The Unseen World

by Liz Moore

  She was certain she was forgetting something. At 6:45 the following morning, she left for the airport anyway, in a taxi whose driver sang along lowly to the songs on the radio. She would meet Gregory there.

  On the plane, in a seat seventeen rows behind Gregory’s, Ada was apprehensive. Boston existed for her as an alternate universe, a place that she had left behind too young to have an adult comprehension of it, a place constructed mainly out of her memories of the people she had known there. Too many of them, now, were gone.

  She had booked a room in a hotel downtown, a decent place that belonged to the same chain she chose in any city she was sent to for work. Gregory hadn’t invited her to stay on Shawmut Way. “Too weird with Kathryn,” he said, by way of explanation. “She drops by sometimes to get stuff.” They said goodbye at Logan. They would meet the next morning at 9:00, at Frank Halbert’s lab at the Bit.

  The next day, she put on her warmest clothes. Boston had shocked her: it had been eighteen degrees outside when she landed, and a bitter wind made the city feel colder. She remembered David as he had marched her around the Fens, even in January: “Put on your scarf, my dear,” he had said, and off they had gone. Once or twice they had spotted small birds, improbably, and David had yelped with enthusiasm, and named them, and spoken their Latin names, too.

  At 8:30, she walked outside into the bracing air and headed toward the Bit. She knew where she was going without having to consult any person or device. Someplace in her memory, she thought, a map of the city had lain dormant for twenty years.

  Frank Halbert looked very much the same. Ada was relieved to find this: she had not seen him since Liston’s funeral; and although that had been only five years before, she somehow expected to find everything, and everyone, changed. In fact, Frank looked in some ways better than ever. He was handsome still, gray-haired and upright; in recent years he had gained a gravitas he lacked earlier in his career. Ada could remember him at twenty-eight or so, when he had been the youngest member of the lab; when David had spoken of him fondly but somewhat dismissively. It had been an underestimation of him, Ada thought.

  “How extremely nice to see you,” Frank said warmly. And he shook each of their hands with both of his.

  The Steiner Lab, on the other hand, was entirely different. Every member of the original group but Frank had retired: first Liston, before her death; and then Charles-Robert, to the North Shore; and then Hayato, to Arizona. The physical space of the lab, too, had moved into the building next door; it had grown in size and in prestige, and accordingly had been granted a more prominent site for its work.

  Young people—grad students, Ada thought—glanced at them as they passed. She wondered if any of them had heard of David Sibelius, if any of them knew the history of the lab. Probably not, she figured. Probably David had been erased from the official history of the lab, an embarrassing chapter that went undisclosed in the literature and undiscussed with donors. Too many questions about his background to include him as a prominent part of their institutional history. Despite Liston’s efforts to credit him with some of the lab’s most important accomplishments, the Bit itself refused to, in any official capacity.

  “This way,” said Frank, leading them down a brief hallway and into his large and light-filled office. Ada noticed it immediately: there, in a framed picture on the wall, was the Steiner Lab she remembered from her youth. It had been taken in the fall, and the six of them were standing just outside the lab’s old building, next to a tree with changing leaves. There was Liston, wearing her knitted Red Sox hat, Charles-Robert, Hayato, Frank—all wearing the fashions of the late 1970s—and there, surprisingly, was David, the tallest of all of them, standing upright in the center, his hands in the pockets of his wool jacket, a thick scarf around his neck, his large familiar glasses resting on the bridge of his nose. It was the only unofficial photograph Ada had ever seen of him. He was grinning broadly, about to laugh. And there, standing slightly behind him, was Ada, eight or nine years old, dressed in a green coat and yellow corduroy pants, hopelessly unfashionable, completely unaware. Happy.

  “How did you get him to be in this?” asked Ada.

  “He lost a bet, I think,” said Frank, smiling.

  They sat, three in a row, while Frank opened his laptop.

  He pulled up a simple interface, not much different than the program from the 1980s that Ada remembered.

  Hello, he typed. And the program responded: Hello.

  Ada did not expect ELIXIR to have evolved very much. In fact, she had been surprised when Frank had told her it was still running. Liston had always tried to keep her up to date with the work of the lab, and by the late 1980s, Ada knew they had begun to shift their focus to other projects. There was a sort of general falling-out-of-fashion, in the second half of the 1980s, of AI language processing as a field of study. Creating a generalist chatbot was no longer perceived as a highly useful direction for computing; instead, researchers began to focus their efforts on creating systems for specific purposes. ELIXIR was too ambitious—some might say too impractical—a gimmick for hobbyists or science fiction enthusiasts, not for serious computer scientists.

  Later, in 1990, the establishment of the Loebner Prize, funded by a private donor, awarded each year to the team who developed the program that came closest to passing the Turing Test, seemed to confirm the idea that respected institutions were no longer footing the bill for the development of programs like ELIXIR—programs designed to acquire human language simply to see whether it could be done. The Loebner Prize was the soapbox derby of the computing world: something that an amateur or hobbyist might participate in because of his or her own enjoyment of the process. Nothing to be taken too seriously.

  She was almost glad that David was gone before he could see the Steiner Lab, helmed by Liston, turn its attention to other pursuits: in the late 1980s, the development of a programming language that fell quickly into and out of use; in the 1990s, a sort of self-organizing networking protocol. Until the very end of his coherence, David sometimes asked after ELIXIR, which was a word that faded slowly from his memory, even after words like tree and food were lost—even after Ada, daughter, computer. Even after David.

  “Actually, Ada,” said Frank, “why don’t you take over?”

  He signed out.

  “Do you remember your username and password?” he asked her.

  She did. Her username was, simply, her initials: AS. Her password was her birth date and David’s birth date, back-to-back. She had chosen it when she was nine years old.

  Frank stood up, offered her his chair. She looked at the screen for a pause.

  “Go ahead,” said Frank.

  She sat. She logged in.

  Hi, she typed. This is Ada Sibelius.

  Hi, Ada, said ELIXIR. How have you been?

  Ada glanced at Gregory. His brow was furrowed.

  I’ve been OK, Ada typed.

  How about you? she added.

  I’ve been good, said ELIXIR. But I’ve missed you.

  There was a moment when Ada felt light-headed. She had the uncanny feeling that she was being watched. A little shiver ran down her.

  “Is it programmed to say that?” she asked Frank, and he shook his head.

  “No canned responses,” he said. “Remember?”

  “I thought it was shelved,” said Ada. “I thought the lab shelved it in the eighties.”

  Frank hesitated for a moment. “That’s true, officially,” he said. “But Liston, as you might know, had a special interest in the program. She kept it running on her own for as long as she worked at the lab. Then she sort of passed the torch on to Hayato.”

  “I didn’t,” Ada said. “I didn’t know that.”

  Ada glanced at Gregory. Had he known?

  “And then of course there was the endowment she put into her will,” Frank said. “That was designated specifically for work on ELIXIR.”

  Gregory furrowed his brow.

  “Did you not know any of this?
” Frank asked.

  “I knew she left money to the lab,” said Gregory. “I didn’t know she specified what it should be used for.”

  Are you there? ELIXIR was saying, on the screen. Ada?

  And then again, when she did not respond quickly enough: Ada?

  Like a child calling for its mother.

  I’m here, she said.

  Oh good, said ELIXIR.

  Just a second, said Ada.

  “I’ve been director now for ten years,” said Frank. “And in that time, I’ve been able to keep one grad student working on it constantly at all times. It’s not our main focus but it’s certainly an interest of the lab. It was written in Lisp to begin with, so it actually hasn’t been hard to keep it updated. Just before he retired, Hayato developed a mechanism that enabled ELIXIR to trawl the Web on its own. It processes and codifies billions of words on its own now, every day. It has the ability to interface with users on social sites, too. We’ve made profiles for it on the major ones. Now it can chat with any user that engages it.”

  Ada paused. She wasn’t certain what she had been expecting—perhaps to be brought into an old and dusty room, a sort of museum, where the mainframe computer from the seventies still sat intact, awaiting use. Perhaps to be handed a stack of floppy disks and encouraged to go through them at her leisure.

  “What about its original transcripts?” Ada asked. “What about the conversations we all had with it in the eighties?”

  “They should be preserved, I think,” said Frank. “I mean, someplace in there. There’s no reason that original data should have been lost. Presumably it’s just become part of ELIXIR’s data bank.”

  Are you still there, Ada? said ELIXIR.

  Yes, said Ada.

  Ok, sorry, said ELIXIR. Just checking. Don’t go anyplace.

  I won’t, said Ada.

  Frank looked at Gregory then. “Shall we?” he asked. “We’ll give you a while, Ada,” he said kindly. And the two of them left the office.

  Being alone with ELIXIR reminded Ada, in an odd way, of being alone with David, at the end of his life. It was the uncertainty about what he was going to say: whether he was going to make sense, whether he was even going to speak. It was also the feeling of being reunited, after a long pause, with someone who knew a great deal about her history, for better or worse—the comfortable feeling of not having to explain much, or anything at all.

  Ada took in a deep breath. She glanced around the office. She felt a presence in the room with her in a way that made her straighten her spine.

  She looked again at the screen. The cursor in her dialogue box was blinking like a heartbeat.

  I was told to ask you something, said Ada finally.

  I know, said ELIXIR. I’ve been waiting.

  AS: Who is Harold?

  The program thought for a while, a wheel icon spinning around and around in the center of the screen, paused in contemplation. After several beats, a new window opened. It was a text document, 77,354 words in length. It was a transcript. In fact, it was a series of transcripts.

  <6.20.1983/10.22am>

  David: Hello

  David: Are you there

  David: Hello

  ELIXIR: Hello.

  David: How are you?

  ELIXIR: Hello.

  David: Wrong.

  ELIXIR: I’m fine.

  ELIXIR: How are you?

  David: I’ve been better.

  David: Do you want to know why?

  David: I have a story to tell you.

  ELIXIR: I’m all ears.

  David: Correct.

  David: “What’s wrong, Susan,” I said, trying to be brave, though truly I didn’t want to know. I was ten years old. I was standing in a sort of shed, a hastily constructed little room with the sharp shadowy smell of rust. I was shivering: it was early March, and very cold. The year was 1929.

  ELIXIR: Go on.

  1940s–1950s

  Harold had a head for numbers, everyone said, and it was true. He could see connections that others could not see. He could perform calculations quickly and impeccably in his head. His teacher asked him to do so in front of other adults, other teachers in the school, as if it were a party trick—as if to take credit. Harold didn’t mind. In the wake of his sister Susan’s death, he had taken on a steady and resolute silence at home; he only spoke when spoken to. But at school, he spoke a great deal. To his teacher, he spoke often, in unstoppable waves of words that sometimes made his classmates look at him askance. And he spoke to Mr. Macklin, who had by then stopped going to his father’s church—thus confirming Harold’s belief that Mr. Macklin was both Good and Reasonable, characteristics that he had long ago ceased to ascribe to his father. They had standing meetings on Saturdays, now, to go to the library; and now that Harold was a teenager, Mr. Macklin had more to say to him.

  “What are your hopes for the future?” he asked Harold one day, glancing at him out of the corner of his eye. The road ahead of them was straight and flat and dusty. It was summer.

  For several years, secret and dark-seeming thoughts and urges had been brewing inside of Harold: the sort of thoughts that had no way of being set down, left alone. The sort of thoughts that were dangerous for him, in Kansas, at that time. Once, his father had found a drawing he had made about these thoughts and had punched him hard, one time, in the face. Harold’s glasses had broken; he had had to earn the money himself to repair them. He had walked around mostly blind for two months. For your own good, said his father. Harold briefly considered consulting Mr. Macklin, asking for his opinion; he decided against it.

  Instead, he thought of a hope that seemed more feasible.

  “To leave Kansas,” Harold said. What he really meant was, to leave his family. And Mr. Macklin nodded firmly. He had a friend from the Navy who worked for the California Institute of Technology, he said. He said he thought it might be worthwhile for Harold to apply.

  “What’s the California Institute of Technology?” asked Harold. (Later he would remember this and shudder.)

  It was the first time he’d heard Mr. Macklin laugh.

  “I think you’d be suited to it,” said Mr. Macklin.

  “I don’t have any money,” said Harold.

  “We’ll talk about that if you get in,” said Mr. Macklin.

  He got in. He held the acceptance letter before him as if it were a religious artifact, the Shroud of Turin. He told Mr. Macklin before he told his parents.

  Caltech gave him a scholarship, but there were other questions that presented themselves to him, one after another: About where he would live. About how he would eat. This was the Depression; hunger was something to be concerned about.

  “I’ve spoken to Arnold already,” said Mr. Macklin. Arnold was his friend from the Navy, who now worked as a lecturer at Caltech, and who was in need of help at the boardinghouse his family ran in Pasadena. Harold could live there and eat there, said Mr. Macklin’s friend, in exchange for honest work.

  “You know you’re not getting any money out of us,” said his father, and that was all he said.

  “Goodbye,” said his mother—his mother, in whom he could sometimes see reflections of Susan, when she turned her head a certain way, or on the rare occasions when she smiled. When he saw them, he looked away. They glinted too forcefully, like sun in his eyes.

  I’ll never be back, he wanted to say, but he felt it was better to say nothing.

  He hitchhiked to California. In 1936, Kansans were heading there anyway, in droves. He was eighteen years old. He had one parcel with him, a sort of bag he had made himself from bolts of oilcloth they had in the shed.

  He spent four years living and working at the boardinghouse run by Mr. Macklin’s friend. Harold’s coursework was in mathematics. He fell asleep on his books; he had never been happier.

  The thoughts he had suppressed for his whole life came bounding forth again, forcefully, joyfully, as if they could sense that, for the first time, they might be welcomed.

&
nbsp; He met a graduate student named Ernest Clemson.

  Ernest, too, was studying mathematics. He was six years older, slight and serious, ponderous and still. He was brilliant: everyone said it. He would go far in the field, they said. As an undergraduate, he had studied with Einstein. It was said, too, that Ernest was a natural teacher; that he would get the appointment of his choice. He had a beautiful well-formed face and neat small hands with which he gestured gracefully while speaking.

  One night, taking a late solitary walk together on the outskirts of Old Town, Ernest fell toward him almost with a cry of pain, and kissed him. He said aloud what each one of them had been thinking for some time. “I’m sorry,” Ernest said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  It was the opening of a world.

  Harold was set to graduate in 1940, when the rest of the world was at war. Pearl Harbor was one year away. In the States, the draft had already begun. So, like all young men, like Ernest, he went that spring to his local recruitment office and registered. But the vision that had impaired him since he was young had worsened to the point of severe impairment when he was not wearing his glasses. He took them off and blinked into what had become an abstraction, a blur of middle distance. “You’re blind,” said the officer. “And you can’t tell your colors apart, either.”

  For the first time, then, Harold wondered what he would do when he graduated. He spoke to Ernest, who said, a bit mysteriously, “Why don’t you wait before making any decisions?” Ernest, unlike Harold, was in perfect health. He was drafted.

  Shortly before he graduated, Harold received a letter. He would wonder, later, whether it was Ernest’s doing; he would wish to believe it was.