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?
The 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
Harold 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.