He and Cyrus have been working on a secret project. They hold meetings to which the rest of us are not invited. Cyrus puts black paper up on his walls and a sign on his door that says, DO NOT DISTURB—NO EXCEPTIONS, which I take to mean NO EXCEPTIONS, NOT EVEN MY WIFE. Jules and Gaby invite me over for dinner on a regular basis, and in their super-clean apartment, we speculate endlessly about what Cyrus and Marco are up to. When we ask Cyrus and Marco, they giggle like a pair of kindergarteners who have just discovered poop, and finally, when they break the news, it is too late for us to do anything: they’ve already convinced themselves it’s a brilliant idea.
Crazy Craig is jubilant. “THIS IS GOING TO KILL EVERYONE,” he says when he shows up at Utopia. “I knew it, I knew you two were a force, a super-fucking-natural force.” He waltzes around the office hugging people and passing out cannabis-laced lollipops. All this because, to everyone’s horror and Craig’s utter delight, for the first time in history （drumroll, please）…
A dead person has sent a text message.
Yes, it’s true. Marco has used the WAI code—my Empathy Module—and combined it with Obit.ly’s database to get people to communicate with their loved ones from beyond the grave. Cyrus has named it AfterLight. It mimics the tone, the written diction, the vocabulary, of a person based on an entire history of texts, emails, Instagram comments, likes, memes, and retweets. It takes all of that and creates new texts and sends them as if the person were still alive.
Now, if you want your family to hear from you after you’re dead, and if they want to hear from you, you can all go on as if nothing has happened. “Most people only call their parents once or twice a year anyway,” Marco argues. “They’ve got a family WhatsApp group, they exchange all their news there. So the AI just keeps going as if the person hasn’t died, the family chat stays the same. And you can postpone your grief for as long as you want. Maybe forever.”
There must be some kind of law against this, I figure. At the very least, it’s an idea ripped off from a TV show. I consult our lawyer, and she does a little digging, and two hours later, she calls to tell me that although it’s a gray area, the thing itself is so new that the law hasn’t really caught up. The people who invented messaging didn’t imagine they’d have to be solving for this particular situation, so we have no legal way of handling it.
* * *
I try to get Cyrus to change his mind. “Is it possible that I’m the only one here who thinks this is a ticking time bomb?”
Cyrus looks at me and I know he’s secretly calling me the girl who cried Marco is insane.
Jules has doubts too, I know he does—he and Gaby and I have gone over it all again and again—but it’s like he is programmed never to disagree with Cyrus out loud.
“I agree, there are risks,” Cyrus says. “I’ve thought about them, and I have to tell you, I believe this is the culmination of everything we dreamed of when we started this company.”
“What, that dead people will speak? What does that make you, the Night King?”
Cyrus lowers his voice to a near whisper. We are in his office, and there is a song playing in the background that I can’t place. “When I think of the number of times I’ve wished I could talk to my mom just one more time, and what that would’ve meant to me, I feel it’s my responsibility to offer this to the WAIs.”
So this is what it’s been about all along. How could I have been so stupid? This whole romance with Marco is about Cyrus and his dead mother and the fact that he still has things he wants to ask her. Questions that had been left unanswered by her death, and goddammit if he isn’t going to raise her from the grave and have her answer them. “This is about your mom.”
“It’s too late for me,” Cyrus says. “But for a lot of people, it could be a lifeline.”
I recognize the song. It’s Mama Cass singing “Dream a Little Dream.”
“I understand that this is important to you, Cyrus, but surely you can see that preventing people from grieving might also be dangerous.” I turn to Jules. “Jules, come on, you can’t let him do this.”
Jules shakes his head. “Technology allows us to stop doing the things we no longer wish to do. Like hailing a taxi on the street or sending faxes. Nobody wants to confront death. And now we don’t have to.”
“I don’t think death is optional.”
“But it could be.”
I want to bang my head against the wall.