The Unseen World (48 page)

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 versions 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.

“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.

T
he 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

S
he 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.