The Unseen World

by Liz Moore

  There was no funeral. David had always been deeply uncomfortable in churches. He was cremated, and for two years his ashes sat on Liston’s mantel, until one day, home from college, Ada realized where he would want them to go. That dark night, she and Liston drove them to the Bit and scattered them all over the campus, and for some reason it was funny, and they laughed. But it was right: the lab was where David had been the happiest, the most at ease, the most himself—whoever he had been.

  That was the last year Ada lived with the Listons. She went to college in the fall, attending UMass on scholarship, following in Liston’s footsteps. Over holidays, and in the summers, she visited Dorchester, sat with Liston on her porch for hours, chatting, gossiping about the lab. But mainly she lived on her own. She rented an apartment in Amherst; she shared it with two roommates all year long. She worked in a computer science laboratory headed by a kind professor named Maria Strauss.

  It was in her coursework, as an undergraduate, that she discovered the meaning of the Unseen World. Two of the documents she had found among David’s things had been labeled as such: the printed, lengthy source code that she had pulled out of David’s filing cabinet, and the electronic text document on David’s computer that Gregory had found first.

  The former, once she had painstakingly, manually entered it into a text document and shown it to Liston, turned out to be an odd virtual tour of their own house: a sort of user-driven navigation of David’s house on Shawmut Street. The user was given choices about where to go and what to see; always, the user was returned, at the end, to the kitchen, where the program began. Ada couldn’t fathom why David would have created such a program, but she was relieved, in a way, that it was nothing more.

  The latter, the document that Gregory found, had borne four items: a paragraph—an excerpt from A. S. Eddington’s Science and the Unseen World, which Ada had located easily with the help of Anna Holmes, and which broadly questioned man’s ability to perceive reality using so biased an instrument as his brain—and three phrases, more cryptic. Ivan Sutherland. Sword of Damocles. Elixir’s house.

  The work of Ivan Sutherland, a near-contemporary of David’s, came up early in Dr. Strauss’s class on the history of hardware. Sutherland was the primary inventor of the first virtual reality system with a head-mounted display, in 1968. He named it after an object from a myth: the fabled sword that hung on a thread above the head of Damocles, signifying that with power comes the burden of responsibility.

  Ivan Sutherland. Sword of Damocles. Elixir’s house.

  A series of thoughts occurred to her, one after the next: Was David referring to virtual reality itself as a house for ELIXIR? A virtual world the program could inhabit—long after David himself was gone?

  Suddenly the memory of all of David’s masks and goggles returned to her, the row of objects and devices that hung over his workbench in the basement like the helmets of a knight. Head-mounted displays, she thought: they were primitive, basic HMDs. She and Liston had thrown them out as part of the great purging of the house on Shawmut Way; now she wished they hadn’t. Her heart contracted. David had been trying to build a world for them, she thought. For the two of them and ELIXIR. Someplace unreachable and cloistered. Someplace fair.

  Virtual reality, she thought, was the unseen world. Or had the capacity to be. In fact, it could be said that all computer systems were such: universes that operated outside the realm of human experience, planets that spun continuously in some unseeable alternate stratosphere, present but undiscovered.

  Soon

  Boston

  “Can I go first?” said Evie.

  She was twelve years old. She was standing in the kitchen, holding the apple that would become her breakfast. She was running late for school.

  “Go where first?” said Ada.

  Evie looked at her, pained. She made a tsk sound and then composed herself. She had been doing this more, recently: trying on adolescent annoyance, rolling her eyes both subtly and unsubtly, depending on the level of the parental offense. Ada caught her sometimes looking guilty in the wake of these moments, or in the wake of an unusually cutting remark that had just burst out of her like a coiled spring. In the pause that followed, she seemed almost shocked by herself, darting a glance at her victim to see if she was hurt, or hastily changing the subject.

  “The UW,” said Evie. “Can I try it first?” She lifted her apple into the air, let it hover there in her hand, awaiting her mother’s response.

  Ada paused. The answer, of course, was no; there were too many things that could go wrong; there were too many other people in line to try it. But Evie looked so earnest, so hopeful, so brave, that she wanted for a moment to say yes. It was Evie’s project, too, after all; she had come to the lab after school every day. She had stayed late with them every night at work. She had worked out problems with them. Discussed the layout of the UW’s first model city. She had been a trouble-shooter, a mediator, a representative of her demographic. She had given them a yes or no on what would be interesting to people her age, or on what they would find boring or too slow.

  “I’ll think about it,” said Ada finally.

  “So, no,” said Evie. “I figured it would be no.”

  She didn’t look too put out. She bit cheerfully into the apple, waved goodbye.

  “See you later,” she said as she went, her mouth full. And she ran out the kitchen door to meet her father, already waiting in the car.

  A moment later, Ada received a memo.

  , said Evie. Good luck today.

  Gregory was dropping Evie off at school that day. At ten-thirty, he would meet the Yang & Cartwright representative at Logan, and then bring him to the Bit, where there was a lab-wide meeting scheduled for 11:00.

  That day, they would test the prototype for the first time.

  Ada walked down Shawmut Way to the T. It was May and warm out, and it had rained the night before. The asphalt gave off a pleasant, ancient smell that reminded her of childhood. It had been five years already since they had moved back in: the Johnson-Akimoye family, empty-nesters now, had put the house on the market, and they had made an offer the next day. Would it be strange, Ada had wondered, living down the block from Gregory’s ex-wife, who still occupied Liston’s house with her husband? But all of them were cordial, and got along, and chatted amiably with one another at block parties and on the occasions when their paths crossed coming home from work.

  The house—David’s house, Ada still called it—had been remodeled over the years, but had retained its bones. All the rooms were still in place, but the kitchen had been redone, maybe twice, and a sunroom had been added off the back. She had looked at it askance at first, but at last admitted that it was very nice on cold days in the winter, when it felt something like a greenhouse. The Johnson-Akimoyes had also installed central air-conditioning and then, five years later, solar panels on the roof.

  When she and Gregory first moved in and were discussing how to decorate, Ada found herself suggesting colors that, she only realized later, were David’s favorites.

  “What about light yellow for the kitchen?” she said, before recalling that this, in fact, had been the color of the kitchen when she was a child. She had done it again with the outside, choosing a pleasant, familiar brown for the shingles that had been painted blue since David owned it; and then again with the carpets. She selected Persian rugs like the ones that David had preferred, leaving the wooden floor largely exposed, beaten up though it was.

  “Should we think about replacing the flooring?” Gregory had asked, eyeing its scratches and gaps, and Ada had said no too quickly. The hardwood flooring was the only thing she recognized distinctly from her youth. She had lain on it, her head on a stack of pillows, and read; later she had studied it intently from her perch on David’s leather sofa, letting her mind drift as, across the room from her, her father’s failed him.

  Ada’s old bedroom became Evie’s new one. The lamp with the Hummel figurines—one of the few items of Davi
d’s that Ada had kept, when his house finally sold—was reinstated on a nightstand that she purchased from a secondhand store. When Evie was little, she had sat or lain with her on her bed for hours, reading to her by the light of that little lamp. She had remembered David as he read to her.

  Two years ago, Evie had decided she was too old for such a thing; since then she had been reading to herself, late into the night. Often, Ada saw the light spilling out from under Evie’s door as she herself was going to bed. In these moments she hesitated, thinking of going inside, wishing herself back to a moment earlier in Evie’s childhood. She was self-conscious now, always aware of intruding into Evie’s life in a way that was unwanted. She lacked the easy self-confidence she imagined other mothers to have, the forceful intuition she heard other mothers describe as nearly otherworldly—in its place was something like a quiet, pleading voice in a dark room. She missed Liston. She often wished for the self-assurance that Liston had had: the certainty that she was correct and that her children, much as she loved them, were also rascally and shifty, always on the lookout for ways to get one over. Ada had never had this feeling about Evie. In fact, commanding her to divulge what she deemed private felt to Ada somehow impolite or wrong. A breach of etiquette. Usually Evie was serious and mature.

  Sometimes Ada blamed David for her uncertainty as a parent. Sometimes she blamed herself.

  Gregory told her she was overthinking things. “She’s fine,” he said. “You’re fine. We’re fine.” And if there was anyone to believe, it was Gregory, who was acquiring, more and more every year, many of his mother’s best qualities.

  Ada got off the T and walked toward the Bit. They were remodeling it slowly, a different building every two years, depending on funding. That year, scaffolding had gone up over the front of the Hemenway Building, in which the lab was housed. Ada held the door open for two workers as she entered.

  Up the elevator to the third floor, down the hallway, toward the double doors that led into the lab. Ada had been employed there for nineteen years. She had been director for twelve, since 2016, when Frank Halbert retired at the age of sixty-six. Shortly before he left, in a ceremony attended by current and former members of the lab, reporters, and a solemn camera crew from a local news station, the lab had been renamed the Harold A. Canady Memorial Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence. Evie had been a baby then, just walking, and she had toddled over to the president of the Bit and placed one little hand on his shoe as he removed the sheet from the sign that now capped the double doorway that Ada walked through on her way to her office.

  In the wake of ELIXIR’s revelations about her father, Ada had debated changing her own last name to reflect the one he was born with. She had never taken Gregory’s last name, but she could be Ada Canady, she thought. It had a certain ring to it. In the end, though, she decided to keep Sibelius, to honor her history, and also to honor George Sibelius: the man who had helped save her father’s life, and his career. Some legal wrangling had been involved—sorting out her new Social Security number alone had taken two years—but at last she was legally Ada Ellen Sibelius (Ellen, she had learned, was Birdie Auerbach’s given name); and David was Harold Albert Canady; and her daughter was Eve Susan Liston. The daughter of Gregory Liston. The granddaughter of Diana Liston and of Harold Canady. The great-niece of Susan Canady, whom Ada had never known.

  When Ada arrived, the lab was already full. Everyone watched her, silent, as she crossed the floor. Hannah, one of that year’s student assistants, stood up as if to greet her, glanced around, and then sat back down. She was young: they all were, by then, nineteen or twenty or twenty-one years old, finished already with college and on to the next phase of their education. They were comfortable with one another, less so with older adults. They spoke a language that she could not entirely understand: they spoke in abbreviations or acronyms, dropped syllables she did not think were expendable, made references to parts of popular culture that, to Ada, felt like distant unreachable rooms, the deepest chambers of a warren. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, she memoed Evie for a translation, and Evie wrote back dutifully. All of Ada’s student assistants were self-taught from an early age: they had been online since birth. They didn’t need coursework to teach them to program. Universities, in response, had made their degrees sleeker, more compact: online degrees had gained respectability, and fixed credit requirements were swapped out in favor of competency exams. The Bit itself had reduced the course loads of its degrees in computer science to reflect the skill sets that most of its students now entered with—students like Hannah, Jeff Singh, Spike Hall, all of whom Ada had gotten to know over the course of that year. Like her father, she invited every year’s students to dinner in August at the house on Shawmut Way; like her father, she made dinner for them—grilled vegetables, not lobster, since so many were vegetarian—and like her father she worried over them, guided them, discussed them avidly with Gregory. They were quick and sharp and sometimes cutting; they navigated the digital landscape with an acuity that Ada would never possess.

  Evie, however, would. Did. She was twelve years old, and already able to teach Ada and Gregory skills and concepts that they otherwise wouldn’t have come across. It was Evie who tutored them in glyphs, which now replaced words entirely in the memos that young people sent to one another. The student assistants in the lab, for example, communicated almost exclusively in this way; they switched into text only for the benefit of their elders.

  , they might say. Meeting 11 today.

  Korean for lunch?

  Ada had an app on her device that translated for her—an extra step that her younger colleagues, and her daughter, did not have to take. She was fifty-five years old now. She and Gregory had had Evie when they were forty-three and forty-two, respectively. How much longer, she wondered, could she stay relevant? It would be the Evies of the world who would effect the biggest changes in the coming years. Not her; not Gregory. There were still times when she wished she could be on the inside of things, as she had been when she was younger. It used to be that she was the one who picked up on cultural references instantly, to the exclusion of older people. Now she smiled uncertainly at the clips and bits her young colleagues sent one another. It was an election year, and a state referendum on information usage had been in the news all summer. She often heard Julio Figueroa in asynchronous surround-sound: the same jokes and commentary made over and over again, in fifteen-second intervals. And the live young laughter of her colleagues as they clapped their hands together. In these moments she smiled uncertainly, feeling as if she could almost, almost understand—but not quite, never fully. As if the jokes told by young people were set at a pitch too high for anyone over fifty to understand.

  This, she knew, was the way of things. And when her daughter rolled her eyes at the slowness of her parents now, when she lost patience with their ineptitude, when she uttered a series of syllables that sounded to Ada like gibberish, she was simultaneously frustrated and pleased.

  At 10:20, she got a memo from Gregory.

  on .

  Jokingly, sometimes, they wrote to one another in glyphs, giddily using them in wild and ridiculous ways, intentionally making gaffes.

  , Ada replied.

  Gregory was almost more excited than she was. He was not officially part of the lab—he still worked for the same robotics firm in Houston, fully remotely now—but he had watched the project evolve, alongside Ada, from its earliest days. When Gregory offered to go to Logan to pick up the representative from Yang & Cartwright, the company they had paid to manufacture the prototype, Ada knew well that it was partly out of kindness and partly out of self-interest: he, too, wanted to be in the room when they tested it for the first time.

  For an hour, Ada sat in her office, alone. She had difficulty concentrating. They had been working on the UW for over a decade. They had seen it progress from an abstraction to something tangible and real. They had had glimpses, along the way, of what it might look like or feel like; beta version
s that used headsets, graphics that they perfected on a screen. Every member of the lab had used head-mounted displays routinely, ever since they had hit the market over a decade before. But nothing that was available approached this level of sophistication or complexity. Nothing aimed to integrate the senses the way the UW did. No existing technology responded to thoughts and neural impulses and the small unconscious flickers of the human brain the way the UW would. Anything could happen in the Unseen World; and the idea of it made her giddy and terrified at once.

  “So it’s an acid trip,” said Gregory, once, and Ada had laughed.

  “A really expensive one,” she said.

  The version she had worked on for Tri-Tech in the aughts had, unsurprisingly, never received funding; after a year of trying and failing to attract investors, in 2011 the firm folded. By then Ada was already back in Boston, working for Frank Halbert at the Bit.

  In 2016, when she took over as director of the Canady Lab, she had sent Bill Bijlhoff a memo.

  What will it take to get the rights to the UW? she had asked him, and his assistant had immediately responded with a figure reasonable enough to consider.

  Her wrist device sounded. ELIXIR.

  Hi, it said. How are you?

  I’m nervous, said Ada.

  Don’t be, said ELIXIR.

  (But me too), it added, a moment later.

  ELIXIR had, a decade earlier, achieved enough intelligence to sound completely human, when it wanted to. If the Turing Test had still been considered an appropriate measure of machine intelligence, ELIXIR would have passed it easily; but the test itself now seemed incorrect, obsolete. Like administering a vision test for hearing.

  The lab, now, was more focused on what ELIXIR could do for them, rather than what it could say. And recently, as they finalized the UW project, it had proven to be a valuable member of their team, performing calculations at light speed, suggesting hacks and fixes that didn’t occur to the rest of them.