Liz Moore - The Unseen World

“This way,” said Frank, leading them down a brief hallway and into his large and light-filled office. Ada noticed it immediately: there, in a framed picture on the wall, was the Steiner Lab she remembered from her youth. It had been taken in the fall, and the six of them were standing just outside the lab’s old building, next to a tree with changing leaves. There was Liston, wearing her knitted Red Sox hat, Charles-Robert, Hayato, Frank — all wearing the fashions of the late 1970s — and there, surprisingly, was David, the tallest of all of them, standing upright in the center, his hands in the pockets of his wool jacket, a thick scarf around his neck, his large familiar glasses resting on the bridge of his nose. It was the only unofficial photograph Ada had ever seen of him. He was grinning broadly, about to laugh. And there, standing slightly behind him, was Ada, eight or nine years old, dressed in a green coat and yellow corduroy pants, hopelessly unfashionable, completely unaware. Happy.

“How did you get him to be in this?” asked Ada.

“He lost a bet, I think,” said Frank, smiling.

They sat, three in a row, while Frank opened his laptop.

He pulled up a simple interface, not much different than the program from the 1980s that Ada remembered.

Hello , he typed. And the program responded: Hello .

Ada did not expect ELIXIR to have evolved very much. In fact, she had been surprised when Frank had told her it was still running. Liston had always tried to keep her up to date with the work of the lab, and by the late 1980s, Ada knew they had begun to shift their focus to other projects. There was a sort of general falling-out-of-fashion, in the second half of the 1980s, of AI language processing as a field of study. Creating a generalist chatbot was no longer perceived as a highly useful direction for computing; instead, researchers began to focus their efforts on creating systems for specific purposes. ELIXIR was too ambitious — some might say too impractical — a gimmick for hobbyists or science fiction enthusiasts, not for serious computer scientists.

Later, in 1990, the establishment of the Loebner Prize, funded by a private donor, awarded each year to the team who developed the program that came closest to passing the Turing Test, seemed to confirm the idea that respected institutions were no longer footing the bill for the development of programs like ELIXIR — programs designed to acquire human language simply to see whether it could be done. The Loebner Prize was the soapbox derby of the computing world: something that an amateur or hobbyist might participate in because of his or her own enjoyment of the process. Nothing to be taken too seriously.

She was almost glad that David was gone before he could see the Steiner Lab, helmed by Liston, turn its attention to other pursuits: in the late 1980s, the development of a programming language that fell quickly into and out of use; in the 1990s, a sort of self-organizing networking protocol. Until the very end of his coherence, David sometimes asked after ELIXIR, which was a word that faded slowly from his memory, even after words like tree and food were lost — even after Ada, daughter, computer . Even after David .

“Actually, Ada,” said Frank, “why don’t you take over?”

He signed out.

“Do you remember your username and password?” he asked her.

She did. Her username was, simply, her initials: AS . Her password was her birth date and David’s birth date, back-to-back. She had chosen it when she was nine years old.

Frank stood up, offered her his chair. She looked at the screen for a pause.

“Go ahead,” said Frank.

She sat. She logged in.

Hi , she typed. This is Ada Sibelius .

Hi, Ada , said ELIXIR. How have you been?

Ada glanced at Gregory. His brow was furrowed.

I’ve been OK , Ada typed.

How about you? she added.

I’ve been good , said ELIXIR. But I’ve missed you .

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.