Goodbye for Now (18 page)

“No, in fact it’s March, love,” said Avery gently. “You died five weeks ago.”

“How do you mean?” Clive asked, confused but not entirely disbelieving.

“You developed pneumonia during your last round of chemo, darling. Your lungs filled with fluid. You just weren’t strong enough to fight it.”

“They said I had another … they said another few months at least.”

“The cancer was … at bay, I guess. But the pneumonia … We were all there. We were all with you when you went. It was very peaceful. You weren’t in any pain at the end. That was a blessing.”

“And this is … heaven?”

“No dear, this is technology.”

Avery came in the next day and the next day and the ones after that. Avery came in every day for the next ten. At first, she was clearly so glad and relieved to see Clive. But the projection would not talk about anything but his death. He was obsessed. The worst day of both of their lives, and he would not let it go. She wanted to tell him about the kids, her support group, her return to work, her new workout regimen. All he wanted to talk about was dying. Avery christened the newly minted wipe. The second time she just didn’t tell him.

At the end of week two, they were still sleepless, breathless, but under way at least. Dash went home to wear his clothes and check in on things there. Meredith and Sam closed up the salon Friday afternoon and thought they were due for a very nice meal at a very nice restaurant with a very, very nice bottle of wine. Unfortunately, they were too tired. They got carryout sushi and put on a movie and fell asleep on the sofa. Sam woke up when the credits rolled with a slice of ginger stuck to his cheek. He shook Meredith awake, and they left everything where it was, warned the dogs against the wasabi, and climbed into bed.

“It’s going well, I think,” she mumbled on the very edge of falling back to sleep.

“What? Dead Mail?”

She laughed. “I thought we weren’t calling it that anymore.”

“Yeah, but sometimes I forget. And RePose is going to be a little formal for some of our users, I bet. The cool kids are going to call it Dead Mail.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ve never started a business before, but it seems like it’s been a pretty good two weeks.”

“I’m worried,” said Sam. “I don’t get why they want to tell their projections they’re dead.”

“I do.” Meredith settled against him. She was warm and comfortable and very naked. They’d put a ban on pajamas soon after they’d moved into Livvie’s.

Sam squeezed her closer to him. “Tell me.”

“It’s like falling in love. Your old life is gone, just … gone. This thing has happened to you, and you look like the same person, and your life has stayed the same in a lot of ways—you live in the same place and wear the same clothes and go to the same job and retain most of the same people in your life as before. But you are totally, completely, irrevocably different. A new person. New life in a new world. And you just want to scream it from the rooftops because otherwise how’s anybody going to know?”

“So it’s not about being honest with their projections. It’s about being honest with themselves.
About
themselves,” said Sam.

“Something like that,” she murmured.

“How do I make it stop?”

“You don’t. They tell. You fix it. You put the fabula in tabula rasa.”

“Huh?”

“Erase and try again.”

Indeed, the wipe was half a solution, but it wasn’t a good one. Starting over took time, energy, money, courage. Users had already been through so much. The dying. Then the death. And then working up the nerve to come into the salon. And then that first e-mail, that first video, the mix of relief and horror that was seeing their projection for the first time. All the confessions. All the tears. To wipe and have to start from scratch was like losing their loved one all over again. The learning curve was steep and thorny—user and projection both had so much to take in—so having to start over felt like a serious setback for people who had already suffered so many. Avoiding the news and thus the wipe seemed the way to go.

Sam wrote up a list of yamas and niyamas, RePose dos and don’ts, the very first bold-printed fourteen-point one of which was:
FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS HOLY, DO NOT TELL YOUR PROJECTION THAT IT’S DEAD!!!!
Meredith wrote a half dozen sample scripts—suggested ways in. Dash got an L.A. friend to make a short film, starring himself, which they screened for new users before they began, explaining what to say and what not to say, explaining why telling your loved one it was dead was not a good idea. Users nodded and sniffled and understood. For a while, Sam had a little quiz afterward that he made them pass before they could proceed. For a while, he made them sign an oath: “I promise not to tell my projection that it’s dead.” They told anyway. Everyone. First goddamn thing out of their mouths.

Projections did not take this news well. Mostly, they weren’t upset. They were confused. It was one of the most important events in their lives, their deaths, but it was also the one thing for sure they had never really experienced. There was no predicting how they’d react to their own deaths based on their e-mails or browser histories or Facebook posts or anything else. There was often a lot of reaction in those archives to other people’s deaths, but that proved to be an ineffective predictor of reaction to one’s own. Furthermore, they couldn’t be convinced of it. Here they were, after all. They could see themselves, hear themselves. They could
move a hand and see it move in the little window of their video chat. They could read an e-mail reporting their death and write back, “Hey, I’m not dead,” or reply, “Nope, no worries—I’m fine.” First-generation DLOs had never heard of RePose, and so it could not be explained to them. Folks who hadn’t been ill—accident victims, heart attacks out of nowhere, electrocution, this sort of thing—had no reason to believe, no basis for belief at all. Or sometimes projections were angry. Once told, they’d send ranting e-mail after ranting e-mail on how they’d given up smoking, given up meat, given up wine, given up croissants, given up skydiving, only to realize now that it hadn’t been worth it, hadn’t, in any case, been enough.

When the film and the scripts and the quiz and the oaths and all Sam’s warning and cajoling didn’t work, his next solution was the Orpheus route. He put but one condition on his benevolent miracle of allowing you to take your dead loved one up from the underworld: don’t turn around. Do not let them know they’re dead. He simply made it verboten. He put in a kill switch. You told—it wiped automatically. Sam shut it down, wiped it clean, and if you wanted it back, you had to start from scratch. He wasn’t trying to be controlling or cruel. But since telling them not to didn’t work, he had to try something else. But the Orpheus route didn’t work either (not even, of course, for Orpheus). Users sat cowed, tongue-tied, afraid to proceed. They were afraid to say anything at all for fear they’d tell accidentally because whatever else they had to say, the subtext was always: look at this gigantic hole in me.

Soon enough, Sam decided to include the first wipe free with the start-up fee. Soon enough, he killed the Orpheus autowipe and left the decision in people’s own hands. Inevitably though, users who told mea culpa’d and requested the wipe, often again and again. Users would wipe and begin again, screw up, say the wrong thing, become annoyed, become frustrated, wipe and begin again, sadder but wiser, knowing what to avoid from last time, falling into new traps instead. It was like a video game. Both projection and person, loved one and user, the dead and the living, died and were reborn into new lives again and again and again.

PENNY

S
am’s solution to all problems had always been: more work. Sam felt head down, feet grounded, firmly seated—in for the long haul—was the way forward. Software engineering was ideally suited for this approach. You just sat and coded, recoded, let it build, looked at what happened, coded some more. While things built, you read stuff online in another window. Sam spent a lot of time sitting down.

“You’re going to fuse physically to that chair,” Meredith warned.

“It’s a good thing you sprang for the ergonomic ones then.”

“You need some exercise, fresh air.”

“I walk the dogs with you. Often. Sometimes.”

“You need contact with humans.”

“I have nothing but contact with humans.”

“Live ones.”

“I see you. I see Dash. I see our clients.”

“I was thinking we could invite people over this weekend.”

“Who?”

“We used to have friends,” said Meredith.

“We still do.”

“Nonelectronic ones.”

“Oh, no one has those anymore,” said Sam.

“You should come with me to the game.”

“I can’t, Merde. I have to fix these bugs.”

“My grandmother would want you to.”

“Take Dash. Your grandmother would want you to take Dash.”

“He’s in meetings. You’re here.”

“Yeah, but you know what fixes bugs, Merde?”

“What?”

“Butt plus chair. It’s the only thing.”

It was Opening Day, and truly, Sam was excited. While his builds were running in other windows, he was reading predictions and spring training stats and DL prognoses. He was thrilled it was baseball season again. But he also thought this was why they had a TV and a radio—so he could work
and
have the game.

“It’s tradition,” said Meredith.

“Yeah, yours,” said Sam. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go with her. It was that they’d staked everything on this, and in all the world, truly, only he could make it work. “Take Penny.”

“My grandmother’s neighbor?”

“Our neighbor.”

“I don’t know. She’s been pretty out of it since her husband died.”

“All the more reason,” said Sam.

Meredith went down to invite her to the game. Sam’s phone rang two minutes later.

“I know you’re having a love affair with that chair,” she said, “but you have to come downstairs right now.”

Penny’s place was exactly Livvie’s two floors down—same layout, same kitchen, same bath fixtures, same balcony and wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, same view—but like their apartment in an alternate universe. In fact, Sam could only assume the view was the same—the windows were covered in thick, dark green velvet curtains. He felt his pupils inhale just to take the place in. It was dark not just from the heavy curtains but also from scant, dim lamps and walls papered dark gold and wall-to-wall stained, matted-practically-to-tile navy carpet and dust all over everything. He took in two ragged leather chairs and a sofa with patched, leaking cushions and two wood tables so old their grain had worn smooth and black. There were dirty dishes on the tables, on the chairs, on the sofa, on the floor. The kitchen counters and sink were full of crusty empty soup cans, empty frozen veggie bags, empty cottage cheese containers, empty
ice-cream cartons. There were piles of clothes—hers and his—all over the apartment like anthills, so Sam had to zigzag insectlike between them to find Meredith. The bedroom was a similar riot of clothes, plates, water glasses, prescription bottles, dirty towels and sheets, old magazines, dusty books in stacks. By the bathroom door was a tumbling pile of leftover programs from Albert’s funeral. The date on it was two months before Livvie died. Meredith and Sam exchanged a long, sinking look.