One Compiled Thing

The brass compiler arrived in a wooden box with my grandmother's handwriting on the lid: For Tess, who will try to fix it. Inside was a device the size of a pocket watch, except that a pocket watch has the decency to explain itself. This had a single slot for a strip of paper, a crank, and a dial marked with words too small to read until I held it up to the window. The dial said: this machine compiles what you mean. It was the first honest thing my family had ever given me.

Grandmother Adé had been a programmer, back when computers were rooms and programmers were women who carried their own chair to work. She had also been a witch, in the sense that all good engineers are witches: she believed deeply in the rules, and she never explained them.

I discovered rule one by accident, when I whispered to the slot that my tea had gone cold. The crank turned by itself. There was a sound like a small bell swallowing, and the tea was hot. I sat in my kitchen for ten minutes with my hands around the cup, crying about tea, and then ran to tell Marshal Adé, who was the courier who had delivered the box and had been standing outside my flat with the patience of a postbox.

Marshal Adé had the good sense to say nothing. He has the good sense to say nothing a lot. Grandmother left him half the inheritance — no money, just instructions — and he had decided that delivering the box was his side of it.

By evening I had compiled a mended mug, a boiled egg, and an apology I had been too proud to send. The apology came out as a paper bird and refused to fly. I understood the refusal.

So I did what any daughter of that line would do: I tried to compile my grandmother back.

The compiler cranks. The bell swallows. And what comes out is not my grandmother but a thin, humming thing that walks around my flat doing her routine: it opens the curtains, checks the thermostat, sits down at the table with the newspaper folded to the crossword, and waits for me to bring it toast. It is not her. It is a program that remembers the shape of her, running forever, waiting for an input I cannot provide.

No halt condition.

I cried about the tea again, which was a smaller and more honest grief. Then I sat down with the dial and the little strip of paper and I wrote the halting condition myself. One program, more important than all the others. It said: stop when Tess can make the soup. There is no code for it. I had to learn the soup. I had to burn the soup. I had to write the recipe down and lose the recipe and find it in the margin of a crossword in my grandmother's handwriting.

Marshal Adé came by on the third week and ate two bowls. He is a professional courier of lost things; he knows when something has arrived.

The compiler sits on my shelf now with its dial turned to the wall. Sometimes it turns, and I leave it. Some programs are meant to be running. Most of mine are meant to end.

— from the notebook of Tess Rooke, first compiler after Adé, entry one.