The Unseen World

1980s, Boston

Liston was waiting for her in the hallway outside David’s room at St. Andrew’s. Ada kept one hand in her jacket pocket, around the four-leaf clover charm she had taken out of David’s grip. Would he miss it, when he woke? Inside it, the key rattled gently.

When they reached Savin Hill, Ada said there was something she needed from inside David’s house, and Liston, kindly, left her alone. She entered through the kitchen, walked into David’s office. And then she moved directly to the filing cabinet that she had tried in vain to open the first time she ever searched the house.

The tall tan cabinet still had its crooked look from when she had tried to force it open with a crowbar. Now, holding her breath, she fitted the silver key neatly into the lock. It turned.

She paused before pulling open the top drawer. She was relieved to find it empty.

The second drawer, however, was nearly full to the brim with a stack of pages printed on a dot-matrix printer, every page still connected to its neighbor, every perforated edge still attached. She lifted the stack out of the drawer.

The Unseen World, the first page said, in larger font across the top. She paused: it was the same title David had given to the document that Gregory had found on his computer, which she had not yet made sense of.

Below it: pages and pages of code. A hundred printed pages. Maybe more. It was written in an iteration of Lisp, and it looked like a game; she could see that; she recognized its cues and commands, its particular shape. As for what it was meant to do: that was beyond her. And she did not know on what platform it could be run.

Was this, she wondered, what David had been working on, secretly, in his final years in the house? All those evenings he had disappeared into his office; all those mornings she had woken him up after he had fallen asleep, the night before, at his desk?

She reassembled the pages. She placed them on his desk, and then turned on his computer.

Already she had been through every file he’d saved, and she had seen nothing like this document. Still, she searched again, and then once more, looking for anything that resembled The Unseen World in electronic form.

She found nothing.

She’d have to manually type every line of the printed text herself, then — slowly and painstakingly, avoiding mistakes that might corrupt the program. Only once she had an electronic copy could she begin to determine the platform it required.

That evening, she began.

(define

flip

#decl (process)

(cond ((type? rep subr fsubr)

(set read-table (put (ivector 3444 0) (chtype (ascii i \() fix) i \))

(evaltype form segment)

(applytype grrt fix)

(put (alltypes) 3 (4 (alltypes)))

(substitute 2 1)

(off.bh))))

(indec (ff) string)

(define ilo (body type np1 np2 “optional” m1 m2)

#indec ((body np1 np2 p1 p2) string (type) fix)

(cond ((or (and (member “(open drawer)”.body)

(not (member,nbup,winners)))

(and (member.np1,winners)))

(member,ff.body)))

(eval (parse.body)))))

(dismiss t))

\

; “subtitle kitchen, shawmut way”

(define house ()

(cond ((verb? “search”)

(say)