In the wake of ELIXIR’s revelations about her father, Ada had debated changing her own last name to reflect the one he was born with. She had never taken Gregory’s last name, but she could be Ada Canady, she thought. It had a certain ring to it. In the end, though, she decided to keep Sibelius, to honor her history, and also to honor George Sibelius: the man who had helped save her father’s life, and his career. Some legal wrangling had been involved—sorting out her new Social Security number alone had taken two years—but at last she was legally Ada Ellen Sibelius (Ellen, she had learned, was Birdie Auerbach’s given name); and David was Harold Albert Canady; and her daughter was Eve Susan Liston. The daughter of Gregory Liston. The granddaughter of Diana Liston and of Harold Canady. The great-niece of Susan Canady, whom Ada had never known.
When Ada arrived, the lab was already full. Everyone watched her, silent, as she crossed the floor. Hannah, one of that year’s student assistants, stood up as if to greet her, glanced around, and then sat back down. She was young: they all were, by then, nineteen or twenty or twenty-one years old, finished already with college and on to the next phase of their education. They were comfortable with one another, less so with older adults. They spoke a language that she could not entirely understand: they spoke in abbreviations or acronyms, dropped syllables she did not think were expendable, made references to parts of popular culture that, to Ada, felt like distant unreachable rooms, the deepest chambers of a warren. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, she memoed Evie for a translation, and Evie wrote back dutifully. All of Ada’s student assistants were self-taught from an early age: they had been online since birth. They didn’t need coursework to teach them to program. Universities, in response, had made their degrees sleeker, more compact: online degrees had gained respectability, and fixed credit requirements were swapped out in favor of competency exams. The Bit itself had reduced the course loads of its degrees in computer science to reflect the skill sets that most of its students now entered with—students like Hannah, Jeff Singh, Spike Hall, all of whom Ada had gotten to know over the course of that year. Like her father, she invited every year’s students to dinner in August at the house on Shawmut Way; like her father, she made dinner for them—grilled vegetables, not lobster, since so many were vegetarian—and like her father she worried over them, guided them, discussed them avidly with Gregory. They were quick and sharp and sometimes cutting; they navigated the digital landscape with an acuity that Ada would never possess.
Evie, however, would. Did. She was twelve years old, and already able to teach Ada and Gregory skills and concepts that they otherwise wouldn’t have come across. It was Evie who tutored them in glyphs, which now replaced words entirely in the memos that young people sent to one another. The student assistants in the lab, for example, communicated almost exclusively in this way; they switched into text only for the benefit of their elders.
, they might say. Meeting 11 today.
Korean for lunch?
Ada had an app on her device that translated for her—an extra step that her younger colleagues, and her daughter, did not have to take. She was fifty-five years old now. She and Gregory had had Evie when they were forty-three and forty-two, respectively. How much longer, she wondered, could she stay relevant? It would be the Evies of the world who would effect the biggest changes in the coming years. Not her; not Gregory. There were still times when she wished she could be on the inside of things, as she had been when she was younger. It used to be that she was the one who picked up on cultural references instantly, to the exclusion of older people. Now she smiled uncertainly at the clips and bits her young colleagues sent one another. It was an election year, and a state referendum on information usage had been in the news all summer. She often heard Julio Figueroa in asynchronous surround-sound: the same jokes and commentary made over and over again, in fifteen-second intervals. And the live young laughter of her colleagues as they clapped their hands together. In these moments she smiled uncertainly, feeling as if she could almost, almost understand—but not quite, never fully. As if the jokes told by young people were set at a pitch too high for anyone over fifty to understand.
This, she knew, was the way of things. And when her daughter rolled her eyes at the slowness of her parents now, when she lost patience with their ineptitude, when she uttered a series of syllables that sounded to Ada like gibberish, she was simultaneously frustrated and pleased.
At 10:20, she got a memo from Gregory.
on .
Jokingly, sometimes, they wrote to one another in glyphs, giddily using them in wild and ridiculous ways, intentionally making gaffes.
, Ada replied.
Gregory was almost more excited than she was. He was not officially part of the lab—he still worked for the same robotics firm in Houston, fully remotely now—but he had watched the project evolve, alongside Ada, from its earliest days. When Gregory offered to go to Logan to pick up the representative from Yang & Cartwright, the company they had paid to manufacture the prototype, Ada knew well that it was partly out of kindness and partly out of self-interest: he, too, wanted to be in the room when they tested it for the first time.
For an hour, Ada sat in her office, alone. She had difficulty concentrating. They had been working on the UW for over a decade. They had seen it progress from an abstraction to something tangible and real. They had had glimpses, along the way, of what it might look like or feel like; beta versions that used headsets, graphics that they perfected on a screen. Every member of the lab had used head-mounted displays routinely, ever since they had hit the market over a decade before. But nothing that was available approached this level of sophistication or complexity. Nothing aimed to integrate the senses the way the UW did. No existing technology responded to thoughts and neural impulses and the small unconscious flickers of the human brain the way the UW would. Anything could happen in the Unseen World; and the idea of it made her giddy and terrified at once.
“So it’s an acid trip,” said Gregory, once, and Ada had laughed.
“A really expensive one,” she said.
The version she had worked on for Tri-Tech in the aughts had, unsurprisingly, never received funding; after a year of trying and failing to attract investors, in 2011 the firm folded. By then Ada was already back in Boston, working for Frank Halbert at the Bit.
In 2016, when she took over as director of the Canady Lab, she had sent Bill Bijlhoff a memo.
What will it take to get the rights to the UW? she had asked him, and his assistant had immediately responded with a figure reasonable enough to consider.
Her wrist device sounded. ELIXIR.
Hi, it said. How are you?
I’m nervous, said Ada.
Don’t be, said ELIXIR.
(But me too), it added, a moment later.
ELIXIR had, a decade earlier, achieved enough intelligence to sound completely human, when it wanted to. If the Turing Test had still been considered an appropriate measure of machine intelligence, ELIXIR would have passed it easily; but the test itself now seemed incorrect, obsolete. Like administering a vision test for hearing.
The lab, now, was more focused on what ELIXIR could do for them, rather than what it could say. And recently, as they finalized the UW project, it had proven to be a valuable member of their team, performing calculations at light speed, suggesting hacks and fixes that didn’t occur to the rest of them.