Excerpt from Homebound by Portia Elan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

And then, when you thought I was ready, you sent me a letter with the first part of a program, handwritten on a sheet of yellow legal paper. I understood the first few commands—naming the program, a REM line saying [This program will put the wind in your sails], but after that I got lost. What were the commands drawing on the screen? Impossible to tell from just the coordinates. I'd have to see them. The unfinished lines of code beckoned, an invitation to a new world where I was smart, I was important. You programmed real games in Cambridge, but you made time to write code with me. That first program: when we finished it, it drew a sailboat that disappeared into the horizon as the sun set.

Here is one of the things you taught me: every program is like a conversation in which the programmer asks one question over and over again, "How do I make the code do X?" and the code answers, offers a cascade of answers. The result is a personal, intimate kind of logic, and although the code itself might look dry and alien, the choices embedded in it—the defining of variables, sequencing of commands, layering of functions—are like a map of the programmer's mind.

But you didn't just teach me to make games, you taught me to love them, too. We worked through the rooms of Zork, each of us making our own grid paper map to mark the grues. We assembled ships in Pirate Adventure. We debated whether The Prisoner was a good game or just a good thought experiment.

And now, almost exactly four years after I started that dumb freshman computer class, I know more than enough BASIC to write a program to calculate the number of days since you died: thirty-seven.

The code I write doesn't have feelings and it doesn't care about mine. It either works or it doesn't. When typing it into the Apple II, I have to stay focused. The fact that you are dead, that you are not in the world anymore, is like a strong magnet held against a cassette. Data—feeling—flattened into irretrievable nothing. But in the code, there are rules and patterns I can rest against. I know where I've been and where I'm going.

By the time I'm done today, it's almost time for the lab to close. I hit RUN.



The TA on duty comes over. I slide my headphones off.

"Bug in the code?" he asks.

The expression came from a literal bug in a computer—that's the story you told me—a moth trapped in the electrical relays, pulled out by Grace Hopper and taped into a logbook with the annotation "First actual case of bug being found." A moth, pinioned in the relays, yielding only an error; whatever was intelligible, lost.

Here and now, it would mean: I typed something in wrong, transposed characters or inverted syntax, or even missed a command entirely.

I shrug. "Yeah." I hit delete and the program's text evaporates from the screen. "I'll try again later."

I get up and go out into the blazing spring evening to take the bus home. I'm thinking about patience, and how, in order to have patience you have to have hope or faith, or some clear idea that it gets better. I'm thinking about all the games you'll never write, about the body of a moth pressed between relays, about lines of code that yield only "error," so you have to rewrite it, every line. You can't do that to a person: scroll through the logic and commands that make them who they are, rewrite the bugs. We run through life once, and when it's over—when you hit an error—it's just over, no one waiting to help you fix the mistakes.

Excerpted from Homebound by Portia Elan. Copyright © 2026 by Portia Elan. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.