Page 44 of Gone Before Goodbye

“It’s for my sister.”

“Sharon McCabe? But why would your sister…?” Then Ivan nods, remembering. “Her expertise,” he says. “She specializes in creating AI people.”

“That’s an oversimplification too, but yes.”

Ivan points at her phone. “So she created this… did you call it a griefbot?”

“It’s a beta version. It doesn’t have the last few months of his life on it. But it’s still her most advanced.”

“So you’re, what, testing it for her?”

“Exactly.”

Ivan stares at the phone for a few moments. “I see,” he says, and the pity in his voice almost chokes her. “Do you find it comforting?”

She settles for the truth, because why not? “I don’t know,” she says. “It’s weird. I feel embarrassed every time I talk to it.”

Ivan gives her a half smile. “And yet here you are—telling your AI husband about your visit here.”

“Like I said—to help my sister.”

“And if your sister didn’t need the help?” he asks. “Would you still talk to it?”

Enough, Maggie thinks. She doesn’t want to discuss this anymore. The truth is, Sharon’s griefbot would probably be less painful if it wasn’t so damn close to reality. Sharon had found a way to perfect her creation by not only getting Marc’s entire digital history, but by hacking into every database he ever visited. Do you have an Alexa or Siri or some other smart speaker in your house? It hears you, records the data, and stores it in clouds. Your iPhone’s built-in microphone does the same. So does your home surveillance system and doorbell and motion detectors and monitoring feeds—they all spy on you and listen to every word you say, even when you think they are off. This isn’t a shock—most people know this. The problem for big tech has always been what to do with all that stored raw data, how to sort it and make it profitable or at least useful.

Sharon had found a way.

She figured out how to use someone’s life data to recreate a near-perfect digital duplicate of a human being. Even Maggie can’t tell the difference most of the time. That’s what’s so incredible about Sharon’s invention—and, of course, what makes it so terrible. The “Marc” griefbot isn’t a comfort so much as a constant reminder that the real thing was hacked to pieces in a godforsaken refugee camp more than four thousand miles from his home.

And yet Maggie keeps opening the app.

Is that insane?

Or conversely, is it any worse than spilling your guts to a paid therapist—or talking to yourself? We all have constant inner monologues going on in our heads. We all have imaginary conversations with superior beings or dead loved ones. Is it any crazier to have these conversations with a nearly flawless AI replica of the man you loved?

These are either deep philosophical questions or delusional self-rationalizations. Maggie isn’t sure which.

Either way, Marc is dead.

You’ve heard about the five stages of grief—denial being the first, followed by anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.Those stages are wrong, Maggie thinks—or at the very least, inadequate. When she first found out about Marc—when Porkchop knocked on her door on that terrible night, the devastation on his face impossible to hide—Maggie dropped to her knees and sobbed uncontrollably. There was no denial. She got it immediately: The only man she’d ever loved was dead and gone forever.Forever. She would never see him again. She would never touch him, never hold his hand, never feel safe and small in his arms, never pull him close when she couldn’t sleep, never help him go back to sleep when he had a nightmare, never know the peace and solace of just being with her soulmate—the real definition of love—or see his goofy smile across the breakfast table or roll her eyes at his intentionally corny jokes or…

Never.

She got that all in a mad rush, instantly, in a split second, and the reality of that truth crippled her. That’s when denial rushes in. Denial comes second, not first, because those first few seconds when you comprehend the awful truth—Stage One should actually be “total understanding”—are so devastating, so awful, so painful, so debilitating that your mind forces you to move on to denial in order to survive.

So total understanding is the first stage. Then denial. Anger, bargaining, depression arrived together, a toxic concoction, oneoverlapping and blending with the others. You spiral. And with that comes the need to numb.

Enter pills.

Maggie started taking them. Not many. Just enough to take the edge off. So she could sleep. So she could vanish. She still worked. She still performed surgeries and lived with Sharon and helped with her mother.

She had it under control.

But then her mother died.

So she took more pills.

She was still okay, she thought. The pills were there, a part of her, but they weren’t all-consuming. They were just a temporary buttress to shore up an otherwise strong woman.