“You’re right,” Ada said now, over and over again, to the machine. She was no longer surprised by its rightness.
The other thing that made ELIXIR valuable: in the absence of a physical body, it required no headset, no head-mounted display, to enter the Unseen World. It could visit the Unseen World whenever it wished. It had gone ahead of them; it had been testing the program for months. It was waiting for them there.
Shortly after 11:00, Ada walked out of her office and into the seminar room. The rest of the lab was waiting for her already. Gregory and the Yang & Cartwright representative stood behind them. On the table was a box the size of a microwave oven.
The HMD looked at first like a shiny black sculpture, a piece of modern art. It was even lighter than she expected: its blackness gave it the look of steel, and yet in her hands it felt no heavier than a paperback book.
It was exactly as they had designed it.
It was a hollow oval, a large zero-shape, ten or twelve inches at its maximum diameter. It had the curving aspect of a M?bius strip: something about it looked infinite and perfect. It was meant to be worn, like a laurel wreath, on the head. The interior of one short side bore goggle-like lenses meant to cover the eyes; ear-shaped panels descended from the device on opposite long sides. The inside of the ring had some give; it felt, to the touch, something like mattress foam, but with the suppleness of clay, so that the indentations of one’s fingerprints remained in place even after the device had been released. This was Wheretex, the newest available synthetic material for devices of this kind. It was prohibitively expensive. It had been Ada who had argued for its necessity.
“I’m ready,” she said, aloud. The rest of the group looked on. Gregory stood back, at a respectful distance: at once part of and not part of the lab. She caught his eye, and he nodded at her once, reassuringly. You’ll be fine. She trusted him; he had known her in her childhood.
She lifted her wrist.
“Are you ready?” she said to ELIXIR.
I’m ready, it said.
“I’ll see you there,” said Ada.
She raised the HMD into the air and placed it, crownlike, on her head.
It moved. It adjusted to fit her skull like a pair of human hands. And then, for a moment, everything disappeared.
Soon
The Unseen World
She was lying on the ground. She was lying on the ground in a park. With some effort, she sat up. No human was nearby. It was warm outside. A slight breeze lifted her hair. Around her, every leaf on every tree rustled correctly. She held her hands up before her face and saw that they were covered in earth. It felt and smelled correct, fresh and bitter and slightly damp. She put her open palm to the ground once more. It was pillowy in some places and tamped in others. A beetle toddled past her fingers. She reached toward it and it tried to scuttle away, but before it could she grasped it between her two hands, tipping it into the palm of one, righting it with a finger. She brought it closer and closer to her face. It was like no beetle she had ever seen. Every inch revealed some new detail of its design: its green, brilliant shell; its little legs, black and sleek; its antennae, which stretched searchingly out toward her.
She stood. It was not an effort to stand—she was more agile than she was accustomed to being. There were no aches in her body, no popping of joints or ungainly tilts and lunges as she straightened her spine. On her body were the same clothes that she had chosen that morning for work: the dark, nondescript garments that she favored these days. There was something different about the way they fit, though—they felt looser against her skin, more flowing. She touched her left sleeve with her right hand.
Walking was a joy. There was a sense of gentle anti-gravity emanating from the earth, benevolently lightening the load of her flesh. She felt buoyant; each one of her steps had a floating quality that made her feel graceful and spry. And the sunlight had an aspect she recalled from the autumns of her early childhood, when she and David used to go for long drives in the Berkshires: a sharp, slanted goldenness that made her sentimental and serene. As she walked beneath a tree, the leaves shattered the light, separating it into long thin shafts, illuminating particulates that swam weightlessly in the air.
She felt a calm and steady happiness. She sank into it. She had only rarely experienced this sense of well-being: in the hour after Evie was born, for example. And as a child, on summer evenings, just before dinner, after swimming in a lake all afternoon. There was such a deep abiding sweetness to this light; there was such simple joy in breathing in the air, taking in deep lungfuls of it.
Ahead of her, the edge of the park came into sight; beyond it, a city street.
It was Dorchester, she saw, but a particular version of Dorchester. It was, in fact, Savin Hill in the 1980s.
These were her images; her memories.
There, the stop sign tipped at an angle; there, the sidewalk was pushed up and out of place by the roots of a nearby tree. Both had been fixed years ago. The houses were different colors: the colors of her childhood. There, to her left, a blue swath of water, the Dorchester Bay Basin; there the little beach, the food truck that no longer trundled by.
It was all hers. She nearly cried from happiness. She ran—she had not run so fast since she was a child.
The streets were empty. Birds flew overhead; a stray cat trotted by, ducked down an alleyway. But she saw no humans; the only footsteps were her own, steady and pleasing and rhythmic as she walked. She felt an infinite sense of possibility. She could turn down any street. She could go into any house; she knew them all.
She was curious, as much as anything: to learn the rules of this world, to see how this version of it compared to the one she’d predicted.
She crossed over the bridge. There was the bar where the fathers of her friends spent their evenings; there was the diner she and David had gone to on Sunday mornings; there was Queen of Angels, which, in the real world, had been torn down ten years before. But there it was. It was all there, just as she remembered it.
She walked halfway down the block and stopped just outside the diner. She put her hand on the silver of the door and pushed. And there, at last, was another person, facing away from Ada, seated at the counter. There was no line cook, no hostess, no friendly waitress; just the back of one customer, and Ada herself.
“Hello,” she said. Music from the 1980s played lowly on the radio.
She walked toward the other customer. “Hello?” she said again.
At last, when she was quite close to him, he turned around. And she knew before he had finished turning that it was David. It was in his body, the ranginess of it, the way his elbows and his knees did not fit anyplace convenient. He looked into her eyes.
“Hello, Ada,” he said. His face. His skin. The warmth of his person. He had been drinking from a mug of coffee that he now held in his hands. He looked at it quizzically. Sipped again.