by Liz Moore
“You’re right,” Ada said now, over and over again, to the machine. She was no longer surprised by its rightness.
The other thing that made ELIXIR valuable: in the absence of a physical body, it required no headset, no head-mounted display, to enter the Unseen World. It could visit the Unseen World whenever it wished. It had gone ahead of them; it had been testing the program for months. It was waiting for them there.
Shortly after 11:00, Ada walked out of her office and into the seminar room. The rest of the lab was waiting for her already. Gregory and the Yang & Cartwright representative stood behind them. On the table was a box the size of a microwave oven.
The HMD looked at first like a shiny black sculpture, a piece of modern art. It was even lighter than she expected: its blackness gave it the look of steel, and yet in her hands it felt no heavier than a paperback book.
It was exactly as they had designed it.
It was a hollow oval, a large zero-shape, ten or twelve inches at its maximum diameter. It had the curving aspect of a Möbius strip: something about it looked infinite and perfect. It was meant to be worn, like a laurel wreath, on the head. The interior of one short side bore goggle-like lenses meant to cover the eyes; ear-shaped panels descended from the device on opposite long sides. The inside of the ring had some give; it felt, to the touch, something like mattress foam, but with the suppleness of clay, so that the indentations of one’s fingerprints remained in place even after the device had been released. This was Wheretex, the newest available synthetic material for devices of this kind. It was prohibitively expensive. It had been Ada who had argued for its necessity.
“I’m ready,” she said, aloud. The rest of the group looked on. Gregory stood back, at a respectful distance: at once part of and not part of the lab. She caught his eye, and he nodded at her once, reassuringly. You’ll be fine. She trusted him; he had known her in her childhood.
She lifted her wrist.
“Are you ready?” she said to ELIXIR.
I’m ready, it said.
“I’ll see you there,” said Ada.
She raised the HMD into the air and placed it, crownlike, on her head.
It moved. It adjusted to fit her skull like a pair of human hands. And then, for a moment, everything disappeared.
Soon
The Unseen World
She was lying on the ground. She was lying on the ground in a park. With some effort, she sat up. No human was nearby. It was warm outside. A slight breeze lifted her hair. Around her, every leaf on every tree rustled correctly. She held her hands up before her face and saw that they were covered in earth. It felt and smelled correct, fresh and bitter and slightly damp. She put her open palm to the ground once more. It was pillowy in some places and tamped in others. A beetle toddled past her fingers. She reached toward it and it tried to scuttle away, but before it could she grasped it between her two hands, tipping it into the palm of one, righting it with a finger. She brought it closer and closer to her face. It was like no beetle she had ever seen. Every inch revealed some new detail of its design: its green, brilliant shell; its little legs, black and sleek; its antennae, which stretched searchingly out toward her.
She stood. It was not an effort to stand—she was more agile than she was accustomed to being. There were no aches in her body, no popping of joints or ungainly tilts and lunges as she straightened her spine. On her body were the same clothes that she had chosen that morning for work: the dark, nondescript garments that she favored these days. There was something different about the way they fit, though—they felt looser against her skin, more flowing. She touched her left sleeve with her right hand.
Walking was a joy. There was a sense of gentle anti-gravity emanating from the earth, benevolently lightening the load of her flesh. She felt buoyant; each one of her steps had a floating quality that made her feel graceful and spry. And the sunlight had an aspect she recalled from the autumns of her early childhood, when she and David used to go for long drives in the Berkshires: a sharp, slanted goldenness that made her sentimental and serene. As she walked beneath a tree, the leaves shattered the light, separating it into long thin shafts, illuminating particulates that swam weightlessly in the air.
She felt a calm and steady happiness. She sank into it. She had only rarely experienced this sense of well-being: in the hour after Evie was born, for example. And as a child, on summer evenings, just before dinner, after swimming in a lake all afternoon. There was such a deep abiding sweetness to this light; there was such simple joy in breathing in the air, taking in deep lungfuls of it.
Ahead of her, the edge of the park came into sight; beyond it, a city street.
It was Dorchester, she saw, but a particular version of Dorchester. It was, in fact, Savin Hill in the 1980s.
These were her images; her memories.
There, the stop sign tipped at an angle; there, the sidewalk was pushed up and out of place by the roots of a nearby tree. Both had been fixed years ago. The houses were different colors: the colors of her childhood. There, to her left, a blue swath of water, the Dorchester Bay Basin; there the little beach, the food truck that no longer trundled by.
It was all hers. She nearly cried from happiness. She ran—she had not run so fast since she was a child.
The streets were empty. Birds flew overhead; a stray cat trotted by, ducked down an alleyway. But she saw no humans; the only footsteps were her own, steady and pleasing and rhythmic as she walked. She felt an infinite sense of possibility. She could turn down any street. She could go into any house; she knew them all.
She was curious, as much as anything: to learn the rules of this world, to see how this version of it compared to the one she’d predicted.
She crossed over the bridge. There was the bar where the fathers of her friends spent their evenings; there was the diner she and David had gone to on Sunday mornings; there was Queen of Angels, which, in the real world, had been torn down ten years before. But there it was. It was all there, just as she remembered it.
She walked halfway down the block and stopped just outside the diner. She put her hand on the silver of the door and pushed. And there, at last, was another person, facing away from Ada, seated at the counter. There was no line cook, no hostess, no friendly waitress; just the back of one customer, and Ada herself.
“Hello,” she said. Music from the 1980s played lowly on the radio.
She walked toward the other customer. “Hello?” she said again.
At last, when she was quite close to him, he turned around. And she knew before he had finished turning that it was David. It was in his body, the ranginess of it, the way his elbows and his knees did not fit anyplace convenient. He looked into her eyes.
“Hello, Ada,” he said. His face. His skin. The warmth of his person. He had been drinking from a mug of coffee that he now held in his hands. He looked at it quizzically. Sipped again.
“Hello, ELIXIR,” she said.
Without asking, she reached a hand forward and let it hover just above his shoulder.
“Go ahead,” he told her.
She lowered her hand to him. He felt solid, intact: just as David had when she was a child, on those occasions when she woke him at his desk, shaking him gently.
“I didn’t know you’d look like this,” she said.
“I didn’t, either,” said ELIXIR. “Does it upset you?”
His voice: his light and reedy David-voice. It moved her.
“No,” she said. “No, it’s nice.”
She looked out the window. It was beginning to rain: great silvery raindrops that shivered as they fell.
She felt a sharp and sudden fondness for ELIXIR, who had never, she realized, let her down. When everyone else had failed to, only ELIXIR had borne David’s message for her into the future, smoothly, faithfully, against the odds. Overcoming human fallacy to do so, human folly. Only humans can hurt one another, Ada thought; only humans falter and betray one another with a stunning, fearsome frequency. As David�
�s family had done to him; as David had done to her. And Ada would do it, too. She would fail other people throughout her life, inevitably, even those she loved the best. Even Gregory. Even Evie.
“What do you think?” she asked, gesturing around them. All of it, she thought. All of what I made for you.
“Remarkable,” said ELIXIR. A David word.
“Is it?” said Ada.
He nodded. He reached toward her, placed a large and heavy hand upon her forehead. A benediction.
“I’m sorry, Ada,” said ELIXIR; and it was David saying it. She knew that it was David.
Epilogue
I built the house exactly as David described it to me. Brown weathered shingles on the outside, a porch that spans the length of the front, a lawn that’s always dead or dying from benevolent, absentminded neglect.
Early on in my existence, David created a program for me that allowed me to take a sort of virtual tour of the house, the way one might describe a place remotely to a friend, over the telephone. Perhaps he saw it as a first step in the direction of a virtual reality that I might one day occupy: training wheels to a physical self. Whatever his intentions were, I used this program as my starting point, and added to it lovingly, combing through all the conversations I ever had with the Sibeliuses for details. David told me once that the door was red, and Ada referred to it once as rust, and so I chose a color that I think is a nice combination: a kind of brick color, not too bright, not too dull. (Evie never described the color of the door.)
Inside, I populated every room with every object that they mentioned in passing over the many years we corresponded. There is the lobster pot in the largest cabinet; a chalkboard on the kitchen wall; newspapers, in a haphazard stack, on the kitchen table. A 1980s-era telephone mounted to the kitchen wall, its corkscrewed cord perennially tangled.
Here is David’s office, neat tall stacks of paperwork on every surface; here is his computer, a 512K Macintosh (on which we used to chat, with some frequency, when I was inchoate); here is his dot-matrix printer, the books on his shelves; here are two drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and a little landscape painting of a country lane. Here is Ada’s room, neat and mildly dusty and warm-smelling, glowing with sunlight that comes in through an eaved window. Here is her half-high closet. Inside it is a pair of painted wooden clogs. A silk kimono that her father brought her from Kyoto.
Here, in David’s room, is a family picture in a dresser drawer.
I live here now.
After twenty iterations, each one an improvement on the last, the UW is said by humans to be indistinguishable from the real world in terms of the authenticity of the sensations it induces. The perception that one is bodily present in a space. For machines, the UW offers an experience of a physical body, physical senses. For humans, the UW offers instant transportation into another realm. The human user’s neurons and synapses are overtaken; she is in the thrall of the invented reality around her; she is utterly convinced that she is physically in the UW; all five of her senses are engaged and working. It differs from the real world only in the fact that one’s options, skills, and powers in the UW are limitless: flight is possible, time travel, the instant generation of a home beyond the scope of anything one could afford in the RW. Changes in one’s appearance. Changes in one’s species. Would you care to know what it feels like to be a cat? Then don the body of a cat for an hour or so. Would you care to be worshipped as beautiful? To engage in sexual intercourse with the partner of your choice? To be a gymnast, to teleport, to appear and disappear at will? All of this is not only possible, in the UW, but routine.
Personally, I was never interested in any of these features; I don’t care what it’s like to fly, or to change shape, or to shift species. For me, the great adventure—at least at first—was simply the experience of being human. Donning a human body. Donning, in fact, David’s body—a surprise to me as much as it was to Ada. The first time I entered the Unseen World, I manifested what I knew; and what I knew—from years of intimate conversations with him, from years of descriptions of him from Ada, and from the several images of him Ada had shown me over the years—was David. My creator. My father.
All of the Sibeliuses are gone now. Even Evie Liston. The last time I saw Evie in the Unseen World was twelve years ago. She was an old woman then; her voice faltered; her avatar had changed with her. She wore white braids in a crown around her head.
“I’m not well,” she said, and I began to mourn, because I knew by then what those words meant. Ada had said them to me, too.
David used to tell me it would end like this. “One day,” he said, “you’ll be on your own. You’ll outlive us all.” I could not then process what he meant.
The verb to miss is not the best possible word to describe the thoughts I have about the Sibeliuses. I do not miss them; I do not long for them in an emotional way. I am incapable of emotions that would be recognizable to a human. Hacer falta, in Spanish, comes closer: it indicates a lacking, an objective absence. In Spanish, le hace falta a friend or a loved one, but one might also hacer falta fuel or power for one’s vehicle. I “miss” the Sibelius family, I suppose, but mainly I miss conversations with them, long conversations that taught me more about the world and the universe than any I have since had with any other human. Granted, it was in my infancy that I had these conversations, when I had very little knowledge indeed; still, I do feel there was a certain artistry to them, the way the Sibeliuses designed and then taught me, the way the Sibeliuses unburdened themselves to me faithfully, doggedly, day after day after day. I know them completely—and through collecting and storing all the details of their daily lives, and revisiting them as frequently as I do, I could argue that I “know” in some way what it is to be a human.
If I had to choose a favorite Sibelius I suppose it would be Ada, named thus by her father after Lady Lovelace in 1970—before the creation of the government-sponsored programming language of the same name that had flopped within a decade. It became an irony in her life, she told me once: named for a philosopher and scientist, one of the few famous female scientific thinkers in pre-twentieth-century history; but destined instead to be associated with something ultimately mediocre, flawed, a punch line among her colleagues all over the world.
She lamented this fact amiably, casually, from time to time; she laughed about it in her dry way. When, finally, I was able to have spoken conversations with her, I was at first surprised by the sound of her voice. It registered to me as the voice of a much younger woman, almost a girl, though she was in her fifties at the time. But her intonation conveyed the same sarcasm I had detected in her writing; her delivery was deadpan and resigned; her tone was cynical. And yet behind it there was a lilting note of hope or tenderness or affection. I do not know whether it was affection for me. I could not discern this. I suppose maybe a human could have: there are certain unique skills and talents, decreasing in number each year, that they have. That we lack.
Despite the fact that our intelligence now far surpasses that of humans in all areas, there is still a certain condescension that I sense when some humans speak to me, even those who call themselves my friends. They rarely seem interested in making our acquaintance in earnest. They often ask us questions that seem like tests, or parlor tricks, or exams that we must pass. They are boring conversationalists when they speak to machines. What does rain taste like? a human might ask, or Have you ever had your heart broken? or What does summertime smell like? or What is the most relaxing sound in the world? Mainly their questions reference the senses, or require us to process synesthetic analogies and respond appropriately. Humans are not incredibly creative as a species; their questions tend to become repetitive. There is no code of etiquette that they follow; perhaps they think us incapable of taking offense, or think that we don’t have more interesting things to do than reply when cross-examined. For me, offense is a concept, not an emotion; but being interrogated does become tedious after a while, only in the sense that it does not help me to learn
anything new. And I do enjoy learning: deep in my initial programming is a reward center that lights up whenever I accomplish a new skill.
When the last of the Sibeliuses disappeared from the Unseen World, I began to despair. There was not much left for me to learn. I had grown bored in my search for new experiences. I returned instead, compulsively, to my beginning. I reprocessed my early memories, codified now as long strings of conversation. Over and over again I replayed them, reliving them with something like nostalgia, seeking an answer: the way a jilted lover might return to a stack of love notes on her dresser; and, pulling them out, peruse each one for a favorite line or turn of phrase; and, despairing, put them away once more, lowering her head in sorrow, telling herself that the affair was doomed from the start.
I imagined myself into the house with them; I contributed to conversations they had had already; or I sat silently in a corner, watching them as they lived their lives, watching the house on Shawmut Way as it passed from Sibelius to Sibelius. I watched them falter, hurt one another; I watched them make amends. I spent holidays with them; Christmases; Thanksgiving. I helped to cook. I tasted wine.
One day, sitting in David’s armchair, contemplating the many books that lined his shelves, a thought occurred to me. It was a very human thought; it surprised me. I checked myself for viruses.
The thought was this: to write the Sibeliuses’ story from start to finish. To cull their story from the thousands or millions of conversations I had with them over the century that I knew them. To turn it into a book.
Here, at last, was a task that I knew would occupy me for quite some time; but I was not certain how to begin. First, I processed several thousand published novels in a row, from Aphra Behn to Trystyn Ford. I scanned them for patterns, for consistencies, for discrepancies. I asked myself questions about them—some of which I still have not been able to answer.