, it was. They were. But it was really weird. I got my laptop, and my access, and Josh gave me a ticket to do on my second day, a small one, adding a field to an API. I was really excited. I sat down and opened the code and started reading it, trying to work out how it all fitted together. Callum came over after about an hour and asked what I was doing.” He paused. “I said I was trying to understand the codebase. He was really kind about it. He showed me how to give the ticket to the agent, and it did it before I’d finished my coffee, with tests. Then he showed me how to review it. And that was it. That was the job.”
“How did that feel?”
“Fine. Amazing, honestly. It was so fast.” Sam stopped walking. He looked at the heron. “And sort of awful.”
Nobody said anything. Maya had to stop herself filling the silence. She saw Marcus not filling it, quite deliberately, with his hands in his pockets, looking at the heron too.
“I kept waiting for the bit where I’d learn,” Sam said eventually. “Like, the bit where you write the code yourself and get it wrong and someone tells you why. But nobody really writes it anymore. Everyone’s prompting. Steering. Reviewing. Which is a skill, I know it’s a skill, I’m not saying it isn’t. But I’d spent three years learning to do the other thing, and since I was fourteen really. And I got here and that thing just—” he made a small gesture with one hand, an opening, letting go “—wasn’t anybody’s job. It was like I’d trained to be a carpenter and turned up and everyone was operating a machine that makes chairs. And I’m good at operating the machine. I’m actually really good at it. Josh says I’m one of the best on the team.” He swallowed. “I just don’t make chairs.”
“Did you tell anyone that?”
“God, no.” He laughed, a little wildly. “It’s a really good job. They pay me loads. Half my course didn’t get jobs. Meridian stopped hiring graduates after my year. Josh said they didn’t need to, because the agents do the junior work now. I’m one of the last ones they took. You can’t go to your manager and say, sorry, I’m a bit sad that this incredibly well-paid job is too easy.” He shook his head. “It’s not even that it’s too easy. That’s not right either. I don’t know what it is.”
“You said something to Maya on Thursday,” Marcus said. “Can I ask you about it?”
Sam’s shoulders came up very slightly. “Okay.”
“You said: I read every line. I just never really know, with any of it, whether I actually know.” Marcus said it slowly, exactly, without any emphasis. “What did you mean?”
Sam stared at him. For a moment Maya thought he was going to apologise, or say it had been nothing, or that he’d been tired. She saw him get as far as the first syllable of sorry, and then she saw him decide not to.
“I mean,” he said. “When I wrote the Pokémon thing. Even though it was terrible. I knew it. I knew why every line was there, because I’d had to put every line there, usually after getting it wrong three times. If something broke, I could feel where it was before I’d even looked. It was like knowing your way round your own house in the dark.” He took his hands out of his pockets and looked at them. “Now I read code that’s very good. Much better than I’d write. And I understand it. I can tell you what every line does. But I didn’t put it there. I didn’t get it wrong first. So I don’t know why it’s that line and not a different line. I don’t know what it’s scared of. With normaliseRef, if I’d written Escalation myself, from scratch, I’d have hit the merged-record thing. I’d have had a bug, and I’d have had to work out why, and I’d have remembered it forever. Instead I read it, and it looked like nothing. It looked like a bit of old junk. I read it really carefully. And it didn’t—” He stopped. “It didn’t scare me. And it should have scared me.”
He wiped his face quickly with the back of his hand, as if it might be the wind.
“It’s like knowing your way round somebody else’s house in the dark,” he said. “You think you know it. And then you walk into a table.”
They walked back slowly. Sam talked more freely now, as though something had come unstuck. He told them about the thing he did in the evenings, which nobody at work knew about: he was writing a Game Boy emulator in C, from scratch, line by line, without any AI at all.
“It’s so slow,” he said, almost happily. “I’ve been doing it for a year. It can nearly run Tetris. I’m not doing it for any reason. I just like knowing every bit of it.”
“Of course you do,” Marcus said.
Near the King’s Cross end of the towpath, by the steps up to the street, Sam stopped.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Do you think it’s my fault? Honestly?”
Marcus considered him.
“I think you were standing at the place where it broke,” he said. “That’s not the same thing. Ask me again in a week, when I know more, and I’ll give you a better answer. I won’t lie to you.”
Sam nodded. Then, as if it had only just occurred to him, he said: “It’s not just me, though. The not-knowing thing. Is it? I mean, doesn’t everyone feel that a bit?” He looked from Marcus to Maya and back. “I just assumed everyone did, and that you get used to it. I thought that was just what the job feels like now.”
He went up the steps two at a time and was gone.
Maya and Marcus stood at the bottom of the steps for a while.
“I talked to him for forty minutes on Thursday,” Maya said. “I got the facts. I got the timeline. I got him apologising a dozen times. You got that in an hour and a half on a towpath.”
“You asked him what happened. People prepare for that question. They’ve been answering it in their heads since Tuesday.” Marcus started up the steps, slowly. “So I didn’t ask it. I asked about the one sentence he said to you that he hadn’t prepared, the one he apologised for. That’s usually the true one. People apologise for the things that come out before they’ve checked them.”
“Ask about the sentence, not the facts.”
“If you like.” He paused at the top, slightly out of breath. “And then shut up. That’s the hard bit. You nearly didn’t, back there by the heron. I saw you.”
“I didn’t, though.”
“No. Well done.” He looked back down at the canal. “Did you hear what he said at the end?”
“I thought that was just what the job feels like now.”
“Yes.” Marcus was quiet. “That’s the finding, by the way. It isn’t that a junior engineer removed something he didn’t understand. Everybody removes things they don’t understand. The finding is that he felt he didn’t understand it, and assumed that feeling was normal, because everyone around him seemed to have it too and nobody said anything. He wasn’t missing a skill. He was sitting in an organisation where not knowing had become the background noise. If you can’t hear the alarm because it’s always going off, it isn’t working as an alarm any more.”
Maya took her glasses off and looked at the grey water.
“He read it really carefully,” she said. “And it still didn’t save him.”
“No,” Marcus said. “It didn’t. Remember that. I think it’s going to matter.”
He walked off towards the printworks, and after a moment she followed him. In her notebook, under Thursday’s sentence, she wrote a second one.
I thought that was just what the job feels like now.