by Liz Moore
There was nothing keeping her at the office now: Meredith, after all, was leading the meeting. She put on her jacket, stood up, and walked across the main floor—strange looks from her colleagues, from Tom Tsien—and then out the door and into her car. She had suggested, to Gregory, a restaurant called Larkspur, avoiding Palo Alto’s most popular spots. It was a sort of tearoom, someplace that served breakfast and lunch, someplace she hadn’t tried before; someplace, she thought, where she wouldn’t be seen by anyone she knew. She didn’t want to have to introduce Gregory to anyone, or explain what they were doing.
As she drove, she contemplated David.
He existed in a deep recess of her mind as a strange and painful chapter of her own history that she only thought about when she was prepared for sadness. She tried to convince herself that she had come to terms with him; that she was comfortable, at last, with never knowing the truth about him. But she was not certain she had been successful in this endeavor. He was troubled: this was how she had categorized him. The word she used to describe him, always, to friends.
She still had dreams about him, though—regularly, once a week or more—and in them he appeared to her as the face of all the benevolence in the universe. A kind and somehow holy presence that blessed and pacified her, that eased her worry, that calmed her. She woke up from these dreams consoled; but any warm feelings she had were quickly replaced with suspicion, with the unsettling sensation of being lied to again and again—even by her own recollections.
The restaurant was on a side street, in a Craftsman-style house.
When she walked in, she realized that she had gotten there first. She had not wanted to. She was more nervous than she could have anticipated: to see Gregory, yes; but also to hear what he had to say. It had been so long since she had spoken directly to anyone about David.
The place was decorated inside to represent the period of the house’s construction. Light wood and rich colors. She ordered tea. She asked for bread. It came with delicate small pots of jam and marmalade. She waited five minutes, and then ten.
Moments later she received a text from him: looking for parking. be there soon.
And then there he was, Gregory, finally, rushing toward her in an overcoat, a look of apology on his face. He was benevolently inept: he elbowed another patron in his rush to the table, and then stooped down to excuse himself for longer than was necessary, bowing in apology.
There was a moment when Ada half rose from the table, uncertain whether he would expect a hug, but he sat down abruptly across from her and, relieved, she sank back into her chair.
“Cold out!” said Gregory, before he said anything else. He took a piece of bread from the basket, ripped off a piece, chewed quickly. “I thought San Francisco was supposed to be warmer this time of year.”
Ada nodded. It was January. Typically, it was. She watched his jaw as he chewed. It was a day or two past being shaved: his face was thin now, thinner than it had been the last time she had seen him. He had lost the elfin look he had had as a child; but his eyes were still large and inquisitive, his mouth fine and interesting. Now, newly, there were flecks of gray in his hair.
“How have you been? Good to see you,” said Gregory. He seemed nervous.
“I’m good,” said Ada. And she racked her brain for questions she could ask him, so she would not have to answer any about herself. “How’s the house?”
“Oh,” Gregory said vaguely. “Old. You know.”
“And the job?”
“Great,” said Gregory. “Good as it can be, I mean. Too much sometimes, but you know how it is.”
“I do,” said Ada.
“How about yours?” Gregory asked. “How’s Tri-Tech?”
She paused. She wondered if Gregory knew the details of Tri-Tech’s recent troubles. Industry websites had been reporting on the topic for a year, and last week rumors of layoffs had been posted on TechCrunch. Gregory didn’t seem like the type to keep up with industry gossip, though.
Before she could say anything, the waitress came by to ask him for his drink order.
“Coffee,” he said. “Black.”
“And how’s Kathryn?” asked Ada.
Roughly, he ripped off another piece of the bread with his teeth, and chewed it with a sort of aggressiveness, to make it clear perhaps that he could not speak. He looked out the window as he did so.
Ada took a sip of her tea. She wasn’t certain what to say. The silence went on for longer than was comfortable.
“I was hoping to save that for later,” said Gregory. “But what the heck. We’re getting a divorce.”
He shrugged at her, looked at her with wide, defensive eyes.
“I’m sorry,” said Ada.
“Yeah,” said Gregory. “Really knocks the wind out of you.”
She had a vision of him, suddenly, as he had been in middle school: broken, scurrying from place to place, avoiding anyone’s eye. These days he stood up straighter, looked intently at anyone speaking to him. He might even be called handsome, in a way that was subtle enough to present itself slowly, over the course of a long conversation. It was funny, she thought, what adulthood did to a person; William had grown into something nearly unrecognizable, his only attractive quality the unshakable confidence that he had acquired as a child. Gregory, on the other hand, had grown interesting to look at. He had fine dark eyebrows that he raised, one at a time, to emphasize a point. Thanks to years of braces he had excellent teeth, straight and white, and as an adult he smiled frequently. Ada imagined that new acquaintances of his suspected nothing of the trauma he had endured at school when he was a child. But his voice had retained a hint of it: there was a slight, almost imperceptible quaver to his speech, and he still occasionally stammered. Ada heard both qualities, now, as he spoke.
The waitress returned, delivered his coffee; and then, perhaps sensing the gravity of the moment, departed swiftly once again.
“She’s keeping the house, too,” said Gregory.
“No,” said Ada.
“Yup,” said Gregory. “Mom’s house. I’ve got half my stuff in my car already. Mostly old gear and cables and stuff, antiques.”
“Where are you moving?”
“Some new apartment building in Cambridge,” he said. “With a bunch of college kids. Can you believe it?”
“When do you have to leave?” Ada asked.
He shrugged again, ripped off more bread. He was clutching the crust of it in his hand too firmly. It was disintegrating in his grip. “Soon as possible,” he said. “I’m already paying rent at the new place. We’ve been separated for a year already, and she’s at her new boyfriend’s now most of the time, anyway. They’ll probably move into the house together as soon as I’m gone.”
They sat in silence, briefly, until at last the waitress returned to take their order.
“Two scrambled eggs,” said Gregory.
“Nothing, thanks,” said Ada.
Ada sipped her tea. She pictured Liston’s house and David’s house, too, sitting a few lots apart on Shawmut Way. Soon she would know nobody who lived there, and the thought made her feel hollow. For as little as she saw Gregory, she still took comfort in the thought of him living on their old street, bearing inside him the story of his mother, of David, of Ada. It connected her, in some intangible way, to her past.
He stared down at the table. He looked incredibly forlorn.
“Tri-Tech’s failing,” she said, abruptly. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they folded in a year.” It was true, and it seemed right to tell him. A fair trade, a secret for a secret.
“On top of that,” she continued, “I think they might be edging me out. I was supposed to be leading a meeting right now that I was disinvited to this morning.” It was almost funny, as she told it to Gregory: it was a relief to say it. She felt the deep absurdity of it welling up inside her, softening its edges, lessening the blow of having wasted most of her professional life to date on a company that was fundamentally unsound, subject to t
he ignoble whims of an egomaniacal leader. She was working for an outfit that prized money over ideas. David, she knew, would have predicted a different future for her: and this was the thought that needled her, that pierced her sometimes unexpectedly as she was driving to work each day. This was the guilty whispering voice that kept her up at night.
“I’m thinking of quitting,” she said.
“Oh, yeah?” he asked. “I guess we’re both screwed.” And, for the first time, he smiled.
Gregory reached into the inner pocket of his overcoat then, and from it he produced an object. Silently, he offered it to her.
It was the original floppy disk that David had given her twenty-six years ago. It was lost; she had thought that it was lost. That Liston had donated the dictionary in which it had been housed.
“My God,” said Ada, and instinctively she reached for it, as if reaching for her father.
“I found it while I was going through the house,” said Gregory. “Packing to leave.”
“Where was it?” she asked.
“The attic,” he said.
“How did it get up there?” she asked him, and he told her he didn’t know.
It had been many years since she had held a floppy disk. Even longer since she had held this one, the original, which she had years and years ago stashed away for safekeeping, working only from copies after that. This one was a five-and-a-quarter-inch disk—an obscure link between the eight-inch disk and the more famous three-and-a-half-inch disk—that just happened to be the standard format for saving data when David had created it. It was enclosed in an opaque white clamshell case, For Ada scrawled in black permanent marker across it. She opened it. Inside was the disk itself, made of matte black plastic. A sticker with the brand name, Verbatim, was affixed to the upper left corner. The upper right corner was the one with the label. There, too, was David’s familiar handwriting, which felt, as always, like a punch to the gut. It had been so long since she had seen it.
Dear Ada, it said on the label. A puzzle for you. With my love, your father, David Sibelius.
“I put it into an ancient disk drive and opened it,” said Gregory. “But the file was corrupt.”
Ada was distracted. She put a finger up to the inscription.
“So no one’s solved it,” said Gregory.
Ada shook her head. She looked at him. In his face she recognized an old glint of the self-satisfaction that had annoyed her as a child, but now it gave her hope.
“Do you have the encryption memorized?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I thought you would,” he said. “Here. Write it out.” He fished in his pockets once again, produced a pen, pushed a napkin across the table at her.
She wrote:
DHARSNELXRHQHLTWJFOLKTWDURSZJZCMILWFTALVUHVZRDLDEYIXQ.
Gregory took the receipt back. Studied it. A light moved across his face.
“Do you have any ideas at all?” Gregory asked.
“Not really,” Ada said. “The consensus is either that David wasn’t in his right mind when he created it, or that he made it using a one-time pad.”
And as she said it, she lifted from the table the floppy disk Gregory had brought her. She studied it.
It had been years since she had broken an encryption, but she still recognized the buzzing, electric feeling of being on the cusp of undoing one—she had first felt it as a child, with David next to her, guiding her—and it overtook her now. She felt light-headed.
“Do you see it?” said Gregory.
There were fifty-three letters in the encryption.
DHARSNELXRHQHLTWJFOLKTWDURSZJZCMILWFTALVUHVZRDLDEYIXQ
There were fifty-three letters in the message David had written to her, on the label carefully affixed to the original disk:
Dear Ada. A puzzle for you. With my love, your father, David Sibelius.
So there it was, at last: the one-time pad that Hayato had guessed might exist. Without the original disk, without the label stuck to it, the copies they had all been working from were meaningless. The encryption, without its key, was an orphan.
From there, it took them ten minutes to decrypt the rest. Gregory’s eggs arrived. He let them go cold.
“Everything okay?” asked the puzzled waitress, but they barely looked up.
They assigned each letter in the encryption its logical number—4 for D, 8 for H, 1 for A, 18 for R, 19 for S, 14 for N—and from each subtracted the numerical substitute for the letters in the message on the label: 4 for D, 5 for E, 1 for A, 18 for R, 1 for A, 4 for D.
4 minus 4 was 0.
8 minus 5 was 3.
1 minus 1 was 0.
18 minus 18 was 0.
19 minus 1 was 18.
14 minus 4 was 10.
0, 3, 0, 0, 18, 10 translated to nothing obvious at first: it looked something like _ C _ _ R J.
“Try shifting every letter up to the next one,” said Ada. And _C_ _ R J suddenly became ADAASK.
They continued to work until, at last, the whole decrypted message sat before them on the screen, unpunctuated and abrupt, a telegraph message sent to them from twenty-six years in the past.
ADA ASK ELIXIR WHO IS HAROLD WITH LOVE YOUR FATHER HAROLD CANADY
It was easy to reach Frank Halbert, now the head of the old laboratory at the Bit. His information was public, and they found it quickly online. He answered Ada’s e-mail immediately. Yes, he said; the program’s still running.
1980s
Boston
Liston was waiting for her in the hallway outside David’s room at St. Andrew’s. Ada kept one hand in her jacket pocket, around the four-leaf clover charm she had taken out of David’s grip. Would he miss it, when he woke? Inside it, the key rattled gently.
When they reached Savin Hill, Ada said there was something she needed from inside David’s house, and Liston, kindly, left her alone. She entered through the kitchen, walked into David’s office. And then she moved directly to the filing cabinet that she had tried in vain to open the first time she ever searched the house.
The tall tan cabinet still had its crooked look from when she had tried to force it open with a crowbar. Now, holding her breath, she fitted the silver key neatly into the lock. It turned.
She paused before pulling open the top drawer. She was relieved to find it empty.
The second drawer, however, was nearly full to the brim with a stack of pages printed on a dot-matrix printer, every page still connected to its neighbor, every perforated edge still attached. She lifted the stack out of the drawer.
The Unseen World, the first page said, in larger font across the top. She paused: it was the same title David had given to the document that Gregory had found on his computer, which she had not yet made sense of.
Below it: pages and pages of code. A hundred printed pages. Maybe more. It was written in an iteration of Lisp, and it looked like a game; she could see that; she recognized its cues and commands, its particular shape. As for what it was meant to do: that was beyond her. And she did not know on what platform it could be run.
Was this, she wondered, what David had been working on, secretly, in his final years in the house? All those evenings he had disappeared into his office; all those mornings she had woken him up after he had fallen asleep, the night before, at his desk?
She reassembled the pages. She placed them on his desk, and then turned on his computer.
Already she had been through every file he’d saved, and she had seen nothing like this document. Still, she searched again, and then once more, looking for anything that resembled The Unseen World in electronic form.
She found nothing.
She’d have to manually type every line of the printed text herself, then—slowly and painstakingly, avoiding mistakes that might corrupt the program. Only once she had an electronic copy could she begin to determine the platform it required.
That evening, she began.
(define
flip
#decl (process)
(con
d ((type? , rep subr fsubr)
(set read-table (put (ivector 3444 0) (chtype (ascii i () fix) i ))
(evaltype form segment)
(applytype grrt fix)
(put (alltypes) 3 (4 (alltypes)))
(substitute 2 1)
(off .bh))))
(indec (ff) string)
(define ilo (body type np1 np2 “optional” m1 m2)
#indec ((body np1 np2 p1 p2) string (type) fix)
(cond ((or (and (member “(open drawer)” .body)
(not (member ,nbup ,winners)))
(and (member .np1 ,winners)))
(member ,ff .body)))
(eval (parse .body)))))
(dismiss t))
; “subtitle kitchen, shawmut way”
(define house ()
(cond ((verb? “search”)
(say)
2009
Boston
There was a seat available on the same plane to Boston that Gregory was taking. It was leaving the next day.
After meeting with Gregory, Ada didn’t go back to Tri-Tech. She couldn’t. She would find out from Tom, who would find out from Bill, how the meeting had gone. She would call in the next day and tell Bill that she had to go to Boston. “Family emergency,” she would say—and, because he had never once asked her anything about her life, because he had no sense that, in fact, she had no family, he wouldn’t know any different. In a way, she told herself, it was true.
She would quit, she decided. She had to. But all of that could wait until her return.
That night, at home, she turned in a full circle, assessing what to pack. She couldn’t think well. She mouthed the names of items as she put them into her suitcase. It was winter. January. That year, San Francisco was cold, but Boston would be freezing. She opened the bottom drawer of her dresser, rifled through the clothing in her closet. Since moving to the West Coast, she had shed most of her cold-weather gear. She remembered Boston’s version of winter as something breathtaking, unkind.
