Page 43 of Gone Before Goodbye
“Who were you talking to?” he demands. “What did you tell him?”
Maggie stops struggling. She sighs and gestures for him to have a look for himself. Ivan appears puzzled. He lowers his hand away from her. When he stares at the screen, his eyes widen.
“How…?”
“Press the blue icon,” Maggie says.
“What?”
“Just”—she lets loose a breath—“press the blue icon.”
With a thick thumb pad, Ivan Brovski does as she asks. Then he looks a question at her. “Do you want to explain?”
“You know about my husband.”
Of course he does. They investigated her financial situation, her sister’s, her malpractice suit. They’d know everything about her.
Ivan nods. “Doctor Marc Adams, renowned cardiothoracic surgeon.”
“And you know,” Maggie continues, trying very hard not to let her voice crack, “about his death.”
Ivan nods again, more solemnly this time. “He was on a humanitarian mission in Ghadames when a militia group raided a refugee camp. Your husband stayed behind to help a patient. It cost him his life.”
“Yes.”
Ivan lifts the phone. “But I just saw your husband on your phone.”
“No.”
“No?”
“You saw,” Maggie says, “a griefbot.”
He makes a face. “A what?”
“A griefbot. You’ve probably heard of rudimentary ones.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Maggie wonders how to explain this without sounding insane.
“When a loved one dies, and when someone misses that loved one, misses them so much that…” Maggie shakes it off, channels her sister, and tries a more analytical approach. “A griefbot is an artificial intelligence app that mimics a dead person via their digital footprint—for example, their social media content, emails, maybe videos online or photographs on their phone, whatever. The software then creates a lifelike avatar of the deceased, and a mourner can”—she hesitates—“a mourner can actually converse with it.”
“You mean talk to it?” Ivan says.
“Yes. When done well, the humanoid AI can replicate the dead person’s speech patterns, personality, temperament, mannerisms, intelligence, tics, gestures—everything that made the deceased unique. It can generate full conversations and even comfort the grieving.”
It takes him a few moments to get it. “And in this case, you’re the grieving?”
“Yes.”
“So you were talking to a computer?”
How to explain this…?
“It’s more complicated than that,” Maggie says. Then when she sees the look on his face—part pity, part… disgust?—she quickly adds, “I’m not doing it for me.”
“Oh?”
