“I want to ask you something,” said Ada.
She stood up, knelt down in front of his chair, held the picture out so he could see it. He shifted his cloudy eyes downward without moving his head.
“Who are they?” asked Ada, pointing to the adults in the picture.
“Well, that’s Mother and Dad,” said David.
“But what are their names?” asked Ada.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said David. “Mother and Dad.”
He studied the picture again, and then reached toward it, tracing the faces with one finger. There was that accent again, the one she could not place: it was not David’s accent. Not his voice.
“Where’s Susan?” David asked suddenly.
“Susan?” asked Ada.
“Susan,” he said, looking up at her suddenly, as if addressing her directly. “Susan, there you are. I’ve been waiting for you.”
“What’s your name?” asked Ada, and he held her gaze for what seemed like quite a while.
“Come on, you know it, Suze,” he said at last.
“What’s your name?”
“Harold Canady,” said David. And he held one finger to his chest. Then he pointed one finger at her slowly. “And you’re Susan Canady.”
“I missed you,” David said, his light eyes filling completely with tears.
Gently, surely, he bent back the brown weathered mat that surrounded the portrait, and from it removed the photograph itself, as if to inspect it more closely. And for the first time she saw what had been beneath it: there, in the bottom right corner, in a curling, hand-drawn white script, five words: The Strauss Studio. Olathe, Kansas.
2009
San Francisco
Ada had slept for an hour, maybe less, when she woke up panicked, thinking she had missed her alarm.
She grabbed for the phone on her nightstand: 5:59 a.m. The alarm would sound in a minute. Briefly, she lay her head back on her pillow. Her neighbors had played beer pong until 4:00 in the morning. How, she wondered, did they get up for work in the morning?
She showered and dressed. She chose her outfit carefully: something that read as simultaneously young and powerful. A blazer and close-fitting dress pants. She would get to work a little early, go through the presentation one last time with Tom Tsien. She ran through the people who would be at the table with them: three members of the board; the CEO, Bill Bijlhoff; about a dozen potential investors who had been courted for months; and the VP of marketing, Meredith Kranz. Like many of Tri-Tech’s newer employees, Meredith was improbably young for her title—twenty-nine, perhaps, or thirty at most—and impeccably dressed. She wore brands with names that baffled Ada. “This is Acne,” Ada had heard Meredith saying once to a colleague, about a jacket she was wearing. And Ada Googled the brand name to make sure she had heard it correctly.
It had been Meredith Kranz’s idea for the investors to interact, at the meeting, with the new product’s male and female avatars. This was the idea that had kept Tom and Ada up late the night before, troubleshooting, fixing glitches. Meredith had written the script for the reps herself. She had insisted on letting them pitch the product. “It’s more dynamic,” she had said, when Ada raised concerns. “And afterward, we can let the investors interact with the reps themselves,” she continued. An even worse idea, thought Ada. But Bijlhoff had sided with Meredith, and Ada had done as he wished.
The pitch felt, to Ada, like a joke; she had trouble not laughing herself when she saw the reps earnestly moving their computer-rendered limbs about in clumsy, cardboard arcs. Computer-animated people, in 2009, still looked stilted and bizarre. These avatars were not close to passably human. The way they used their arms was incorrect—they hovered in the air unrealistically, never dropping to meet their flanks. When reps moved forward, their gait was outlandishly wrong. For decades, computer animators struggled to replicate the motions of walking and running, without much success; the particular rhythm of the human stride eluded them all, the rhythm of bone and muscle and fat and nerve impulse. Worse than that: these particular reps kept freezing. At the end of last night, Tom claimed to have everything running smoothly, but Ada was still nervous. To her, having reps pitch the product only served to reinforce how far away Tri-Tech was from being able to actually bring it to market. Five years, ten years until the hardware was available; maybe more. They would all have to hope for very patient—and reasonably young—investors.
In the car, at 6:45 a.m., her phone rang. It was a 617 number. She rarely got calls from Boston anymore.
She remembered, abruptly, the conversation she had had with Connor and Caleb the night before: someone had been by to see her. They had given this person her number, whoever it was. A man, they’d said. Could it be him?
She contemplated answering for too long: normally she didn’t answer calls from unknown numbers, but she thought perhaps she should pick this one up.
By the time she had decided to, it was too late; the call had gone to voice mail. She waited for thirty seconds, then a minute. But no message had been left.
When she arrived in the office, it was both unusually full and unusually quiet. Bill Bijlhoff, the CEO, had tried hard to keep the investment meeting under wraps, especially around the more junior programmers; they knew the company was imperiled, surely, and it wasn’t good for morale to raise and lower their hopes too much.