At first, it didn’t register when I saw the message.
“He’s worried when he dies, the horses will all go downhill. But that’s what he liked about your idea. Maybe they’llbe so strong they keep running. Even when he’s gone, they’ll keep running.”
Not too many people contacted me on Facebook anymore. A couple of high school friends from New York, but mostly they texted if I heard from them at all. So it wasn’t until I clicked on the icon and saw where the message was coming from, that my breath slowly left me.
There was Jonah’s little face at the top right of the new message, which said:
I have to talk to you, Tess.
It’s important.
“Tess,” said my dad. “Did you hear me?”
The sky outside the plane was cloudless now. A blue so bright it hurt my eyes. My dad was touching my shoulder, but I could barely feel it.
“Tess,” he said.
I looked at him and saw the concern on his face.
“Hey,” he said, “where did you go?”
11
My thoughts went first to the article. The one Jonah had sent me about the Russian billionaire who wanted to upload his brain to keep from dying. At the time it hadn’t seemed that important. Jonah sent me lots of articles. And videos. And GIFs. And songs. And photos. And every other piece of media you can think of.
Early on, we broke away from text alone, and for some weeks we communicated entirely in links and images. Not because we had nothing to say to each other, but because it was fun. Multimedia flirting: It kept things interesting.
But sometimes he sent articles that weren’t meant to be a link in the flirt-chain. These pieces often had short accompanying messages like “Cool, right?” or “READ NOW” or just “This!” The article about the Russian had no message at all.
It just showed up in my in-box one day. I never mentionedit to him while he was alive. I think I repressed it. But after I got the new message from his account, I went back and read it over again. And it was just as creepy as I remembered. It said that someday, there would be no difference at all between man and machine. Scientists called this concept the Singularity.
For a moment, I surrendered to complete illogic and let my mind go down that road. Maybe the Singularity had actually arrived and Jonah was still alive somewhere on the Internet. Maybe he had melded with the machine I’d used to love him. It wasn’t that hard to picture.
My computer, after all, was where I’d always found him. His face, when I saw it in the rare video chat, was pixilated, sometimes freezing in a smile when my Internet connection was slow. And his g-chat messages popped up on my screen like the machine itself had generated them.
I was all set to embrace this new reality and make contact with cyber-Jonah until I took a moment to take a few deep breaths.
I was sitting at my dad’s computer where I had been since we got home from the airport. I closed my eyes and listened to some birdsong coming through the window. And when I saw the new message again, I couldn’t help but think of human fingers typing it.
Fingertips on keys. The same fingertips that had once—just once—rested above my hip bone. Jonah was not typing things on a keyboard anymore. He was not doing this because he had no living fingers. He had dead fingers. He was not living in a computer or in a stream of code. He was gone.
I took another long, slow breath. Then I typed my response, one letter at a time. I pressed reply and looked at the three words I had typed.
Who are you?
It was the only logical question to ask. I had probably known that from the beginning. I watched the screen and waited out the two minutes it took for a response.
Not sure where to start.
I got up from my chair and walked around the room, letting my bare feet dig into the old wool rug in my father’s office. Then I sat back down.
Start by telling me who you are... maybe?
It was still Jonah’s face that popped up alongside each reply, his eyes looking right at the camera, and by extension, at me.
I’m the person you’ve been talking to for the last five months.
A real urge to shut everything down came over me. To cancel my account. Shut off my dad’s computer. Go to sleep. Wake up in a few days. But if I did that, I might never know anything.
