The Unseen World

2009, San Francisco

Ada had slept for an hour, maybe less, when she woke up panicked, thinking she had missed her alarm.

She grabbed for the phone on her nightstand: 5:59 a.m. The alarm would sound in a minute. Briefly, she lay her head back on her pillow. Her neighbors had played beer pong until 4:00 in the morning. How, she wondered, did they get up for work in the morning?

She showered and dressed. She chose her outfit carefully: something that read as simultaneously young and powerful. A blazer and close-fitting dress pants. She would get to work a little early, go through the presentation one last time with Tom Tsien. She ran through the people who would be at the table with them: three members of the board; the CEO, Bill Bijlhoff; about a dozen potential investors who had been courted for months; and the VP of marketing, Meredith Kranz. Like many of Tri-Tech’s newer employees, Meredith was improbably young for her title — twenty-nine, perhaps, or thirty at most — and impeccably dressed. She wore brands with names that baffled Ada. “This is Acne,” Ada had heard Meredith saying once to a colleague, about a jacket she was wearing. And Ada Googled the brand name to make sure she had heard it correctly.

It had been Meredith Kranz’s idea for the investors to interact, at the meeting, with the new product’s male and female avatars. This was the idea that had kept Tom and Ada up late the night before, troubleshooting, fixing glitches. Meredith had written the script for the reps herself. She had insisted on letting them pitch the product. “It’s more dynamic,” she had said, when Ada raised concerns. “And afterward, we can let the investors interact with the reps themselves,” she continued. An even worse idea, thought Ada. But Bijlhoff had sided with Meredith, and Ada had done as he wished.

The pitch felt, to Ada, like a joke; she had trouble not laughing herself when she saw the reps earnestly moving their computer-rendered limbs about in clumsy, cardboard arcs. Computer-animated people, in 2009, still looked stilted and bizarre. These avatars were not close to passably human. The way they used their arms was incorrect — they hovered in the air unrealistically, never dropping to meet their flanks. When reps moved forward, their gait was outlandishly wrong. For decades, computer animators struggled to replicate the motions of walking and running, without much success; the particular rhythm of the human stride eluded them all, the rhythm of bone and muscle and fat and nerve impulse. Worse than that: these particular reps kept freezing. At the end of last night, Tom claimed to have everything running smoothly, but Ada was still nervous. To her, having reps pitch the product only served to reinforce how far away Tri-Tech was from being able to actually bring it to market. Five years, ten years until the hardware was available; maybe more. They would all have to hope for very patient — and reasonably young — investors.

In the car, at 6:45 a.m., her phone rang. It was a 617 number. She rarely got calls from Boston anymore.

She remembered, abruptly, the conversation she had had with Connor and Caleb the night before: someone had been by to see her. They had given this person her number, whoever it was. A man, they’d said. Could it be him?

She contemplated answering for too long: normally she didn’t answer calls from unknown numbers, but she thought perhaps she should pick this one up.

By the time she had decided to, it was too late; the call had gone to voice mail. She waited for thirty seconds, then a minute. But no message had been left.

When she arrived in the office, it was both unusually full and unusually quiet. Bill Bijlhoff, the CEO, had tried hard to keep the investment meeting under wraps, especially around the more junior programmers; they knew the company was imperiled, surely, and it wasn’t good for morale to raise and lower their hopes too much.

Bijlhoff, who’d been brought in by the original cofounders of the company to head the Alterra initiative, was now the only Tri-Tech employee who’d been working there longer than Ada, and the only Tri-Tech employee to have an office door. Doors, in general, were not part of Tri-Tech’s culture. While other tech companies were going remote, Tri-Tech had hung on tenaciously to its physical space. It occupied the top two floors of a building that now, nearly a third vacant in the wake of the closure of several start-ups in a row, felt something like post — Gold Rush California. The main level was set up like an atrium or a piazza, with six Dorian columns stretching from glossy floor to vaulted ceiling, and two walls of windows. A dome at the top of the building sported an oculus in its center that let in a dramatic, slowly rotating shaft of light. The VPs, including Ada, had their own offices around the perimeter of the main floor; but they were doorless, open to the rest of the space. The other employees spent their days out in the open, at temporary workstations or on couches. They were given breakfast, lunch, and dinner, hot meals rolled out on carts that locked into place at one end of the main floor. They were given healthy snacks throughout the day. Sometimes it felt, to Ada, a little like what preschool must have felt like, though she couldn’t be sure; there were even two small dark offices with cots inside them, in case a midday nap was required by an employee who had recently pulled an all-nighter.

She walked across the floor to Bijlhoff’s office and found the door closed. She wanted to let him know about what she and Tom had done the night before, in the two hours before the meeting began. She rehearsed it in her head: she would assure him that the reps seemed, now, to be behaving; she would run through the backup plan they’d enact in case they didn’t.

She rapped lightly at the door, and Bill Bijlhoff opened it after a beat.

“Ada,” he said, “I’m glad to see you. Come in.”

He was a good-looking man, tall, light-haired, straight-up-and-down. He was slightly older than Ada. Rumors placed him at forty-four, but his actual age was a closely kept secret. Five years ago, when Alterra was booming, he’d been a Silicon Valley celebrity. He had been profiled in every major magazine in the country. He’d appeared, in cartoon form, on The Simpsons. He’d given a TED talk. Now, even with the company in decline, he had not lost the persona he had acquired in those years: that of mischievous boy genius, pioneer, freethinker. Despite the firm’s troubles, Bijlhoff’s estimation of himself remained unshaken. Ada had as little interaction with him as she could manage; he liked her, she thought, because she had never given him a reason not to. Other employees, ones who were closer to him, cycled in and out of his favor rapidly and randomly; she watched them sometimes, shaken, walking out of his office with their heads low.

“Have a seat,” said Bijlhoff, and she did, and so did he.

“Everything looking good?” he asked her. She nodded.

“I think so,” she said, and he said, “Great.”

“The demo was glitching a little bit last night, but I think we’ve got it under control,” she began. Bijlhoff didn’t look interested.

“Listen, Ada,” he said. He took a breath.

“Yes?” said Ada.

“I’ve been talking with some board members. We’re letting Meredith run the meeting today.”

Ada paused.

“Meredith Kranz?” she asked dumbly.

“Yeah.

“As in,” said Ada.

“We’re turning it over to her. We think she’s got it. We think she’ll be good.”

Ada opened and closed her mouth. “But,” she said.

“I know you and Tom have been working on the pitch for a while,” said Bijlhoff, “and that’s great. But the fact is that none of the investors we have coming to sit in today knows anything about programming. And we think Meredith will do a good job of packaging it for them.”

“What if they have questions?”

“I have faith that Meredith can answer them,” said Bijlhoff. “Or else I’ll be there, too.”

Bill had been a programmer, once upon a time; but he hadn’t worked on the tech side of the firm in years. It wouldn’t have surprised Ada if he’d forgotten most of what he once knew. Certainly he knew none of what had gone into the beginnings of the new project.

“You don’t even want us to sit in?” Ada said. “Just to be safe?”

Bijlhoff stuck out his bottom lip, blew upward. A small lock of hair shifted slightly on his forehead. She pictured him suddenly as a rep: How might one animate that particular motion, that particular expression?

“I think you might make Meredith nervous,” he said, in a tone of voice that told her he was trying to be kind.

Ada lifted a hand and dropped it onto the arm of the chair she was sitting in. She put her hands on her knees. She leaned forward, stood up.

“I guess that’s that,” she said.

She wondered — briefly, perhaps unfairly — whether Meredith was sleeping with him. It wouldn’t be the first time that Bijlhoff had dated an employee.

“You’re appreciated, Ada,” said Bijlhoff. “I hope you know that.”

Ada nodded, once. She walked toward the door. She looked down at the shoes she had chosen for the day: heels. She never wore heels.

A thought occurred to her then, and she turned to face Bijlhoff before she left.

“The name,” she said. “Does Meredith know where the name comes from?”

“Of course,” said Bijlhoff. But he had already lifted his phone to make a call, and he looked at Ada as if waiting for her to leave.

The name of the program was the Unseen World. The UW for short. And the truth was that no one, except for Ada, knew how it had come to be called that. She had suggested it; the others had approved. She had never shared the story of its provenance.

She walked, dumbfounded, toward her doorless office. Around her, heads popped over workstation walls. Did the rest of the company know already? Meredith Kranz was friends with some of them. Halfway across the floor, she ran into Tom Tsien, who looked at her grimly.

“You, too?” said Ada. He nodded. Lifted his shoulders once, dropped them.

Ada sat at her desk for a while, uncertain of what to do next. She felt almost as if she should go home for the day: it was too much, she thought, to watch a series of investors walk past her office on their way to the meeting room. To watch Meredith walk toward her fate. What would she do, Ada wondered, if the reps didn’t cooperate? What would Bill do? He was both impulsive and stubborn: ten years ago, when fate had been working in his favor, these were the traits that had propelled him into glory. Now these were the traits that threatened to tank the entire company.

She didn’t notice she was holding her phone until it vibrated in her hand.

She glanced at it. It was the same 617 number that had called earlier that morning. This time, she answered it.

The person on the other end hesitated long enough that she nearly hung up.

“Ada?” he said, at last.

It was a voice she hadn’t heard in half a decade.