6/15/2003 01:01:00 AM

'The Bug': The Postmodern Prometheus

...T-shirts trading puns around a conference table. Enter Roberta Walton, a Ph.D. in the ''linguistics of poetics'' from Yale and something of a refugee from academia, where all of her colleagues have ''gone postmodern'' and given up ''on the notion of meaning.'' Berta is hired by Telligentsia to do Q.A., or quality assurance -- testing the code for bugs. Contrary to her expectations she becomes enamored of the ''separate, artificial reality inside the machine,'' even as she puzzles over the philosophical implications of this strange world made of ''pointers to pointers, arrays of pointers, pointers to structures containing pointers to strings'' and the distancing effect it seems to have on the lives of the people who write code. ''I didn't know it at the time,'' Berta recalls with the mordant hindsight that distinguishes her voice, ''but I was quickly becoming what I hated most about programmers: impatient with anyone who couldn't code. So it was,'' she reports, ''that I missed the death of Foucault.''