“Gone? As in...”
“As in dead,” he said.
I looked at another of the Post-Life tweets.
“When I eat two chili dogs in a row, I usually hear the Braveheart sound track in my head.”
“Who’s writing these?” I asked.
“He is,” he said. “I mean, kind of. The program surveys his entire online persona, filing away all his likes and dislikes, interests, and the speech patterns of his previous posts. Then it uses that information to generate new ones, which it sends to his friends.”
I stared at the screen.
“How can he eat chili dogs if he’s dead?”
Daniel pushed the hair back from his forehead.
“That’s a bug I haven’t quite worked out yet. It doesn’t seem capable of distinguishing what a dead person can and can’t do. An ideal version would just keep up his interests, you know, as if he were still alive.”
“But he’s not still alive.”
“I know.”
“And he didn’t ask for this.”
“I get that,” he said.
There was a current of irritation in his voice for the first time.
“It’s not done yet. And the service would be for people who actively subscribe. People who want to keep posting after life. Jonah’s profile is just a test. For me.”
He snapped his laptop shut, and the room went dark again.
“You think it’s creepy, don’t you?” he said.
“A little,” I said.
He wiped his hand over his eyes.
“That seems to be the consensus,” he said. “My teacher suggested I switch projects.”
It was starting to rain lightly outside. More like a heavy mist than a storm.
“It’s not the same,” I said. “You can’t keep him alive that way.”
I watched as a small puddle slowly pooled against the windowsill.
“I have a problem,” he said, “don’t I?”
“No,” I said.
He looked at me.
“You have a lot of problems.”
He smiled, but only for an instant.
“I knew it was wrong to write to you as him,” he said. “But I did it anyway. I wanted to keep him here.”
