Troubleshooting the Human Condition
By Maggie Chao
April 21, 2025
Graphic by Paris Yang
I am a programmer.
I am a technician,
My nimble fingers slicing through intricate circuitry
My precise vision identifying each diode, relay, and motor.
Sutured script
Soldered sinew
Lines of binary written through tapestries of flesh and steel
I weave,
I mark down and map out
In beautiful diagrams with corresponding numbers
I fill in the blanks
And it all makes sense,
All of it.
I was raised as a scientist.
I work as one.
My father studied disease,
My mother, mathematics;
I grew up between my house and the lab
With a fume hood for a dollhouse and a computer for a coloring book
Clinical studies for bedtime stories and dreams of electric sheep.
Questions and answers are all I’ve ever known —
Analyze patterns, diagnose problems, apply solutions.
I like principles and formulas.
I like when one thing equals another.
I like when I am presented with a dilemma
And I can declare: “See this part right here? That’s what’s wrong.
Here’s how we can fix it.”
And I do just that.
It is not always easy
But there is always an answer
And I have been taught to always seek it out.
It is a cold Tuesday evening when you tell me we’re over.
Like a scientist, I ask why.
You never say why.
Go to sleep, my best friend says.
She knows me too well.
A scientist too, she sees my bruised hands and tired eyes
And hypothesizes that I have not been sleeping.
I present false data: I’m fine.
And yet it’s two a.m. and the questions in my head
Are strewn bare across the workbench,
Wire and tape and skin and bone
Labels scratched off, redone, misplaced
And the tears are seeping through my torn knuckles
Because I fear – no, I know – that this lack of an answer
Might just kill me before the night ends.
Because what do you mean there isn’t a why?
What do you mean it just doesn’t feel right?
What do you mean I can’t run the experiment back
And try again
And again
And again?
I scrawl blueprints of brains
Across acres of blue paper.
Yours and mine.
Out of bits and pieces of us
I construct shoddy replicas,
Welded abominations of viscera and technology and memory
That I wire with my own veins
And strike with a match,
Every turn a jolt of self-inflicted pain,
As my charred fingertips
Grasp desperately for every microsecond flash I see in the pitch dark.
Was that a spark there?
Was there ever one?
Why did I miss all the signs?
Where were the symptoms, the variables?
Surely I overlooked something.
Surely I will find it now,
Whatever was wrong with us,
And fix it.
Surely it was one thing I did wrong
That I can redact and revert
As a simple patch gets the code working again,
As surgery brings a patient back to life.
Surely as all things in my life have had,
There is a diagnosis, and a solution.
Yet over and over I light the fuse and
Over and over I fail
To replicate what once was,
What we had,
What I had.
A lapse in concentration
And frustration is momentarily replaced with rage.
I rip the arteries from the machinery.
I tear the drawings into shreds.
I pitch my fists against the workbench until they are broken and red
And wrought with my mistakes.
I am ashamed of the sob that escapes my throat
Harsh and guttural,
Built up in my stomach from hours of agony
What was the point of it all?
Miles and miles of wiring between our beating hearts
Hours spent deciphering your circuitry
Trying to understand you, put you into words
Just so you’d seem more tangible, more real
My walls plastered with spreadsheets,
My every thought an analysis
My every sentence an inquisitive prompt
Because it was the first time that I had had something so tightly within my grasp
That was not a number, or a sample, or a piece of technology
For me, to love meant to understand
And I wanted so badly to understand you
Like I understood all that was so familiar to me.
I took you apart to see what was inside
I drew and labeled all your components
Your gears, your bones,
Your branches and loops and nodes.
Hunched over us with a wrench in my hand
I knew everything and nothing
And despite it all, I could not make you stay.
I spend hours dissecting the graphs
Cutting through seas of statistics
In search of my white whale,
Some critical point,
Some figure of significance
Something -- anything --
That can tell me what went wrong.
My work spills off the desk,
Puddles at my feet and seeps into the floorboards.
I rewrite my thesis again and again
And it never means anything more than what I already know.
What the hell do I know?
Graphic by Paris Yang
And even so, do I need to?
I think as I sit,
Staring into the 4 a.m. darkness with weary eyes.
I am drained of all my rage
Drowning in nostalgia
I keep flipping through the same papers,
Shoving the same slides under the microscope.
There are certain things the math cannot convey
And so I resort to something distinctly unscientific, memory:
Your hand in mine
Your voice in my ear
Your arms around me, soft and warm
Yet now nothing but the shadow of a sensation leaving my skin remains.
I swaddle myself in data because it smells like you.
Fresh wounds smudge the spreadsheets,
Pain entangled in the print grids
And I wish I could talk to you one more time
But all I can do is talk to myself.
What do I really want?
An answer.
That’s what I’ve always wanted.
A problem, an explanation, and a fix.
How can you heal a patient without a diagnosis?
How can you repair a program without finding the bug?
How can you correct a faulty electronic
Without knowing which wire is attached backwards
Which motor is jammed
Which chip is malfunctioning?
And all I want is to fix this.
Do I?
I could’ve.
Should I have?
Maybe not.
But I still would’ve tried.
For what?
For…
I don’t know.
I guess I never really knew.
My fingerprints are gone
And the fuses are blown
And the engine is shot
But I just keep trying, and trying,
For what I don’t know,
Digging myself deeper and deeper into the server room
My skin threaded with cables and cords
My ears ringing with thunderous static
My hands overflowing with numbers
That tumble off into the gaps,
Out of my grasp,
Out of my control
Willing to sacrifice myself
To keep the machine running
Even if it meant giving all I had left
Even if it meant losing all I ever was.
Why?
Because I loved you.
I truly did.
But I know I can’t anymore.
Let it be.
It will hurt
But let it be.
I’m tired.
I know.
I don’t want to hurt.
It helps to hurt a little.
We live and we learn.
There is nothing left to do but heal.
But what about the answer?
Maybe there isn’t one.
Maybe there doesn’t need to be one.
I put away my scalpels, my screwdrivers
I sweep the viscera off the desktop and dust the chalk from my palms
I coil my soul back into neat loops
I unpin the diagrams from my walls
And feed them through the shredder.
The sun rises outside,
Golden light pouring across my work desk
Just as I am sitting down
And it is beautiful, so beautiful,
As the dark regresses into the corners of my room
The grime gone from my skin
The slate clean, begun anew
All the anger, the bargaining, the confusion falls away from my heart
As I pull out my phone
And I block your number.
I take down the photos of us
From the walls of my room.
Your face is but a footnote,
Stashed away in the appendix of my story.
I gaze down at all my unsent letters
Manic tear-stained scrawls amidst charts and arrows
Begging for clarity, for solutions
Bargaining for the fleeting warmth of knowledge
All that I meant to ask
But never did.
As my cheeks dry I realize, with shock,
That I no longer want to know.
This time I do not hesitate.
I open the window
I scatter my questions into the wind
And for once,
I don’t wait for an answer. ■
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