“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.