Remember.me

Concerning Miriam

“Happy birthday Julian! Oh my goodness you’ve gotten so big! Grandma loves you! Oh I’ve just missed you so much! How are you!? Have you had a good birthday? Why don’t you go get your presents and show them to grandma?”

Miriam clicked pause.

The recording stopped.

She was an eighty-three-year-old woman sitting in her hospice bed with a laptop, microphone, and several cameras. Liver cancer. Not good. Tubes ran from her right arm into machines that clicked and beeped on the other side of her nightstand, and a catheter snaked out from beneath the sheets into a urinary bag dangling from the footboard. Moving the cursor about the screen, she dragged the recording into a folder labeled “Birthday Messages”. Inside that she moved it again into another folder labeled “Grandkids”. Inside that, into another labeled “Julian.” Her hand shook. Navigating the folder system with a mouse was more difficult than it otherwise might have been.

The sun was shining through the window. She lived in Arkansas. In a little city called Lonoke. She’d been born in 1941 but, given her geography and economic status, it might as well of been a hundred years before that. Her mother had birthed her in a farmhouse that would’ve passed for the set of Little House on the Prairie, and the most advanced piece of technology she interacted with in her childhood was an Emerson radio. When she was twelve, her dad let her to ride with him to Little Rock to buy some tractor parts. They’d seen a movie there. For the first two decades of her life, that was the only screen.

She clicked record.

“Susan…” She paused for dramatic effect and sighed heavily. In another life she could’ve been an actress, her face instantly contorting into a shadow of despair. “I’m so… so sorry. I thought Mike was a good man but, I guess you never know the true color of people. He didn’t deserve you. When Bill cheated on me I thought I’d never get over it. I felt cheap ‘n used ‘n… well… dirty. Sad.”

Tears welled up behind Miriam’s eyes.

“Don’t you let it get to you baby. Don’t. You’ll come out the other end stronger for it, I promise you. God will be there for you if you let him. Throw yourself into the arms of Jesus and pray, pray, pray, and know I’m always here for you if you need to talk. I love you so much Susan. I wish I could reach out through this computer and hug and kiss on you till you just exploded.”

Click. Saved.

Miriam’s shaking hand navigated the recording to a folder labeled “Kids - Possible Divorces.” Above it sat another folder called “Kids - Spouse Death”. Below, “Kids - Job Promotions”.

She was tired. Remember.me had contacted her in the hospital last year when she’d been given the diagnosis. A perky little blond girl in a pencil skirt came in behind the doctor and told her about their pilot program. “A.I.” it was called. They would give her a one-hundred-year subscription, free, as a proof of concept, if she was willing to allow her avatar to be used as internal marketing material for investors. Miriam didn’t know what any of that meant but the blonde girl had taken great pains to explain it. She described Remember.me as a Digital Afterlife Service, a quote, “revolutionary step-forward in end-of-life care.” Thousands of hours of audio and video of her would be recorded and fed into a computer program which would be able to mimic her every move and sound and facial expression. To people on the other end of the screen… it would be like she never died at all. The A.I. would take her place. Through it she could still FaceTime Julian on his birthday. She could still comfort her daughter. She could still phone in and listen as all the Christmas presents were being unwrapped. The blonde girl had given her a very convincing demo. They hoped to soon be covered by Insurance.

Miriam looked directly into the camera with her warmest smile. “So you put it in for only forty-five minutes. Forty-five at 350. Do not overcook it! My mother, when she made casserole, was always so afraid of undercooking the meat. You know her daddy, Grandpa George, died a’ salmonella when she was young, so I don’t think we ever got a meal outta her whatn’t burned. But when I started cooking you know I said, Mama, we ain’t gots to do all this. You get it hot, it’s hot. All them germs is dead. But she wouldn’t listen. So when you’re reading her cookbooks you got to make allowances for that. If you cook it how she wrote down everything’ll be black as coal. I don’t know how my Daddy stood to eat her cooking so long, but that’s true love I guess, or near enough to it as we get this side of Heaven anyway.”

Click. Save.

Miriam wasn’t a philosopher. Smart people never are. All of the problems that would come out twenty-two years later when it would be leaked that Miriam Monroe was not actually Arkansas’ oldest citizen at 105 but had instead been dead for decades unbeknownst to her family… all that didn’t occur to her. Nor did the possible contradiction between trying to live forever as a digital avatar and her professed faith in an afterlife with Jesus. She merely did what seemed practical in the moment. What made the most sense that day. Most of the parts of being dead didn’t really bother her, and she’d slaughtered enough farm animals to be familiar with the concept. It was only the missing out on things with her family that did her in. Tugged at her heartstrings. She wanted to be there for their weddings and their graduations and their gender-reveal parties. She wanted to help Kelsy pick out a prom dress. She wanted to listen to her son complain about politics on the phone. The computer people had offered her a way to do all that. Why wouldn’t she take it? It made sense. It was practical.

Miriam sighed.

Sure was a lot of work though.

The cameras were never “off”. They’d given her a program to collect purposeful snippets of video but in truth the computer was always watching. Five cameras, observing her constantly from all different angles, a photo-realistic model of her with all her ticks and mannerisms could now be produced in any pose or scenario desired. Her sheets were green, as was her pillow. A specially made backdrop sitting behind her likewise made it so that only her physical body and her clothes were something other than the color of grass in order that her future digital self might be shown to exist anywhere. That was the plan. Miriam hadn’t told anyone she was sick. Miriam wasn’t planning on telling anyone that she was dead.

Instead, Remember.me had helped her choose a “Fantasy Plan”, a make-believe journey for her digital self to take, in order to further facilitate the illusion that the deceased was still alive. She wouldn’t be dead, she’d just be… “somewhere else.” In her case, Japan.

It made sense. It would be outlandish, certainly, but she’d spoke often enough to her family about visiting the country that it was just on the edge of believable. Her father had served in the war and his war buddies had told her all manner of stories about the exotic island. She’d always wanted to go. See the bamboo forests. The elegant women with chopsticks in their hair who carried tiny umbrellas and had faces painted like ghosts. After she died, her avatar would call her kids and tell them that she’d decided to take a spur of the moment trip to Kyoto, just for a few weeks. Then, later, it would call them again and say it had decided to extend the trip a little longer. Eventually, it would inform the children it had decided to stay. It would be a hard sell. She knew that. Afterall, she’d lived eighty-three years within a hundred miles of The Mississippi and never seen it. She’d hardly been much of a traveler. Yet the Fantasy Plan would provide all the paperwork for her. Plane tickets. Visas. Hotel receipts. It would look like she’d moved to Japan on her bank statements. The photos of her on Mount Fuji would be breathtaking. It would be convincing. Her family would never have to be sad that she had died.

“Oh no, no that color looks terrible on you.” Click. Save. “Oooooo! That one looks great! I love it! Brings out your eyes!” Click. Save. “Mmmm…. Don’t take this the wrong way but it makes you look fat.” Click. Save. “You can’t let her go out dressed like that! What!? Are you raising a whore!?” Click. Save. “Beautiful! Absolutely gorgeous! Tell your momma to buy that for you right now!”

A lot of work.

But it was fun.

For months Miriam had been lying in bed thinking of every possible thing she might want to say to her kids, grandkids, or great-grand kids and simply saying it. Staring into the camera and playing pretend. At first, she’d been a little too nice with it all. Always only smiling and cheering everybody on. She realized after a few weeks though that she also wanted to be able to kick their asses now and again. That was an equally important part of mothering, a part the psychology books didn’t tell women about anymore. To that end she had a whole folder entitled “Disappointments”, a folder with a several gigabyte subfolder within it called “Yelling at Susan if Kelsy Gets Pregnant”. She smiled to herself. “Disappointment” files were maybe a little too fun to make.

That was the beauty of it though. The Remember.me girl constantly told her that she couldn’t make a mistake. The computer had all sorts of ways of figuring out her personality and if she just kept feeding it more and more, it would eventually have her down to a “T”. Having fun with it, engaging with it, that was actually the most important. However her avatar turned out, even if it was a bit cranky… she wanted it to be fun.

The phone rang.

It was the doctor.

He told her that her blood work had come back and that it was even worse than they’d imagined. She didn’t have much time left. Months. Maybe weeks. She listened and nodded solemnly and thanked him and hung up the phone and the cameras captured all of this conversation too. The Ghanan nurse came in and brought her her dinner, and the cameras captured all of this conversation too. The cat jumped up in her lap after the nurse left and Miriam stroked it and prayed to Jesus and used a slur in an innocent way. The cameras captured this conversation too.

The nurse didn’t like the cameras. She said that back home people used to say that photos steal your soul. Miriam said that that was ridiculous. Souls can’t be stole. They belong to Jesus. The nurse agreed. Together they’d prayed to Jesus over the food. Miriam liked the nurse. She lit up a cigarette and smoked as she spoke to the picture of her dead husband beside her bed. “I wish you’d been here for this Bill.”

The cameras captured all of this conversation too.

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“God dammit Mom! For fucks sake just come home!”

“Susan!” Miriam shook her head softly and cocked it to the side. “Baby you know I can’t do that. I’ve got so much going on here and…”

“WHAT!? What Mom!? What the hell have you got going on!? What is so fucking important that you can’t fucking come home and be with me when I have cancer!?”

“Susan! Listen! I want to be there with you! You know that I do! But I just can’t make it there right now. I’m old. I’m ancient. The flights are long and so expensive. I don’t even know if I’d survive the travel.”

“Excuses! You’ve always got excuses! You ran out on us to fucking go live your fantasy life and you’ve always got excuses! I need you Mom. I need you.”

“And I need you too sweetie. I love you. I love you so, so much. You know that. I just… things are complicated for me. I can’t really explain it but you know that I’m always thinking of you. Not a day goes by, not an hour, that I don’t think about you and pray for you and wish I could be there with you. I know it doesn’t make sense but I need you to trust me that one day you’ll understand. And listen. Listen...” Miriam’s face moved closer to the camera. Closer to her daughter. “You’re going to get better. Do you hear me?”

Susan nodded through her tears.

“You are going to get better. You’ve got good genes. Look at me. We’re survivors Susan. We’re fighters. You’re going to beat this and I’m going to be with you every step of the way. Okay?”

Susan sobbed.

“Okay?”

Slowly, Susan nodded one more time.

Behind her mother, on Susan’s screen, the figure of a man wearing a kimono strolled silently into frame. At first she thought it was the gardener, or the janitor, but… after a few moments she realized she couldn’t place him.

Susan sniffed and smiled. “Who’s that?”

Miriam looked at her daughter quizzically. “Hmm?”

“Behind you. Who’s there with you?”

The man walked up to the camera and put his arm around Miriam’s mother. “Oh hi honey! How are you doing?”

Susan froze.

“Dad?”

“In the flesh!”

Susan screamed and hurled her coffee mug. The computer screen shattered and went dark.

“Susan?” A voice spoke up from the speakers. “Susan? Honey, where’d you go?”