Page 118 of Gone Before Goodbye

Whack.

A fist slams into Maggie’s lower back, just beneath her ribs. The knuckles land flush on her kidney. The pain is a white-hot piercing stab. A coppery taste flows into her mouth. The blow shuts down muscles, organs maybe, incapacitates her. Maggie tries to hang on through it, tries to finish this off.

But then another punch lands in the same place.

Maggie feels everything in her close down.

Someone grabs her shoulders from behind and pulls her off CinderBlock’s back. Maggie crashes to the floor. People dance all around her, some stamping on her legs and back. She tries to fight through them, to get back up, but there are just too many people. She keeps battling, keeps trying to get up, keeps getting knocked down.

She screams and then screams again. But no one hears her. No one stops.

The crowd parties on.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Sharon slides into the corner booth at Vipers.

Porkchop is already there. He looks up, sees the expression on her face, and waits. Sharon puts both hands on the table in front of her. She stares at them for a bit—her hands—and then sits back. Sharon’s eyes are everywhere but on him. Her left leg has the jackhammer shakes, but that’s pretty standard for her.

Porkchop knows Sharon is working up to something, so he just gives her space.

A few more moments pass. Then Sharon says, “Do you know what a griefbot is?”

The question is unexpected. But so is his answer. “Yes.”

“You do?”

Porkchop nods.

“I always thought you were the ultimate Luddite.”

“Pinky told me about them after Marc died. I guess he tried one with his mother.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He said it’s some kind of software program where the dead, I don’t know, they text you? Supposed to help you cope with losing a loved one. It’s like a digital replica of them or something.”

Someone hits the jukebox. Tears for Fears start telling everyone to shout, shout, let it all out.

“Did you try one?” Sharon asks. “A griefbot, I mean.”

“No,” Porkshop says. “I don’t want a digital replica. I want my son.”

Sharon nods slowly. Then she says, “But you know that will never be.”

“I do. Death is final.” Porkchop gets that Sharon can sometimes be clumsy with her words or overly blunt. “Is there a point to this, Sharon?”

“I created a griefbot of Marc for Maggie. But it’s not like any other griefbot.”

Sharon takes the next ten minutes explaining the machinations, details, ingenuity that have gone into the AI development of the Marc griefbot. Porkchop listens and tries not to react. Sharon talks fast. She rambles a bit. She loses him when she gets too deep in the woods with the technology, but he just rides that out. Again, this isn’t atypical with Sharon. Her mouth is always trying to keep up with her brain, and that’s an impossible task.

Toward the end Sharon veers into the economic realities of her potential startup. “Unfortunately, I’ve concluded that as of now, my griefbot is not a viable marketplace product, fiscally speaking.”

“Why not?”

“It took me two months of working full-time to gather the information on Marc—coding, hacking, researching, development. This is a beta version, a prototype, but I don’t see how I can mass-produce it to the point where it would ever be profitable. It’s too time-consuming to extract and organize the data.”

“If your griefbot works the way you say it does—”