Goodbye for Now (36 page)

“But she hasn’t even met these guys.
I
haven’t even met these guys.”

“ ’Tis a wise mother who knows her own daughter.’ ”

“What’s that mean?”

“Something my grandmother used to say. Point is, you don’t have the best track record.”

“I know,” Nadia moped.

“Cheer up. Everyone’s track record is lousy until they meet the good one.”

“I guess.”

“And even if she were wrong, even if you’d found the good one, the projection is going to need some convincing before it’s supportive.”

“Because she was never supportive while she was alive?”

“Because she’s never going to think anyone is good enough for her little girl.”

“I’m not a little girl,” said Nadia.

“So you’ve mentioned.”

Sam was taking Edith out to lunch. At a bar. He wasn’t sure Meredith would approve of that approach, but he was out of his depth here. He suspected Meredith would have been out of hers as well, especially given her reaction to the news about Penny and Albert. He also suspected alcohol was in order, given his findings, and that a public place wasn’t a half-bad idea either. He’d thought about lots of lies he might have told her. He thought about copping to her accusations that RePose wasn’t working somehow. But he couldn’t figure out a way to avoid the truth coming up again and again and again.

“So, what are you drinking?” Sam asked.

“Oh water, I think. Well, maybe one small glass of white wine,” said Edith.

“Let’s order a bottle.”

“Sam! It’s Monday. And it’s only noon. You’re so bad.” She was thrilled. Sam waited until the wine arrived and glasses were filled before he took a deep breath and plunged in.

“Look, I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’m just going to tell you as much as I know as gently as I can.”

“Hit me.”

“You were right. Your husband was not, in fact, having an affair.”

“Of course not. He wasn’t very kind to me, but he did love me.”

“But RePose isn’t wrong either.”

“What do you mean?”

“He thinks he was.”

“He thinks he was having an affair?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“So here’s the thing.” Sam emptied his glass. “Bob looked at a lot of porn.”

“No. Eww. Bob?”

“A lot.”

“How could he possibly? He was an old man.”

“Age restrictions on those sites usually work from the other end,” said Sam.

“When?”

“Until he died.”

“No, I mean when did he do it? He worked all the time.”

“Maybe not all the time.” Sam shrugged. “Or maybe he looked at it at work. Who knows?” Edith looked like she was trying to swallow her own lips. “It’s perfectly normal. Most men—”

She waved him off. “Spare me that speech. Female?”

“Yeah, female. He had a thing for … Well, the less said about specifics, the better maybe. Suffice it to say he had a type.”

“Was it late-middle-aged with a stature shorter than her ass is wide?”

“I’m afraid not,” Sam said.

“But he was just looking, right? He wasn’t sleeping with these … models?”

“No, no, no, just looking. But Leanne fit the type, more or less. The algorithm considered his … proclivities. It saw how often he communicated with Leanne and she with him—all innocent, work-related stuff but very frequent, of course, and very kind and friendly too. And so it put two and two together and concluded that he must be sleeping with her.”

“But he wasn’t.”

“Not that I can see. If he was, he never, ever mentioned anything electronically.” This was true. Sam doubted Bob and Leanne were actually sleeping together. But he also thought the algorithm was probably right: it hadn’t happened yet, but it was about to. RePose: predicting the future. Bob’s language had changed. His tone had changed. If he hadn’t gotten sick, who knows what would have happened, but the scenario the projection played out wasn’t at all out of the realm of what was already occurring. Sam didn’t think Edith needed to know any of that though. Sam was beginning to think reality and honesty were overrated.

“And of course the computer can’t tell that Bob loved me,” Edith admitted, mostly to herself. “He never said so. Hell, maybe he didn’t. Maybe I’m the only one who didn’t know.”

“No, Bob
did
love you.” Sam seized on that. “That’s why the projection’s so confused. The software sees that he loved you. It thinks he was honest with you and close to you. It’s evidently decided this isn’t something he’d keep from you.”

“It feels … guilty?”

“It feels truthful. And I think Bob’s going to keep bringing this up until you respond.”

“Why?” Edith had paled and stopped drinking her wine.

“Because he ignored you sometimes, but you’ve never ignored him before.”

“Never too late to start.”

“It might be,” Sam said gently. “I think he really did love you, Edith.”

“Just not as much as porn.” She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “She used to visit him in the hospital.”

“Who?”

“Leanne.”

Edith was no longer sitting with Sam. Her eyes had wandered elsewhere; her head had left the building. “She came some at the beginning. She’d sit there with me and the kids. She’d bring flowers or food or something—something every time—and she’d fill us all in on what was happening at the office. She has all these sisters—four or five—and she’d tell us what they were up to, all their crazy stories. I was always glad to see her.… She made Bob laugh. She made us all laugh. She was so … young. In such a different world. The world of the well. The world of the life-ahead-of-you.
And then he got sicker, and she stopped coming. Everyone stopped coming, really. There were a lot of tubes and … fluids. It was kind of gross and, um, intimate? You know the body … bodies.… They’re kind of embarrassing, I guess. I just assumed … Anyway, then she started coming again at the end when he was so drugged up he was pretty much gone. Not much gross anymore—he was barely there. So I thought she could finally bring herself to come and say goodbye. To her boss. That’s what she told me. ‘He was the best boss I ever had.’ ”

Sam reached over and squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.

“It wasn’t a very good relationship anyway. And besides, it was more than a year ago now.”

“Not that one.”

She looked at him and managed a small, somber smile. “So now what do I do?”

“Respond. When he tells you he’s having an affair, you respond.”

“How?”

“However you like.”

LOVE LETTER

Dear Merde,

Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am a genius. But it’s not the same as being smart. We like to call that wisdom, but I feel like it’s more solid and nail-downable than that, or at least it would be for a smarter person. Good plus genius isn’t helping me without you. You were the heart of this idea—its genesis, its center, its moral compass and guide. Without you, I’m not smart enough to know. Are we helping these people? It doesn’t help users mourn to find out their loved one was unfaithful. When RePose violates the loved one’s better judgments and tells secrets they’ve brought to the grave, that may be honest, but it isn’t healing. I tell people, I tell myself, that it’s out of my hands. I don’t make anything up. Projections say what’s real and true. But is that real and true? Is that tiny shred of ourselves we make public and commit to bit code really who we are? Loved ones are loved, but they’re also disappointing. Real people don’t always, don’t even usually, say what we want them to, respond how we hope. So what then is the value of making projections as close to real people as possible? I have no idea anymore. No fucking idea.

I reread your last e-mail, and it strikes me as ironic how much more you know than I do.

I love you, you know,
Sam

HEARTS WILL BE GLOWING WHEN LOVED ONES ARE NEAR

D
id the holidays bring out the best in people or the worst in people? Sam had heard both and wasn’t sure it was either one. The holidays brought out the stress and guilt and credit cards of people, best he could tell. What they brought out in the projections though was single-minded focus on one thing: shopping. After Livvie’s insistence that she was coming home had killed the love of his life, Sam had added a calendar function for the projections to work into their calculations. Had Livvie realized it was late September, she’d have been talking about leaving, not coming home, and Meredith would still be alive. The dateline omission was the least of Sam’s sins, he knew, but it was one he could fix easily. As a result, everyone’s projections realized it was the most wonderful time of the year at the exact same moment.

“I think something’s wrong, Sam,” David called from the corner of the salon where he and Kelly were chatting with his mother on a laptop. “My mom’s spent the last ten minutes talking about things she wants to buy online. She’s sending me all these URLs. ‘Do you like this sweater for Grandma? In what color? Do you think Sheila would like this jacket? What size does she wear these days? Do these skis look good for Dad? Do you think he’d prefer Rollerblades?’ It’s weird.”

“Me too!” said George Lenore who hadn’t been in for a while. Having exhausted early on the list of things only his wife knew the whereabouts of, he hadn’t for a little while seen the point in coming back. It dawned on him only belatedly that he could RePose just to talk to her and enjoy her company. Now she was bargain shopping. “If we buy it here,” she was saying, pasting a URL into a separate chat window, “it’s a hundred and
forty-nine ninety-nine, but we have to pay twelve ninety-five for shipping. Twelve ninety-five! What a rip-off. It weighs less than a pound. If we buy it at this place”—another URL came through—“it ships for free, but it’s one sixty-one fifty, but it only comes in black and silver whereas the first site has it in blue too which I think is prettier. What do you think?”

“What do I do?” asked George helplessly.

Dash shrugged. “Well, what do you think?”

“About what?”

“About whether the blue one is prettier.”

“I don’t know. I was never in charge of Christmas shopping. That’s why I got married.”

On the one hand, the holidays were very good for business. That was the best of people maybe. Users longed to connect with their loved ones, to banish bygones, to include DLOs in family traditions of which they’d always been a part. People missed the ones they had lost—always, of course, but more so at the holidays. But it was hard too. Projections themselves were having days merry and bright. They were cheery, as they’d been in Christmases past, whereas users were depressed without them and offended, in spite of themselves, that they were missing their DLO so terribly and their DLO wasn’t missing them at all. Users wanted to reminisce and reflect. Projections wondered when they had to order by to get guaranteed delivery by December 24.

Edith came back one week before Christmas. Celia offered to shoo everyone out and give her some privacy, but she said no, they were all family here. Avery came over and held her hand, just out of frame, and Dash and Sam stood cowardly and cowering behind the front counter. A hush fell over the whole place as everyone furtively whispered that they’d call their loved one back in a little while then tried to look busy doing something else, but no one made a move to leave.

“You don’t have to do this,” said Sam. “I could mess with his programming. I could run him again.”

“I want to.” Edith waved him off. “This is a conversation my husband and I evidently need to have. It’s been a long time coming.”

“You could just stop,” Dash offered. “Maybe you’ve already gotten out of this all you came for.”

“No. I like being able to speak my mind finally,” Edith said. “I’m not ready to give it up. So now I guess I need to let it talk for once.”

She called, Bob answered, and Edith took a deep, shaky breath. “So Bob,” she said, aiming for casual but missing by a mile, “you have something to tell me?”

Even from across the room, Sam could see Bob lose his color. He never ceased to be amazed what this algorithm knew. But Bob was ready. Sam was right about that too. He couldn’t get unburdening his heart out of his head.

“I have to tell you something,” said Bob, and Edith was already looking at her lap and nodding slowly. “It’s going to sound worse than it is, but keeping it from you is killing me, and I need you to listen to the whole thing because the end is important too. I’ve been … I’ve … um …” The projection was having a hard time getting it out, and Sam wondered fleetingly if it was going to end up saying something else altogether. “Leanne and I have been having an affair. Had an affair. It’s over.” It wasn’t. Because it hadn’t even begun. Or maybe, in some other ways, it had. “I’m sorry, Edith. I’m sorry I betrayed you. I’m sorry I lied to you. I’m sorry about the whole thing. I made vows and should never have forgotten them.”

“You’re worried about the vows?” Edith said.

“Our relationship has … struggled some, especially recently. That’s not an excuse. That’s my fault too.”