Goodbye for Now (10 page)

“And another thing,” Jamie said, pointing a french fry at Meredith. “Stop e-mailing and texting each other during meetings. Meredith’s my only ally over there. I need her to pay attention.”

“I do pay attention!” Meredith insisted innocently.

“No one smiles at their trousers during meetings. I’m on to you two. There’s a new boss in town.” Then he thought about it. “At the very least you could CC me. Marketing meetings are interminable. Those damn chairs make people long-winded. I could use a good laugh.”

“Today she requested pictures of my naughty bits,” said Sam.

“How many times do I have to tell you?” said Jamie. “No texting during meetings.”

Jamie’s becoming Meredith’s boss may have been a step down for him, but it was a huge step up for Meredith. Her old boss had been, well, old—stodgy, tiresome, old-fashioned, and clueless when it came to technology. He frequently bragged that he had met his wife at an actual harvest festival, the traditional way, the pure approach to true love, not this
newfangled technology. Meredith had only the dimmest sense of what a harvest festival actually entailed, never mind what a fangle might be, but she was pretty sure that a marketing manager at an online dating company needed at least some sense of the online part. In contrast, Jamie was fun, funny, technologically astute, and, once he got his head around the idea, enthusiastically engaged with all the women on the marketing team. She started spending longer hours at work, going out afterward, sending fewer dirty texts and e-mails from meetings.

Sam was glad. He was glad she was happy. He was glad she was moving on, settling in—new boyfriend, new boss, new work, new apartment, new life without Livvie. He was glad to be without a job too. Growing up in a household where not just the kid but also the parent was on an academic calendar had bred into Sam the sense that everything should start over every fifteen weeks, that no one should work in the summer and holidays should be long and frequent, and that it was reasonable to expect to take a handful of months off every few years to work on your own project but still get paid for it. The sabbatical was the best part of academia, so far as Sam could tell, and his son-of-a-professor heart was glad for some time off. Severance wasn’t salary, but then again, academic salary wasn’t software engineer salary, so maybe it evened out in the end. He needed the time off. And he had the project.

He’d said no to video chat, and he’d meant it. He didn’t think it was possible, but even in theory, it seemed like a bad idea. He’d said no, but he tinkered a tiny bit. It was interesting. He was curious. He thought he’d mess with it just a little, just to see, just to try, just for fun. He collected what data he could, but it was in no kind of order: a sentence here, a wink there, a laugh, a sneeze. He wrote a script to order, assemble, and compile what he’d found, but what he wound up with was a jigsaw puzzle missing most of its pieces. It wasn’t nearly enough. Livvie would sound like Livvie for three or four words; then she’d sound like five-year-old Sam’s Speak & Spell. She would look like herself then stutter into jerky movements then freeze completely. She would laugh like Livvie and then laugh like Livvie on mute and then stop laughing so abruptly and entirely you would swear you were looking at someone who’d never laughed once in all her life, and Sam would remember all over again that whatever he was looking at, it certainly wasn’t human. He hid it from Meredith. This Livvie would scar her for life.

“Thank you, by the way,” she wrote from a meeting one morning the first week in November.

“Anytime. For what?”

“Working on video.”

“How do you know I’m working on video?”

“We’ve met. Besides, you can’t say no to me.”

“Sure I could.”

“I’m way too cute.”

“You’re not
that
cute.”

“It’s your argument that I’m
pretty
cute but not so cute that you’re unable to deny me a computer program?”

“My argument is that you’re
very
cute but not so cute that I can reanimate the dead. Don’t get your hopes up, Merde,” he warned her. “It doesn’t even almost work.”

“I have faith. You’re pretty cute yourself.”

“Alas, cute has nothing to do with it.”

“And you’re quite skilled.”

“Which has more to do with it, but not enough.”

“I love your big brain, Sam. And all your big parts.”

Then Sam’s phone chirped with an incoming text from Jamie. “STOP E-MAIL-FLIRTING DURING MEETINGS.”

Sam’s dad was also on sabbatical as it happened, real sabbatical, bored with his Hopkins-appropriate project, intrigued and eager to be distracted by Sam’s instead. Sam said I’m not on sabbatical; I’m unemployed. Sam said this isn’t academic; it’s love. Sam’s dad said same difference. To the limited puzzle pieces assembled by Sam’s search, his dad added bits of other programs: animation so that she looked human and consistently like Livvie, a voice synthesizer so she sounded like herself rather than R2-D2, facial recognition software so she could tell who she was talking to. It was better—less creepy, more human—but it still didn’t know much. It needed to be taught.

“This is foundational artificial intelligence philosophy. This is Turing,” Sam’s dad enthused. Alan Turing, 1912–1954. Sam’s dad’s hero.
Father of computer science and all-around computer badass. There was a bust of Turing on the mantel in Sam’s living room growing up. It had been made for Sam’s dad by one of his students, a kid who was double-majoring in sculpture and, in case that didn’t pan out, computer science. The head was made of molded plaster, but its eyes, nose, lips, ears, eyebrows, hair, collar, and tie were made of scrap computer parts. The eyes in particular—keyboard “I” keys—creeped out seven-year-old-Sam beyond articulation. Turing’s argument was that a computer or robot or avatar or whatever could be considered thinking only if a person engaging with it couldn’t tell for sure whether it was human or machine. Seven-year-old Sam’s question was what if the person were really stupid or a little kid. Turing’s question was what if you started with a computer only as smart as a little kid and taught it what you wanted it to know—artificial intelligence learned rather than innate. Nurture over nature.

“What does this have to do with Livvie?” said Sam.

“Teach her what she needs to know,” said his dad.

Sam fed Livvie pictures so she could recognize who was who, who said what, and where they were. He fed her all the e-mails she’d been exchanging with Meredith since she died so she’d be up to speed. Then he fed her all her pre-death e-mails as well to give her a base of knowledge. And that was when Sam had a new idea. Well, an old idea. An idea he’d had before. What Livvie needed was his dating algorithm, not to find her a mate but to find her a voice.

At first it didn’t work at all. It was attuned to love, spark, romance, preferences, turnoffs, habits, inclinations, objections, gut reactions. None of that was required here. But what did hold true was that more data painted a better and fuller picture of the person in question. It didn’t need artificial intelligence; it needed Livvie’s natural intelligence. The algorithm bootstrapped the bits and pieces of old video chats until it could project just what Livvie looked and sounded like, her intonations and her affect, her facial expressions and verbal habits, the way she fluffed the back of her hair idly while she talked, the way she twisted her wedding ring around her finger, the way she messed with her hearing aids and painted her nails. It knew how she breathed, when she laughed, the way she leaned her right ear toward the camera when she missed something Meredith said, how she looked all around the frame when it opened to
get a first good look at her granddaughter, how she squinted through the conversations they had in the late afternoons when the sun was shining in off the water.

Meredith was right—it was the same idea as with the e-mails. It remembered the sorts of things she’d say, the ways she responded, but also how she looked and sounded when she did so. Sam screwed with the programming. Sam’s dad screwed with the programming. Sam and his dad trialed and errored and messed with it until it got so good it took their breath away, but Sam did not tell Meredith. He kept saying he was making progress but not yet. He told her trying before it was ready might scar them both, her and the computer program, who was less an old woman than a toddler, soaking up everything, internalizing it all, remembering—whether you liked it or not. Best not to curse around it then or it would say the “F”-word in front of your in-laws over brunch.

Then one morning Meredith woke up feeling headachy and vomity and feverish and called in sick to work. Sam wanted to call her doctor, but she said she just needed sleep and a day on the sofa watching bad TV. He went out at lunchtime to get her pho from the place she liked in the International District. He came back very quietly in case she was napping, but instead he heard the fake phone ringing on Meredith’s video chat. And as he watched and listened from the front hallway, breath held in anticipation or maybe premonition, Livvie answered. Her window clicked open. Meredith gasped, wiped her eyes, caught her voice, and finally broke into the most beautiful smile Sam had ever seen.

“Hey, Grandma. How’s the beach?”

“Lovely, baby. Sunny and hot. How’s home?”

“Rainy and cold.”

“Poo. You feeling better?”

“Yeah … I am.”

“I’m so glad, sweetie. I miss your smiling face. I miss the happy, laughing Meredith.”

“It’s been a rough couple months,” Meredith admitted. “What’s new there?”

“Oh you know. Nothing new. Same old same old. I wish you’d come visit.”

“I wish I could.… I have to work.”

“You work too hard, baby. I guess we’ll have to wait till summer.”

“I guess.”

“How’s Sam?”

“He’s good. He’s so great, Grandma.”

“I’m so happy for you, baby. I can’t wait to meet him. How’s Mommy?”

“She’s good too. She misses you.”

“I miss her too. And you, of course. I’ll see you soon, sweetie. I have to run. We’re having piña coladas over at Marta’s. Tell Sam hi for me.”

“Okay, I love you.”

“Love you too. Talk this weekend maybe?”

“Absolutely.”

“Bye,” said Livvie.

“Bye,” Meredith squeaked, and Sam breathed out behind her, and she spun around and saw him, but neither of them could think of anything to say that seemed appropriate. Pale and stunned, she was also shining, her eyes feverish, her cheeks flushed.

“It was flawless,” she whispered finally.

“It was.”

“I swear you’d have to know to know.”

“I know.”

“It looked like her. It sounded like her. It said what she’d say, responded how she’d respond.”

“I saw.”

“Yeah, but you never knew her. Trust me, it was … perfect.”

Sam nodded. “But is it good or just impressive?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s stunning and all. But do you want to use it?”

“Hell yes. What do you mean? Why not?”

“Is it creepy?”

“No, it’s exact. It’s exactly like talking to her. It’s too dead-on to be creepy. No uncanny valley. No valley, no distance at all. There’s no gap there at all.”

“Doesn’t it make you miss her more?”

“It brings her back.”

“But not really.”

“No, really. It really brings her back to me,” said Meredith. And then later, after pho and aspirin and a decongestant: “It’s such a relief. Like she isn’t really gone. If I can still talk to her … I barely have to miss her at all.”

THANKSGIVING

S
am was troubled. Meredith was overjoyed. Sam was worried this was upsetting the healthy grieving process. Meredith was having nothing even approaching a healthy grieving process to upset. It was more like an illicit online affair. She couldn’t tell anyone. She couldn’t explain to her colleagues at work why she was beaming suddenly, smiling idly while gazing into space during meetings, her old self again for the first time in weeks. They assumed it was because of Sam, and it
was
because of Sam, but mostly, he knew, because he’d given her Livvie. He could always tell when they’d chatted because Meredith just glowed. It used to be that the days they didn’t chat were days they were busy or preoccupied or not paying attention to the time difference or had nothing to report or just didn’t think of it. Now on days they didn’t chat, it weighed heavy on the one that the other was gone. On days they talked, Meredith beamed with pleasure but also with relief—not gone after all. Still, she exercised restraint. They hadn’t e-mailed or chatted every day before, so they didn’t—couldn’t—now.