Conceiving Ada

Microcinema International

R1 DVD

Conceiving Ada is one of the most unusual and original SF films for a long time. It deals with the concept that memories don’t die after the owner’s death, they just circulate around in some sort of space as “memory waves”. With the right search engine and reader it should be possible to retrieve these thoughts and put them into a coherent whole once again.

Emmy is a computer scientist doing just that. She has designed search “agents” to look for the memory waves of designated people. She is a long way ahead of her peers in this research and she has become obsessive if not a little depressed over her inability to make the final breakthrough that will let her read dead peoples’ memories. She finds she has a lot in common with Ada Lovelace, a nineteenth century woman who designed the first mathematical formulas that we would now recognise as a computer program. Emmy has a lot in common with Ada – obsessive, depressed and totally unrecognised for her abilities. Ada is also quite promiscuous, a scandal in English society of the time, so she is something of a lonely social outcast.

Ada meets Charles Babbage, who is working on a machine that can do calculations very rapidly. Although it is mostly mechanical it is recognisable as the first computer. Between the two a strong bond forms. Emmy’s search agents have retrieved many of Ada’s memories and Emmy becomes even more obsessed with the woman. Finally in a flash of inspiration she realises that the final filter to read the memories is human DNA. She must put something of herself into her program. It works and she is able to collapse time within the computer and go back to Ada’s time.

Ada, however, is dying. Emmy’s role now becomes saving the memories of this brilliant but unappreciated woman.

The story is a little vague in places, as you would expect from such a concept, and you must concentrate to follow it and to see the nuances. I found it to be a powerful story, however, with the perfect mix of “what is” with “what if …” It is a good film for thinkers, but the more you think about it the more disturbing it can be.

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