“Death sucks.”
“And then some.”
Perhaps because they were rapidly exiting them, the two frequently talked about their childhoods, Pandora’s having been reasonably happy while George’s—as presented to the girl on the other end of his screen—was parsed and curated for bits that created the appearance of happiness (or were amusing at least). Take the topic of favorite toys, Pandora going first:
“It was a Christmas stocking stuffer, but I loved it beyond reason,” she wrote of her favorite toy. “It was a wind-up Creature from the Black Lagoon that walked and shot sparks out of its mouth, making this whirring sound as it went. I loved winding it up and letting it walk across the table to me, sparking and whirring all the way. I loved doing it in the dark where the sparks stood out, partly shining through the green-and-yellow plastic of the creature’s body. It was beautiful. The body of the creature was squat—like a Lego character—making it cute instead of scary. I think I was three, and I’d fallen in love with a pretty machine.”
“When I was a little kid, I had the weirdest idea about birds,” George prefaced his contribution to their discussion. “The first bird I remember seeing was a robin perched on a rusty patch of fence. The bird and fence seemed connected through the bird’s rust-colored chest. I asked my latest foster dad why different parts of the fence were different colors and learned about metals and oxidation, including the fact that some kinds of metals turn green.
“These facts all connected in my kid head, and I became convinced that robins must be made of metal because they could rust. The fact that my foster family at the time had a cuckoo clock didn’t help. And so, for the longest time, I went around thinking birds were flying robots who perched on high-power lines to recharge and, when they weren’t careful, could rust like the Tin Man from Oz after getting caught out in the rain.
“The whole thing fell apart when my foster dad caught me running outside with an armload of umbrellas when it was raining. ‘What are you doing?’ he wanted to know. I thought it was pretty obvious. I was helping the birds. ‘Helping the birds how?’ So they wouldn’t get wet, duh. ‘It’s okay if birds get wet.’ But what about when they rust? ‘Excuse me?’
“And that was the end of the robot birds of Oakland, disappeared by harsh reality like Santa and the tooth fairy, but even worse because I’d come up with the robot birds all by myself,” George concluded.
“I think somebody owes you a royalty on drones,” Pandora typed back.
“If only,” George replied.
Not that Pandora was fooled by George’s diversionary tactic. “Birds aren’t a toy,” she pointed out. “Come on. Quid pro quo. I showed you mine. You have to show me yours.”
“The truth is,” George wrote back, “being a foster kid, I didn’t have a lot of toys of my own.”
“Wa-wa,” Pandora typed. “Save it for my dad.”
There was an unusually long pause from George’s end, and Pandora suddenly panicked, wondering if she’d overstepped. But then: “On second thought,” George typed, “one of my foster dads brought home a pair of finger cuffs from Chinatown once. I tried it on and cried when my fingers got stuck. And the harder I pulled, the tighter they got.”
“So you’re telling me your favorite—perhaps only—toy was basically some digital S&M device?”
“Punny,” George typed. “But it wasn’t like that. I think there’s a lot of counterintuitive Eastern philosophy woven into those things. Like the need to push deeper to loosen them—that’s like closing your eyes so the Force will take over. Or like loving something by letting it go. I think my foster father was trying to tell me that my mother wasn’t ever coming back, but without words. I think he wanted me to know it in my muscles and bones and to let her go.”
Before Pandora could text her response, she noticed the dancing ellipses, indicating that George was typing again, followed by a brand-new bubble blooping up underneath his last one. “I don’t think these were my thoughts at the time, as a child, but they became my thoughts because that data was there, waiting for me to catch up to it.”
It was a hallmark of these exchanges between George and Pandora that they unfolded by a process of association. And so from a novelty item’s influence on a young boy’s thoughts, George suddenly leaped ahead, to technology’s ability to read them. Thoughts, that is.
“Have you ever seen a person being scanned by an fMRI machine?” he wrote.
“In Fairbanks,” Pandora replied, “the reflex hammer is considered cutting-edge diagnostics.”
“Well, if you ever get a chance, take it,” George recommended. “It’s incredible, watching as various parts of the brain light up when an operator asks the subject to think about something. And the same part lights up when they’re shown an image of what they were asked to imagine, ditto when handed the object to hold.
“It’s hard to walk away from something like that and not think that what you’ve witnessed is mind reading. Without touching the head or opening up the skull, from inches away, an act of thinking has been captured and turned into a picture. Do it with enough words with enough subjects, and you’ll come away with a collection of brain signatures you can feed into a pattern-recognizing algorithm and translate back into words or pictures, like the grooves on a vinyl record that can be traced by a needle wired to a speaker and converted into music.”
Pandora’s response back to George was the “mind blown” emoji, followed by her response to her own heart: a silent scream and feet pumping under her desk—her happy dance.
33
The Furby, of course, wasn’t just for Gladys, but for Pandora as well, to give her some programming practice in her recently decided vocation: artificial intelligence. She’d read an article in Wired about what she had in mind for all the personal data she was mining from her last surviving female relative: a chatbot to assemble and preserve the thoughts, feelings, memories, and uniqueness of her grandmother as she headed for the exit, something to keep her company in the long future without her. The article dubbed it a “dad bot,” and the author found the results surprisingly comforting when comfort was most needed. Not immediately after the loss, but later, when the programming was forgotten, allowing the user to be surprised by the familiar plus time.
Playing a hunch, Pandora had googled the words grief and bot and got several hundred hits, suggesting that she was not alone in wanting to hold on to a loved one busily slipping between her fingers. After comparing reviews and discounting those with obvious grudges against this or that app developer and/or software publisher, she downloaded a plug-and-play program called Memento Morty with a default voice synthesizer that sounded like a fast-talking Hollywood agent from the 1940s but which could be customized to match your loved one’s voice, provided you uploaded enough high-quality MP3s to the cloud, where the real magic happened.
There were the usual funky, robovoice glitches, like pronouncing c’mon as “see Monday,” or talk-spelling titles like Mr., Dr., or Ms.—but these could be fixed on the fly by highlighting the misread text and correcting the pronunciation from a series of phonemes in pull-down menus followed by picking a number from one to ten, to indicate the phoneme where the stress was supposed to go. This last feature was what accounted for the app’s not being free but also not featuring a bunch of distracting ads. After all, the whole point of a grief bot was to provide a closed-eyed and seamless experience of your loved one, returned to answer all those questions you hadn’t gotten around to while they were still alive. And as far as Pandora was concerned, twenty bucks was a small price to pay to not hear her grandmother’s voice trying to sell her male enhancement pills.