Goodbye for Now (15 page)

Though the Olympic leap from just Meredith and Livvie to anyone else seemed hamstring-pulling enormous and foolhardy to Sam, it was all academic to his father. His dad wasn’t horrified or blown away or even terribly impressed. He was proud of his son as he’d been since the day he was born, but computerized projections of the algorithmic compilation of one’s electronic communication archive fell for Sam’s dad entirely within the realm of the possible, even probable, maybe even practical. “We’re thinking of expanding the application. Meredith’s cousin Dashiell has this idea that if we could make it work for anyone, we could make a living connecting people electronically with their dead loved ones.”

“E-mail from the great beyond. Dead Mail. I love it.”

“Exactly. But I’m worried about giving it all it needs to know.”

“It already knows all it needs to know. By definition. Isn’t that the point? To talk with the person they were when they were living?”

“We ran some tests between my archive and Dash. Mixed results. So I gave the projection access to the internet.”

Sam’s dad laughed. “How’d that go?”

“Not that well. Dash was asking the projection for a tamale recipe, but they’d never discussed tamales or recipes of any kind. The projection had no idea what he was talking about. It looked it up, but nothing made sense, so it didn’t know what to do.”

“Well no, Sam, it’s not going to be able to do anything on its own.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not creating a new human. You’re
re
-creating an existing relationship. Of course you can trick it. And of course it’s not going to work if the user tries to trick it. But the user isn’t going to try to trick it. The user’s going to meet it halfway, more than halfway. Users will lead it and guide it. They’ll stay away from what they know the projection doesn’t and can’t know. That’s your whole point here, right? To make it as close as possible to what it was? To who they were?”

“I guess. But aren’t people going to screw with it, go off on tangents, stray from the well-worn path, at least bring up things they never talked about before?”

“Yup.”

“And isn’t that a problem?”

“Yeah,
their
problem. If users don’t want confused projections, they’ll
try hard not to confuse them. If users want their old loved ones back, they’ll stay as close to their old ways as possible. That’s the goal: to maintain contact with dead loved ones, not new people or new relationships.”

“I guess.”

“It’s not going to be smart, Sam. It’s not going to have free will. It’s not going to be human. All it’s going to be is what it was before. It’s a mimic. It’s like a mynah bird—you can make it sound human, but it’s not going to understand or even mean what it’s saying.”

“But the closer it is to real, the more users will forget all that.”

“Yes indeed. Users are always the problem. You know what would help? A redirect. Something it can say to warn the user when it gets confused.”

“I guess,” Sam said again. “You think any of this is possible, Dad?”

“Sure. Why not?” Here Sam was reinventing the rules of life, love, and death, and his dad was not much more than vaguely intrigued. This was what he loved about his father.

“And a good idea?”

“Well, a good thought experiment in any case.”

The more Sam thought-experimented about it, the more he realized his dad, as always, was right. The first Not-Sam had been closest of all to human, closest of all to Sam. Confused wasn’t a failure; it was a victory. Confusion in the face of a making-no-sense Dash was exactly the reaction a real Sam would have. Tom Holly and the capital of the Northern Region of Ghana were computer responses, but they didn’t want computer responses. They wanted human responses, and Not-Sam 1.0’s puzzled and vaguely bemused conviction that Dash was screwing with him seemed the most human one of all. Sam dialed back Not-Sam’s access to the internet. He deprioritized his archive with everyone but Dash. He pyramided what Not-Sam knew, what he could know: a lot of his interactions with Dash, a little of his interactions with everyone else, a smidge of the rest of the world, a delicate balance of the known, the unknown, and the unknowable.

“That bitch lied to me.” Dash was incredulous. “It said it was going to go look in the bedroom, and it never came back.”

“My dad says we need a catchphrase,” Sam reported.

“How about, ‘Don’t lie to me, bitch’?”

“Not for you. For it. A ‘does not compute,’ an ‘abort, retry, ignore,’ a ‘whatchoo talkin’ about, Willis’ for the projection to say when it becomes confused, when you ask it a question it doesn’t have enough information to answer, something to gently guide the user to a different line of conversation.”

“ ‘Back off … or else,’ ” Dash suggested ominously.

“
Gently
guide,” Sam reiterated.

“ ‘I’ve no idea what you’re on about’?” said Meredith.

“Too British,” Sam objected. “You’ve been spending too much time with Jamie. Less work for you.”

“That’s why we need to get rich,” said Dash.

“ ‘Who wants to know?’ ”

“ ‘Why do
you
care?’ ”

“ ‘Never have I ever …’ ”

“ ‘No hablo inglés.’ ”

“ ‘You do not have access to those files. Please contact your service administrator.’ ”

“ ‘I love you and would never hurt you,’ ” Meredith offered, suddenly serious.

“How does that mean, ‘I don’t have enough information to answer that question’?” asked Dash.

“ ‘I don’t have enough information to answer that question’ is evasive. ‘I love you and would never hurt you’ actually speaks to the issue.”

“Which is?”

“Which is that the real point of all these conversations will always be: ‘I love you and would never hurt you. I miss you so much.’ ”

They settled on, “I’m sorry, sweetie, I don’t understand,” with a dropdown menu in the preferences setup so that you could change “sweetie” to “honey,” “baby,” “angel,” “love,” “dear heart,” or your user name as you wished.

Forget really good internet dating. Without even trying, without even deciding to really, somehow Sam had invented eternal life. Immortality.
Not for you, but you wouldn’t care because you’d be dead. As far as your loved ones were concerned, however, Sam could keep you alive and with them forever. How was that not immortality? Sam felt vindicated. Maybe internet daters matched and then quit, but people who died stayed dead. Sam could bring them back, but only so long as you paid for the service.

“Dating is temporary,” said Meredith. “Death is for life.”

Nothing unknown is knowable
.

—TONY KUSHNER
, Angels in America

DEAD MAIL

T
hey spent a lovely, rainy family Christmas together watching storms move in and out again in a big cabin they rented on Whidbey Island. Sam’s dad came out for the great meeting of the parents. Uncle Jeff and Aunt Maddie agreed to stay at the cabin instead of at a fancy hotel, largely because the island didn’t have a fancy hotel but also in the spirit of the season. Kyle and Julia each pulled their daughter aside within five minutes of her arrival to say they loved her and merry Christmas and they couldn’t wait to meet Sam’s dad, but they did not wish to discuss what happened over Thanksgiving and could they all please just leave it alone. Meredith squeezed their hands and looked remorsefully at her toes and nodded soberly. Dash winked at her in conspiratorial solidarity.

The cabin was huge and sprawling. The owners must have built it piecemeal as they could afford to because bedrooms and bathrooms seemed tacked onto corners or nestled at the backs of hidden hallways or accessible only via ladders or by traversing empty loft spaces or in one case by going outside and back in again. On the third day they were there, Aunt Maddie found a fourth bathroom no one had noticed before, tucked into a crawl space in the attic eaves. But it had a great room and a wall of windows looking out over the bluff and the sound below and the mountains beyond in and out of clouds. And it had a kitchen large and equipped enough—and that was saying something as it turned out—to sustain all of Livvie’s holiday food traditions.

There were cookies on every horizontal surface. New ones were made daily, never the same ones twice, never even the same set of bakers
involved. There was a red-and-green-dyed cheese ball one night covered in chopped nuts and stuffed with mushrooms that challenged even Sam’s lactose love affair. There was gumbo and lasagna and clams they dug up themselves along the beach with the dogs. Hors d’oeuvres and dips and snacks appeared hourly, often though not always holiday themed, often though not always identifiable. There were miracle, endlessly self-replenishing bowls of homemade Chex mix everywhere, and a new batch was always,
always
in the oven. Sam and his dad kept exchanging silent, wide-eyed glances over the food. Their holiday tradition had generally involved Christmas Eve dinner at the home of an aunt or a department chair, the exchange of one gift apiece Christmas morning whenever they got out of bed, followed by cereal or oatmeal and then a movie in the afternoon. When Sam was a kid his dad had made a bigger deal—more presents, a pass at decorating, carols on the radio—but neither of them missed it as Sam grew older, and they’d just phased it out he supposed. It didn’t seem worth the fuss for just the two of them.

Now though, everything was different. Everyone’s life was about to change. Sam felt that. He knew it. Behind him were all those Christmases he and his dad had spent alone together, and now here was this huge family—aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, marathon games of Trivial Pursuit, holiday traditions involving foods Sam couldn’t imagine eating for any other reason (why would you dye cheese?), half-finished jigsaw puzzles on fifty percent of the tables in the house, and people everywhere you looked. This is what it’s going to be like from now on, he thought. Family and drama and food and love and tradition. Everything was changing.

They stayed for a week, and every day had a theme—another of Livvie’s brainstorms, evidently, which had no doubt been fun for six-year-olds Dash and Meredith but seemed to Sam to have outlived its relevance. On the other hand, thirty-four-year-olds Dash and Meredith seemed to be enjoying themselves thoroughly, so what did he know. “Old traditions die hard around here,” Dash shrugged at him on Christmas Pajama Day when he came down for dinner in fleece reindeer pants and a pajama top covered neck to hem in one giant (and Sam thought terrifying) Santa face. But it wasn’t until Eggnog Day that they hit any real trouble.