Page 141 of Gone Before Goodbye

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

When she’s left alone, Maggie opens the griefbot app.

AI Marc appears on the screen with a smile. But it’s different to her now. Less potent. She’s not sure why. It’s like she sees the cracks and wires.

“Hey,” AI Marc says. “Where are you?”

“In a vineyard in Bordeaux.”

He smiles. “I wish I was there.”

“You’ve been here before,” she says.

“With you,” he says. “I’ll never forget.”

Neither, Maggie thinks,will I.

“Who picked this place for us?” she asks.

“It was Trace.”

“You knew back then that Oleg Ragoravich was building a facility here,” she says.

His honest answer surprises her: “Yes.”

“But you didn’t tell me.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Did you enjoy that weekend?”

She nods. She remembers the morning sun coming into their room, the way it bathed his beautiful face in the yellow glow. Marc openedhis eyes and looked into hers and they just lay there, in the bed, side to side, and Maggie remembers an old Joan Baez lyric, “Speaking strictly for me, we both could have died then and there.”

“That’s all I wanted for us,” Marc says. “A weekend together.”

It’s a good answer, a nice line, but there is no way to know whether it’s true or not. In that sense AI Marc is no different from Real Marc. This answer might be Real Marc’s truth, interpreted through data and overheard conversations. But what had Porkchop said about the human condition? You can’t really know what another person is thinking deep inside.

And neither could any AI program.

“Is Trace in Bordeaux, Marc?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he kill you?”

The screen glitches. Maggie expected that. The griefbot doesn’t know it’s dead. It can’t comprehend its own death any better than a human. Sharon had warned about this.

As if on cue, AI Marc says, “I don’t understand.”

Maggie changes up. “This is a hypothetical. Let’s say you’re not Marc Adams. You’re an AI creation of him. You were created by my sister to comfort me because the real Marc Adams was murdered. Your data dump ended three months before your death, so you can’t know for certain. But you can look up the stories online. About your death. Study them, crunch the data, add in what you already know about Marc’s life. And then tell me. Did Trace Packer kill you?”

The screen freezes.

Maggie sighs and stands. Then from her phone, she hears Marc say, “The most likely scenario is that Doctor Marc Adams was killed as reported—during the terrorist massacre at TriPoint.”

“What’s the second most likely scenario?”