Writing is metaphor, and what better metaphor for life, love, and the universe than technology? Fundamentally, technology is about connections. The transfer of information. Between two machines, information passes, an interpretation is made, a relationship formed. Between two humans, information passes, either spoken or unspoken, and they connect, they relate. Networks, both human and machine, bring people together.

But networks are vulnerable. The data machines transfer can get misinterpreted or lost, or even sabotaged (the Russians!), exposing sensitive data and leaving users vulnerable.

Between humans it’s no different. Say you are talking to your sister over the phone and you misinterpret what she has said. You get upset and hang up while she is still speaking; the connection is broken and you don’t hear from her for a year.

We have little warning nor protection against these “system failures.” We can put up as many firewalls as we want, but someone will inevitably manage to worm their way in and hurt us. Love is a virus. You meet someone, call him a troll. He infects you with his malware that has now let loose its virus on your heart. Damage control is your only course of action at this point. Hold your breath and wait to be blindsided. Say, after fifteen years of what you thought was a happy marriage, your wife comes up to you and tells you she never loved you to begin with. You did not see it coming. Like in 2020, the government didn’t see the Russians coming when they hacked into the network software of eighteen thousand enterprises. Vulnerability can hurt. A lot.

Riding High in April

The engineer in my new novel, Riding High in April, tries to build a network invulnerable to hacks and heartache. He crosses the world. Risks everything: his reputation, his bank account, and the only real human connection he’s ever had. But no matter how hard he tries, his network breaks. And it keeps breaking. Human or machine, it no longer matters, because our relationship with technology has become ubiquitous with our relationship to humans. Think of when you want to connect with someone, how you open up your laptop and click on Zoom. Or if you want to job network, you don’t go to a fair, you turn on your social media app and enter a virtual chat room. “Virtualization:” that which makes real what is not. First machines. Now, humans. I am an emulation of the physical version of myself. And this is not speculative fiction I’m talking about. This is the world we live in today.

For most of us, technology is a black box which we’d prefer to keep closed. “Just make it work,” is typically the breadth of our curiosity. But, as fiction writers, when we are writing a tech driven book, we must ask ourselves the fundamental question of whether to open the black box or not.

If we leave the box closed, we can make it do anything we want: fly, swim, travel through time, predict the future. Like in The Circle by Dave Eggars, a mock Facebook-Google-Amazon like company envisions personal trinkets that see all because, “All that happens must be known.” In Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart, characters wear pendants that rank the people they meet based on various health, financial, and personal metrics. In either story, it doesn’t matter how the device (the black box) works. It just does. And it’s scary.

Opening the Box

You can also OPEN the black box, as I chose to do, and out comes a can of worms: switches and nodes and firewalls, Linux boxes and redundancy procedures. The blood and guts, the stuff we users don’t want to see. Mine was a conscious decision to open the box. My husband worked in tech for years, and I worked on the fringe of it before I became a fiction writer. Forget about the apps and the pendants, forget about the evangelists, the unicorns, the press focusing the few but not the many, I wanted readers to see inside real tech vs. speculative, to get a look at the guys (and a few gals); the engineers out there fighting to keep the nuts and bolts of technology churning, growing, changing, and evolving. Under the radar, from all corners of the world, these are the guys (and a few gals), dedicated day in and day out to making technology work so that the rest of us can go about our blissful, screen-filled days unfettered. These guys are not the twenty-five-year-olds. These guys are as old as time. There is no Silicon Valley cover story about these guys.

But if you open the black box, you have to get the tech right. The HBO series Silicon Valley got the tech right. In fact, the directors were so intent on getting it right that they hired MIT consultants to make sure that if a whiteboard sat half-blurred in the background of a scene, every last illegible scribble was technically accurate.

Getting Inside the Box

So how to get inside the box?

Here’s a trick. Let your character do it for you.

When I write a story, I tend to let the characters drive the action. The girlfriend, at one point in the story, starts writing a book about computer networks even though she knows little about computer networks. I know little about computer networks. I had to do a lot of research to understand networks enough to write about them. But my character made it easier; she did the research for me. In one way, the book can be seen as me writing a book about a woman writing a book about a topic with which her boyfriend is obsessed. Hers is an existential journey into decoding the coder. And if you’re not aware of this yet, you should be: the coders are the people out there building our futures. Running the world. White males, the majority of them.

My character takes it a step further than I ever would. Curious, and feeling it her duty—the world is in desperate need of women coders—she teaches herself how to code. It’s a whimsical exercise mostly, but she dives deep enough into it to be frightened of what she sees there, not in the code, but in herself. How coding feeds her obsessive, competitive nature. She won’t stop until her program works. Days pass before she knows what is happening. By the time she surfaces, she is gasping for air. Oh sure, she can code, but does she want to? By learning how to code, she decodes herself. What does she find? A mass of data, process, analysis, and information that her brain constantly manipulates into some story. She is a machine not unlike the machines that her boyfriend spends his every waking hour programming to do whatever he wants them to do.

Don’t be afraid to open the black box and see what spill outs. Your characters are stronger than you think, they’ll figure it out, and in the process take you to places you never knew existed.