There were holes in the voice data that had already been uploaded from the Furby to the cloud, and Pandora attempted to fill those during her next visit, recording their conversation on her smartphone while she steered Gladys toward topics likely to require the use of at least one of the forty-four unique English phonemes and four so-called blends she’d not sampled yet. Some of the missing phonemes were easier than others in practice. Th-, for example, was already well represented on the cloud data, even after accounting for the slight lisp her grandmother had acquired, thanks to her having survived frontier dentistry. Other phonemes, however, proved surprisingly difficult, even after Pandora memorized the examples provided in the app’s “Read Me” file. The problem was—as might be expected from a developer who’d name his app Memento Morty—many of the sample words were eccentric at best and frequently obscene. These latter Pandora replaced with rhyming alternatives, but this still meant getting Gladys to offer her opinion on ducks.
“Ducks?” the old woman asked, and Pandora figured she’d bail on the topic now that she had her grandmother saying it. But that might make it obvious there was some funny business going on—something that was not at all hypothetical, seeing as Gladys had already asked what was going on when her granddaughter wanted to talk about punts, dastards, and bird itches.
“What’s a bird itch?” her grandmother asked, and Pandora bluffed.
“Like from lice,” she said. “Um, feather lice. Or wing lice, like head lice, but on a bird’s wing.”
“What birds?” her grandmother asked, and seeing the door open, Pandora stepped through it: “Ducks?” she said.
“Ducks?” Gladys echoed. “What about ducks?”
“Oh, nothing,” Pandora began, then noticed something she hadn’t before: ducks on her grandmother’s nightgown; ducks in glass, porcelain, and wood on her nightstand; ducks on the curtains that had come from her condo and reappeared here. Noticing where her granddaughter was looking, the old lady explained.
“I honestly can’t say how it started,” she said. “Somebody told somebody I liked ducks once, and then your grandfather got wind of it and bingo—birthdays and Christmas and anniversaries—everything ducks. If he hadn’t died on me, I was going to come clean finally and clean house, but then . . .”
And that’s how they went from phoneme collection to phase two in programming Pandora’s grief bot: harvesting the stories and advice and jokes she’d want to hear, in her grandmother’s voice, to illuminate whatever postmortem conversation she might be having with an AI-enabled simulacrum of her last female relative in that future that wasn’t big enough for both of them.
Pandora didn’t mean to eavesdrop on the pillow talk between Gladys and her late husband, but Mr. Nosy was programmed to record and upload whenever it detected a human voice. Needless to say, she could only hear one side of these otherwise private conversations, but that just made them all the more compelling. It was the listening in after the conversation stopped and her grandmother fell asleep that was harder to explain. Pandora took comfort from listening to Gladys’s euphonic snore coming through the speaker that connected them. It was reassuring—that sound—letting her know that everything was okay, that her grandmother couldn’t get into any trouble while she was asleep.
Pandora needed this reassurance because she’d been awoken in the middle of the night by calls from nursing home staff who couldn’t calm Gladys down after what they termed “episodes.” They couldn’t call Roger because they didn’t have his number, only Pandora’s.
“Have you given her any anxiety meds?” she’d ask. They’d reflexively say they had; that’s all they did all day, give old people some kind of medication. But there were too many residents and too few staff, and it wasn’t like residents were going to call them on a missed dose—assuming it was an honest mistake and some underpaid staffer wasn’t supplementing their income by selling Xanax on the side. Sometimes they’d get lucky and the short-pilled resident would sleep through any trigger opportunities, but other times they’d wake up, undosed, in a full-blown panic attack.
“Are you sure?” Pandora would press, and “Yes,” they’d lie, but she could hear Gladys in the background, raging like a paranoid psychotic convinced the nurses were trying to kill her.
Roger would hear her talking, realize it was with his mother’s keepers, and call out where he’d left the keys for the truck, before settling back to sleep. And off went Pandora, a parka around her nightgown and long underwear, her bare feet in a pair of bunny boots. She’d hand Gladys a pill herself and watch her transition twenty minutes later into a cordial, loopier version of her old self, but with ever fewer memories.
She hated being the pill pusher such episodes made her, knew that the prescription stuff was likely accelerating her grandmother’s decline. She would have preferred sharing a brownie or two and chilling with her gram, but rules were rules, no matter how ill conceived. And when she was having a panic attack, Gladys was a danger to herself and others. There was the trade-off, a few more neurons checking out early in exchange for a metronomic heartbeat and an enigmatic smile.
“Hi, Dora.”
“Hi, Gram.”
And so falling asleep to her grandmother’s snoring was a good way of assuring herself that she wasn’t going to be rudely awakened. That is, until she heard Gladys crying out in the middle of the night through her headphones. The filter that had kept her from talking in her sleep as a young bride was apparently gone now. Eventually, even an interruption in the old woman’s snoring would pull Pandora awake, her heart racing as she wondered if this was it. But then there’d be a catch, and the snoring would start sawing away again, making her recall what Gladys had told her once about what she feared.
“I’m afraid of the line,” she’d said.
“What line’s that?” Pandora had asked.
“The one I can’t come back from.”
34
At first, George didn’t talk—text—much about what he was working on, using indirect references to “my work,” “the project,” or how it was “taking longer to grok than I thought.” But then he started loosening up. Example: “I don’t like the expression ‘artificial intelligence,’” he typed. “‘Artificial’ seems pejorative. Why not something like ‘man made’?”
“Maybe because it’s sexist,” Pandora suggested.
“Handmade?”
“Better.”
“You know what word is even better—probably the best?”
“What?”
“I saw it walking past this little indie café,” George typed. “‘Artisanal.’ That’s what I’m going to tell people I’m working on. ‘I’m coding an artisanal consciousness.’”
“Wow.”
“Wow what?”
“You are from San Francisco, aren’t you?”
“Oakland, actually.”
“You know what I mean.”
And indeed he did. To George’s way of thinking, this knowing what each other meant, meant something else. It meant they’d make a good team, coding that artisanal consciousness. Provided he worked up the courage to ask.