With the Furby now air gapped, Pandora had forgotten how soothing listening to the lullaby sound of the old woman’s soft snoring could be. Hearing it again, now, in person, she occasionally found herself drifting off under its influence only to rouse at the last minute. Other times, she didn’t catch herself until her eyes were completely closed, only to jerk awake when the phone in her hand vibrated.
Checking the screen for a text from George, Pandora was disappointed roughly half of the time, finding nothing there at all. The phone had just buzzed on its own, leaving no notification as to why. She wrote these instances off as cases of “phantom phone syndrome,” like people had been doing pretty much since cell phones became ubiquitous.
Once after losing the battle to remain conscious while her grandmother snored, Pandora woke to find that whoever had placed the forget-me-nots in Gladys’s room on Valentine’s Day had struck again. Gladys had woken, too, and was admiring them, as she had before.
“Hey, Gram,” Pandora said.
“Hey.”
“Do you know who brought those?” she asked, pointing at the flowers on the windowsill.
Gladys shrugged.
Pandora hit the call button and then waited the half hour or more she usually did after pressing the damn thing. When the same Tweety-scrubbed nurse’s aide from before popped her head in the doorway, Pandora’s antennae went up. “Would you happen to know anything about these?” she asked. “This time,” she added.
“I think one of the residents might be growing them,” she said, “as a hobby.”
“But how did they get here?”
The nurse’s aide shrugged. “I’ve seen them in other rooms from time to time, though.”
Pandora thought about asking whether the rooms she’d seen them in all belonged to women residents, but then shook her head. It was bad enough sleeping in the middle of the day; she didn’t need to be kept up all night by the image of old people—she struggled for a euphemism—“being romantic.”
“Do you want me to get rid of them?” the nurse’s aide asked.
“No,” Pandora said, “she still seems to like them.” She paused. “Is that right, Gram?”
“Right,” her grandmother said.
Every so often, Pandora would find herself in a bind at the nursing home, texting back and forth with George, getting “this close” to solving the mysteries of the universe when suddenly she’d realize that Gladys was awake and watching. Perversely, it almost seemed as if the old woman chose these moments specifically to become lucid. That happened from time to time, Pandora had been informed by her grandmother’s doctor, another one of dementia’s heartbreaking pranks, dangling a little hope just to snatch it away again.
“Hey, Gram.”
“Hello, Dora. Have you been here long?”
At these moments, Pandora was torn between solving whatever eternal riddle she and George were on the precipice of and engaging her grandmother, however fleetingly this time around. Using the cold logic of Gladys’s disease, the younger woman could totally get away with ignoring the older one, knowing the episode would pass into the mist of forgetfulness if not immediately, then shortly enough. The guilt, however, which lived wholly on Pandora’s side of the relationship, would last and follow her. Roughly half the time, she’d put a pin in those about-to-be-cracked inscrutables to turn her full attention to her grandmother. And the other half of the time . . . yeah, she did the same thing. Gladys was family after all, and mere feet away from touching, while George may or may not think of Pandora as anything more than a sounding board for bouncing ideas off of.
“Text you later,” she thumbed, followed by the “running girl” emoji, followed by, “So,” facing her grandmother.
“Was that a boy?” Gladys asked.
“Where?” Pandora said, looking over her shoulder and out the window.
“No,” Gladys said, and she tapped her palm—tap, tap, tap—with her finger.
This disease never ceased to amaze her. “How did you,” Pandora began, but then stopped. “Yes,” she said. “It was a boy.”
“Boy friend,” she said, stressing the separation, “or boyfriend?”
“One of those,” Pandora admitted, while her face let Gladys know exactly which one her granddaughter hoped George was.
“That makes two of us,” Gladys said, smiling mischievously.
Pandora’s jaw dropped. “How?” she asked. “How does that make ‘two of us’?”
But then the disease reasserted its perverse prerogative. “‘Two of us’ what?” Gladys said, the smile now gone, confusion back to making itself at home.
47
It started with a text from George with two (maybe three) words: “I’m scared.”
“What happened?”
“I was at an all-hands meeting this morning, and our chief products officer described interpretability as a ‘nice-to-have.’”
“And that would be?”
“Whenever you hear a coder say they don’t know how their AI came up with something,” George typed, “that’s called a problem of interpretability.”
“And your CPO’s ready to just ignore those problems?”
“Yep.”
“Well, that’s not good.”
“Exactly. He said we should just trust the AI, like we would trust any human expert. Said we don’t question a doctor’s thought process before accepting a diagnosis.”
“So your CPO never heard the expression ‘Get a second opinion’?”
“Apparently not,” George wrote, stabbing the keys he was so angry. “And this is the guy who decides which products to release into the wild!”
“I think that’s the first exclamation point I’ve ever seen you use.”
“I know!”
“And that’s your quota for the month.”
“Sorry,” George wrote back. “It’s the hubris at the highest levels of this industry,” he continued, not mentioning how Pandora and he had been pretty good at figuring out Buzz’s choices thus far. He also didn’t mention why he’d mentally inserted the caveat “thus far.”
Meanwhile, “Maybe you should send him an anonymous e-copy of Frankenstein,” Pandora suggested.
“You think?”
There was a pause, a lull, a moment for self-reflection on both sides. And then: “Just curious,” Pandora wrote, “but have you ever actually read it?”
“You mean Frankenstein?”
A GIF of an animated smiley face nodding.
“It’s on my list,” George wrote. “Just as soon as I get a little free time.”
“Yeah,” Pandora typed. “Ditto.”
The reason George had caveated his thought with “thus far,” and hadn’t mentioned it to Pandora, was because Buzz was starting to surprise him. Like any good AI, Buzz was allowed to modify its own code as it grew and learned, a bit like natural selection if a species were able to call the shots re: its own evolution. And it had been growing a lot lately, thanks to the k-worm gobbling up new assets every day. But for all its growth, Buzz hadn’t achieved consciousness—at least as far as George knew.