“She was so goddamn smart, it made you question your importance in the grand scheme of things. You know? If Moira was this far above your head, and the heads of everyone you had ever admired—intellectually—then it made you feel like a supporting character. I think that's why she got on everyone's nerves.” Matheson told me over bourbon in his living room, “She made you realize that you were stuck in the past.”

He must have traded in his tea habit for the hard stuff.

I found Edwin Matheson still living in Arlington; he worked with Duncan for most of the Seventies, accepting her brilliance with code and trying to fit her dreams onto 7 ⅜ by 3 ¼ paper. He gave a touching summary of their collaborations at ARPA, and highlighted her contributions to compression algorithms and automatic learning. He was the typist and she was the mad scientist; composing Fortran symphonies that earned Duncan private labs and room-sized computer bays.

I asked him if he’d ever had a blue sportcoat.

Matheson stared me down with the silent indifference of the elderly and finished his drink.

“How about a stack of a hundred punch cards?” I continued, “Some special project you brought home from the lab?”

He set down his glass, pausing as his clouded eyes took on a new sharpness, “One hundred?”

“Exactly.”

“Son, if you have something that belongs to me, you had better come out with—”

Before he could finish, I slid the cards onto the coffee table, watching as Matheson picked them up and ran his thumb over the edge of the deck, his eyes seeing something I was not party too.

I asked him about Elysium.