“Can I come in?” he asked in a whisper.
I considered this a minute. What were a gentleman caller’s intentions when he showed up at your bedroom in the middle of the night? When I looked at his face, though, it didn’t seem especially pervy. It seemed pensive and vulnerable. Also, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t try anything sketchy with my father snoring down the hall. It probably wasn’t the world’s most cautious decision, but I let him in anyway.
He walked over to my bed and lay down with his eyes open. I waited about half a minute before I sat down on the other side, with a gulf of bed between us.
“I didn’t think it would be this weird,” he said finally.
I sighed. On the one hand it was a relief to hear him say it. On the other, it confirmed that things were weird for both of us.
“Maybe you don’t want reality,” I said. “Have you ever thought of that?”
“What do you mean?”
“How could the real me actually be as good as the hypothetical one? Maybe real me kind of sucks. I mean comparatively, of course. In most ways, I’m fucking awesome.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But real you doesn’t suck.”
I felt myself blushing in the dark.
“Should I go home?” he asked.
I didn’t answer him because I honestly didn’t know. And for the next minute, we just lay there on opposite sides of the bed like siblings in a hotel room.
“What do you do all day?” I asked eventually.
I wasn’t looking at him, but I heard his head shift toward me.
“What?”
“On the couch?” I said. “When you’re just sitting there with your computer. What do you do?”
He took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes.
“I can show you if you want,” he said.
I nodded, and he immediately crawled out of bed anddisappeared back down the stairs. When he returned a couple of minutes later, he was carrying his laptop. He unfolded it, and the glowing screen lit up the room.
He opened his browser, and the homepage for Twitter appeared on the screen. I saw a familiar face in the little white Twitter frame. I sucked in a quick breath. It was Jonah. The same photo that he had used on Facebook for as long as I’d known (and not known) him.
It had been a while since I’d encountered the picture, and seeing it again was both gratifying and unnerving. It was an image that I used to love, one I kept myself away from these days for a reason. I looked at the most recent post on the feed and immediately felt a familiar sense of uneasiness. I turned to Daniel.
“This post is dated yesterday,” I said.
He nodded.
The message said simply,“So so many new planets!”and then it linked to a recent article about new planets discovered by NASA’s Keppler telescope. It looked like any other post from a Twitter user.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Are you still pretending you’re him?”
Daniel shook his head.
“I’m writing an app,” he said. “It was our first assignmentin Computer Science. I started out making a game. But then I switched to this.”
I tried not to meet Jonah’s eyes in the photo.
“What is it?”
“It’s called Post-Life. It allows you to stay active on social media after you’re gone.”
