The green leaves spread over the windows, until all the light that came into the room had itself a greenish tint, bathing the desk and the woman in the office chair in dim but luminous light, like the light in a primeval jungle.
She hadn’t left the chair, except to hobble to the bathroom, in days and days. Well, she had taken a few naps on the green vinyl lounge in the corner, when she couldn’t keep her eyes open any more, but somehow that didn’t count.
Plates of food appeared on top of the scanner and were taken away, picked over. Mugs of tea and tall glasses of lemonade sat at her left hand until they were empty, that same quiet figure picking them up to be washed. Even the plants were tended in her virtual absence as they grew more massive and abundant, fern fronds curling around the corners of the monitor.
She didn’t see any of it, her eyes dilating unnoticed in the dimming light around the poisonous flickering glow of the screen. Bursts of typing flew out of her long gnarled fingers, until she paused to snap crackle grind the bones and tendons back into place. The text editor grew long lines of words that weren’t words, Courier New typeface unfolding even more lushly than the pothos and philodendron.
The program was writing itself through her, or so she would’ve said if anyone had asked – so she said in one of her breaks from coding, typing just as furiously into the textarea of the blog editor window. The little breaks for weblog reading, dashing hither and yon in her long list of links, only fed the code. Everything reminded her of something she’d wanted to include, or something that absolutely needed to go in which she’d never thought of before.
Halfway through, she’d realized it was written all wrong, and taken two days to untangle the long strands of misshapen functions with their illogical assumptions, rewriting what she had into a clean masterpierce of modular code, like an idealized apartment of the mid-20th-century, all sleek white plastic and aluminum tubing. But now even that mini-masterpiece (as she’d seen it at the time) was redisintegrating into a gothic mess.
She cracked her neck and closed her eyes, the color-coded text and white background reversed on the inside of her eyelids.