Two Desks

By day I help build software that decides things. Who gets seen first. How a claim moves through a building full of people who will never meet the person it belongs to. Where a human has to put their name on a decision before a machine is allowed to make it. It is careful, unglamorous work.

In the early mornings, before the house is awake, I write. A trilogy about what happens to us when we hand the deciding to the machines. A novel about a man moving his family into a house on a street called Bishop, on a Tuesday in November, the furnace sixteen years old and the figure for the mortgage running quietly in his head. A book about hunger.

People who find me through the software are surprised by the books. People who find me through the books are surprised by the software. Both are too polite to ask the real question, so I will ask it for them. Which one is the actual work, and which one is the thing he does to feel like more than the actual work?

I asked myself that for years. I stopped, because the question has an answer, and the answer is that there is no second thing.

Underneath everything a person does is a reach. We are born reaching. The first thing any of us does, in the first minute of being alive, is look for a face. We find one, or we do not, and either way we spend the rest of our lives reaching after it. For belonging. For meaning. For answers. For forgiveness. For the next thing and the next. A person is a hunger that learned to walk.

It took me a long time to believe that about myself as completely as I believed it about everyone else.

Once you see it, the two desks stop being two.

I put governance into systems for the same reason I write stories about systems that have none. I do not want us to wake one morning and find we have quietly handed the deciding away, one convenient step at a time, until nobody in the building can tell you who is responsible when the machine is fluent and confident and wrong. At one desk I try to keep a human hand on that wheel by designing for it: a seam here, a sign-off there, a record someone can actually read. At the other I try to keep the same hand on the same wheel by writing a person you cannot forget, because an argument holds you for an afternoon and a character holds you for years.

It is one fear and one hope, worked in two materials. The deck and the chapter are the same sentence set in different fonts.

There is another reason, and it is the truest one. The people who come after us will inherit what we build and what we were too careless to build well. They will do their own reaching, in a world some of us are shaping at one desk and warning about at the other. I would like those two to add up to one honest maker. That is the whole ambition. Not to be right in public. To be, in both rooms, the same person.

So there are not two desks. There is one hunger that learned to use both hands.

When people ask which is the real work, I tell them the truth and let them do what they want with it. I am doing the same thing in both places. I am keeping a hand on the wheel. I am reaching for a face. On the good mornings, at either desk, it turns out to be the same hand and the same face, and the work, whatever it gets called that day, is only the reaching made visible.

— Pumulo Sikaneta