The Unseen World (22 page)

Impulsively, she walked around to the front of David's armchair to see his face.

He said nothing to her. He looked, Ada thought, stormy. His brow was lowered; he frowned. His face had not been shaved yet, and a gray stubble was speckling his jaw. He was wearing a light blue cardigan that he never would have chosen for himself; it was October, and getting colder. Perhaps it was a donated sweater that the Carmelite Sisters had received from outside. The thought shamed her. She made a note to ask Liston if the two of them could buy him a few warmer things.

“Hi, David,” she said.

“No,” he said, his head back in his chair, looking at her sideways.

“What were you just talking about?” she asked him, loudly, so that Ron Loughner could hear. She shocked herself. Her anger made her bold.

In the background, she could see Loughner shifting.

“Nothing,” said David.

“Do you know him?” Ada asked him, pointing to Loughner.

“No, I don't know him,” said David.

“Do you know me?” she asked. It had been more than a month since he had called her
Ada
without prompting.

“Yes, I know you,” he said, nodding.

“What's my name?”

And he lifted a hand from the armrest, let it hover there, then dropped it down again, a needle on a record.

Ron Loughner took that opportunity to tell her that he really had to go, and he raised a hand to her in parting.

“Wait,” said Ada, “can you tell me anything? Just tell me what you were talking about,” she said bravely.

“You'd better talk to Ms. Liston,” he said again, and smiled tightly. He left the room, a faint scent of cologne trailing behind him.

David sat up slightly in his chair and turned around to see Loughner go. Then he looked at Ada.

“Bad,” he said, directing a thumb over his shoulder at where Loughner had been before.

“Who was that? What was he doing here?” Ada asked, but he shook his head.

“Bad,” he said again. He raised and lowered his eyebrows, and then his shoulders.

She did not stay with him any longer. She left him. And on the bus ride home she planned how she would confront Liston. This was the word—a
confrontation
—that echoed through her mind on the bus ride home, still bruised by the idea of her being closed out of some important decision. She had never confronted anyone before, but she was very upset. Until that afternoon, she had believed herself to be in charge of David's welfare in some essential way: his protector, his overseer, his sentinel. To be left out of any discussion or negotiation when it came to his well-being infuriated her. To be treated like a child. Her face and her ears were hot with the injustice of it all.

But when she found Liston at the kitchen table, working out some problem on her yellow legal pad, Ada discovered that her voice had decided to fail her. Gone was the fury that had pumped through her at St. Andrew's and on the bus ride home. Liston looked old to her,
and she was pinching the bridge of her nose between her fingers as if willing her brain to work.

“Hi, baby,” she said, when Ada walked in. “How's David today?”

“He's okay,” said Ada quietly.

And then she paused.

“Are you all right?” asked Liston.

“Who's Ron Loughner?” Ada asked her.

Liston exhaled.

“He was supposed to meet with David this morning,” said Liston. “Was he still there when you got there?”

Ada nodded somberly, reveling slightly in her righteousness, waiting for an explanation, waiting for some sort of apology from Liston.

“He must have been late,” she said. Ada crossed her arms.

Liston put her pen down and looked at Ada steadily, assessing something. Then she nodded to herself. “Right,” she said, as if she had finally come to a decision.

“Ada, we have some reason to believe that David might not be who he has always said he is,” Liston said, carefully. And she stood up from her chair and crossed the room, extending both hands, at the same time that Ada sat down, hard, in her chair.

2009

San Francisco

“
W
hat would you say,” said the man, “if I told you that when life got stressful, you could relax whenever you wanted in a fully immersive alternative reality?”

He was sitting on a sofa. He was sitting next to a woman.

The woman turned, nodding enthusiastically. “It's true. We at Tri-Tech are hard at work on technology designed to offer an exciting virtual alternative to everyday life. Just put on this device,” said the woman. She was wearing a black suit. Her legs were crossed. Her foot bobbed slightly to some unknown rhythm. In her hand she held a headset: a sort of sculpted black crown, a circle meant to fit neatly over the head and eyes and ears. She donned it.

“And suddenly you'll find yourself in another world. Think of it as lucid dreaming,” she continued. She was blinded, now, by the head-mounted display. Her arms moved differently, fumblingly. Her fingertips searched the air, gestured in arcs that were ten degrees removed from where they would be when her sight was restored. “Here, you have total control over your own fate; just blink and you'll be transported to Paris, or to the North Pole, or to a secluded beach, invented by you, designed to meet your personal specifications for the ideal beach. Our virtual-world technology includes sensory controls that allow you to
feel
and
smell
and
taste
what you see before you, by emitting signals that trigger the neurons in different regions of your
brain. Too hot on that beach? Lower the temperature to a perfect seventy-eight degrees. Don't just look at the chocolate truffles in the case; taste what you see before you, and never gain a pound.”

“Meet up with friends and family,” said the man. “Or with an old flame who lives halfway across the globe,” he added, suggestively. “The options here are limitless.”

“Infinite,” the woman said. “More infinite, in fact, than they are in reality as we know it.”

She froze, then. Her hand stuttered through the air and then stopped; her mouth paused on its way to closing.

The man was caught mid-turn. He had left his hair behind; he was momentarily bald.

“Come try it,” said his voice, outside his body.

And the voice of the woman said, “We'll be waiting for you.”

Ada shook her head.

“It can't freeze,” she said. “What's dragging it?”

She was sitting in a dark room, at a seminar table. She stood and turned on the lights, throwing the projection into dimness, muting the colors of the male and female avatars that still sat frozen on the screen.

“I'm not sure,” said Tom Tsien, who was operating them. “I'll work on it. It'll be fixed before the meeting.”

“What can I do to help?” said Ada. Tom was a friend, someone she spent time with outside work. She watched him as he worked, head down, two small lines of concentration between his eyebrows. His glasses had slid down on his nose; he looked over the top of them at the screen.

“Tom?” she said. He looked up.

Against her will, she yawned. She pressed two knuckles deeply into her lower back.

“Nothing,” said Tom. “Don't worry. Go home. Get some sleep.”

He looked back at his laptop intently. She wouldn't leave; he knew this. She would stay—they both would—until they had it right.

She worked, then, for Tri-Tech, a software-development company founded in 1995 by three men who had since retired. Their names were not important: they were three of the hundreds or thousands of men of their kind, somewhat interchangeable men who founded somewhat interchangeable companies that boomed dangerously in the nineties and then collapsed. Somehow, Tri-Tech had survived. But its flagship software, a virtual reality platform called Alterra, was now shedding its users. Around the turn of the millennium, the program had been designed—with Ada's help—to function as a virtual alternate universe, one in which user-controlled avatars (
reps
, they were called) roamed freely through creator- and user-designed houses and cities; one in which these reps attended concerts and hawked their wares and bartered in Altokens, units of currency that corresponded to actual dollar amounts. For a time, the program—it wasn't a game, per se, though it was sometimes called that—gained traction. At its peak it enrolled four hundred thousand new users a month, and the press touted it as the future of the Web.

Now, though, Alterra was losing its luster. Its animation looked decidedly two-dimensional, flat and dated and primitive in comparison with games designed for other systems. Silly problems persisted: reps lost their clothing spontaneously, or their hair; or the digital world became voxelated, shattered into pieces momentarily; or the world froze briefly when it was overwhelmed with data. Ada and her team patched these problems as quickly as they could; but in most ways it was a losing battle. Its citizens increasingly fled; the virtual economy of Alterra collapsed at the same moment that the nation's economy was doing the same. Trade publications sounded the death knell for Alterra. Its users complained about a lack of functionality. “ ‘Alterra is Boring,' Users Lament,” read the headline of one article, in
Gaming
.

She had never wanted to work on this type of software. She knew its limitations; she knew the way it was perceived by the rest of the industry.

When she joined Tri-Tech, it was because they had promised her something different: the opportunity to develop the work she had begun in graduate school. At Brown, she had examined the possibilities offered by an advanced, immersive virtual world: one that would be viewed not two-dimensionally, on a computer screen, like Alterra; but three-dimensionally, from inside a helmetlike head-mounted display. One that interacted with all five senses, not just two. She had completed her dissertation in 1996, when the available hardware was decades away from being able to support the sort of software she was describing. Her work, therefore, had been speculative, almost philosophical. She had posed questions that would not be answered for many years. The ideas in her dissertation had gotten her hired by Tri-Tech, and then sat dormant for a decade; at last, after years and years of stalling, Tri-Tech had finally given her the green light to pitch it. Perhaps, she thought, it was an act of desperation, a last flailing grasp at relevance; perhaps the company was hoping that her ideas would be exciting enough to entice a new wave of investors to bank on the company once again, to help revitalize the firm that
Gizmodo
had just deemed—in a blog post that had only six comments, the last time Ada checked—“a dinosaur” that, over the past several years, had “belly flopped into near-obscurity.”

Whatever Tri-Tech's motivation for greenlighting Ada's idea, she was glad to be working again on a project that, until the year before, she had been resigned to develop only on her own time, coding late into the night or on weekends; twice a year taking a vacation merely to continue to work.

They were scheduled, the next morning, to pitch the new project to a panel of potential backers. It was 1:00 a.m. when they finally left, and
the meeting was in eight hours. Ada would go home and try to sleep. Most likely she would fail. Lately she had been kept awake by worry: What would she do if the company folded? Almost nobody was hiring—especially not someone at Ada's level. She was a VP of product development now; she'd been around long enough to be pricey. These days it made her vulnerable. It was 2009, and the recession was beginning, and the tech industry was not exempt.

She said good night to Tom. She got into her car. She worked in Palo Alto and lived in San Francisco. When she had been hired out of grad school, she'd chosen to live in the Mission, on the advice of a friend from Brown who had gone ahead of her. The neighborhood had reminded her of Savin Hill, on first sight: the bright Victorians that lined the streets, the gently sloping terrain. When she first arrived, she was twenty-six years old, and she had a good group of friends, all single, all from elsewhere in the country. Some she knew from graduate school: everyone, then, was moving to San Francisco. Together, they learned the city well and quickly. They spent every weekend at each other's apartments, or at bars, or camping—a particular favorite of Ada's—in nearby state parks.

Most of them were married now; most had kids. Ada saw them at first birthday parties, or at Sunday brunches that the rest of them left quickly, checking their phones throughout. Fewer and fewer of them wanted to have dinner on a Saturday night. Slowly, everyone left the neighborhood for other parts of the city. Pac Heights, Sunset, Noe Valley.

Only Ada had stayed in the Mission, in an apartment on the first floor of a Victorian, with a little garden in the back. She planted tomatoes every spring and hoped they'd grow; every summer she found, without fail, that the shade cast by the tree overhead had made them falter.

Around her, the neighborhood changed.

Its residents, once her own age, stayed young while she grew
older. She was thirty-seven then, and her neighbors above her and on each side were in their twenties. Like her, they mainly worked in tech; but with each year that passed, the ways in which they were fundamentally different from her became more and more obvious. These differences were not caused only by the decade between them—though that certainly contributed—but by some essential shift in tech culture that had occurred sometime not long after she was hired, that stretched the years between them into an eternity. Now twenty-seven-year-olds felt, to Ada, a generation younger. She and her cohort had been introverts, almost to a one; they preferred socializing in pairs, or small groups; they read, they debated; they were at their best when they were not required to speak too much, or for too long. It used to be that this was a trait common to programmers. Now it seemed that there was as much emphasis on being personable and attractive as on being smart.