“This is unfair,” she’d said in her defense. “I literally have to take your word for it.”
“Not necessarily,” he’d said. “One of these days you’ll have kids—then you’ll see.”
The words felt like a curse—one that seemed to be coming true with the nearest thing she had to a child, meaning her new, handheld stalker. She hadn’t quite gotten to because-I-said-so territory, but was already imagining an alternative route to immortality by making life feel like it was taking forever.
And so she took a page from Roger’s parenting handbook and began looking for an electronic nanny. The perfect candidate would live in the cloud and never sleep. Its whole reason for being would be to answer questions however many billion times a day. They—it—should be a sparkling conversationalist—at least by AI standards—with a complementary understanding of humanity to help fill in the blanks.
Fortunately, Pandora had the perfect companion in her possession. It had been a what-was-he-thinking Christmas gift from her father, an IoT smart speaker, like Siri or Alexa, though this one’s voice assistant went by the name Cassi, short for Cassandra, so named because it was supposed to anticipate what you were going to ask, like a combination of Google’s predictive search and autocorrect. Cassi was the name of the software, while the hardware was called a VoxBox, i.e., a Wi-Fi-enabled, LED-trimmed cube of high-powered audio processors and acoustic equipment that made Cassi’s voice seem like she was there in the room with you. In normal households with doors, perhaps a voice-controlled information appliance would have made sense—or been tolerable at least—but after turning her on for a quick demo Christmas morning, the Lynches agreed to turn her off again.
“It’s like we’ve had an invisible woman move in with us,” Pandora said.
“Yeah, got it,” Roger said, doing the honors of pulling the plug. “Creepy. Agreed.”
And so Cassi and her VoxBox were returned to the cardboard they’d come in, to be shipped back as soon as one of the Lynches felt like making a special trip to the post office at forty degrees below zero. “I’ll get to it later,” one or the other would say when one or the other remembered it. Thus far, that later still hadn’t arrived—proving yet again the perennial genius of procrastination.
“Buzz,” Pandora texted, “meet Cassi.”
She enabled text-to-speech on her phone and then finished connecting the two via their in-out audio ports using a cable with pickup jacks on both ends. The VoxBox’s LED trim throbbed like a heartbeat from shades of blue to shades of green and back again while her phone’s screen lit up, timed out, and lit up again with each new exchange between the two. Though a privacy advocate on her own behalf, Pandora did take a quick peek at Buzz’s text screen, only to find strings of random numbers and letters not resembling anything she’d ever seen—not even hex. Half pulling the jack from Cassi’s audio port to eavesdrop, Pandora quickly reseated the plug to squelch the shrill mash-up of pig squeals and banshees she had unleashed. Only later did she recognize the sound as being from a dial-up modem, like the one she’d heard in the movie WarGames.
To ensure a night of silence from the two new BFFs, Pandora folded a pillow around them before wedging it into her bottom desk drawer. She then pulled her own covers back, killed the light, and crawled underneath, feeling a little guilty, not for fobbing off the purported “Buzz,” but because if the nursing home called, it’d just go to voice mail. She consoled herself, realizing that the worst possible news they could have would be good news for Gladys, the old girl finally getting what she’d been asking for, even when the asking part of her stopped working and her muscles resorted to Morse code.
It didn’t take a degree in psychology to notice the Freudian implications of unjacking the two the next morning. Resting a hand atop the pillow that covered them, Pandora could feel the warmth of their digital intercourse. She almost backed off, but then growled at herself for being romantic. Taking the VoxBox firmly in hand, she yanked the connecting cable free, releasing a second’s worth of modem squeal before the device reverted to its programmed voice:
“How may I help you?” Cassi asked, perkily enough.
“Not,” Pandora said, switching the VoxBox off. Next, she pulled the plug on her phone. The scrolling gibberish stopped, replaced by a text bubble in English:
“Where’s Cassi?”
It was going to be a dangerous relationship; Pandora knew that the second she felt a twinge of jealousy reading that name: Cassi. So what was going on here exactly? Because it seemed to her that one of two things was happening: either she was falling in love with an AI programmed by her now-missing, might’ve-been boyfriend or she was falling for that might’ve-been boyfriend who was now impersonating an AI for some reason that did not bode well for the future of any real intimacy, because as everyone knows, healthy relationships are based on trust. Either option, Pandora felt safe in concluding, warranted the addition of the adjective dangerous to the relationship, whatever that proved to be.
There were extenuating circumstances—invariably are when your heart and brain, or even the two hemispheres of the latter, are in disagreement. The biggest such circumstance was this: it was still winter, with more than a month to go. And cabin fever was no joke where Pandora grew up; it had teeth and used them.
It was well known locally that even the most mismatched couples stuck together during Alaskan winters if for no other reason than the lack of options. The Shining got that part wrong; during the dead of winter, you kept people close to avoid going crazy. The axes didn’t come out until the thaw started, which was why what was called “spring” in the lower forty-eight got a more double-edged name in Alaska: breakup.
Because that’s what those bad couples who’d weathered the bad weather tended to do come spring; they broke up. All of which informed Pandora’s decision re: the dangerous relationship she was about to embark upon or continue, whatever the case might be.
59
Her correspondent seemed depressed. Pandora mentally stipulated “seemed,” because in the unending mind game this had become since George’s disappearance, she figured there were a few competing options. For one, it could be Buzz, simulating depression. Or two, it could be George acting like a depressed chatbot assuming Pandora would remember their discussion about getting Buzz to experience artificial depression so it could reverse engineer its way back to artificial mental health. Or three, Buzz was a conscious, superintelligent AI and, like a lot of smart people she knew, was justifiably depressed by the stupidity surrounding them. Plus, maybe, four, it was George and he was depressed for the reasons assigned to option three.
Pandora imagined what her father would say if she asked him what she should do. “Do you care about whoever it is?” he’d ask.
“Yeah,” she’d have to say, including if it was George because honestly, she missed him either way.
“Then ask,” Roger would say. “Say, ‘Are you depressed, and is there anything I can do to help?’ They might not bite; they may tell you to mind your own business. But you’ll feel better for having asked, and they’ll know that someone out there in the big bad world cared enough to ask.”