The Unseen World (41 page)

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?

T
he 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

H
arold 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.

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.

The letter asked him two things: First, what languages he knew. Second, whether he would be interested in working for the United States government in Washington, D.C.

If so
, said the letter,
please reply
.

Yes
, said Harold.
I am immediately available for employment and relocation if necessary
.

It was necessary. In 1940, shortly after graduating at the age of twenty-two, Harold packed up and moved across the country, from California to Arlington, Virginia. He said goodbye to Ernest, who, one year later, would be sent to fight in the Pacific theater.

For the next ten years, Harold worked in intelligence for the United States government. First, for the Signal Intelligence Service at Arlington Hall; next, for the Signal Security Agency, which swallowed the SIS; next, for the U.S. Army Security Agency, which swallowed the SSA; finally, for the Armed Forces Security Agency, comprised of all intelligence units for every branch of the military. He broke codes:
Japanese, mainly, but also German, and also, eventually, Russian. He was good at his work.

With William Friedman, he worked on the Venona Project that broke Soviet codes emanating from New York. He was integral to the building of the PURPLE machine that was a replica of a Japanese encryption device; with this duplicate, the United States was able to decrypt information that contributed directly to American success in the Pacific theater. He imagined, as he was working, that he was protecting Ernest. He worked harder.

For the first years of the war, he and Ernest wrote long and complicated letters to one another. Both of them, in person, had been happily loquacious, talking to each other for hours in a tumbling, almost psychic way. This tendency carried over into their letters.

Let me tell you about my day
, Ernest might begin, and what followed was vivid, lucid writing, a detailed account of his every thought.

They employed a code the two of them had invented years earlier; relying on words, not numbers, it went undetected by the censors who scanned the mail.
Brother
, they called one other.
Friend
.

In these letters they made plans: following the war, Ernest would get a job at George Washington University, or Georgetown, or American. Harold would go to graduate school after the war. Washington, at that time, was flourishing with men like them. Lafayette Square, Dupont Circle, Logan Circle. Many of the public parks in the city. A community was forming.
You'll see when you get here
, wrote Harold, in code.