“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.