Forever Yours
25
The Birth of Pythia
HENRY AND LISA got back from their date about 10:00 that evening. She blocked him at the door to the row house and pulled out her own key. She didn’t unlock the door, though. She looked into his eyes.
“I really enjoyed our date, Henry, and I hope you’d like to do it again. I’d consider it appropriate if you wanted to kiss me goodnight,” she said. Henry started to move forward, but she held him back with her hand on his chest. “But not in the house. If you want to kiss me goodnight, you need to do it out here and then let me go home.”
“I think you have a reason for this?” Henry said, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah. I’ve been thinking a lot about it this evening,” she said. “If we go inside and kiss in the apartment, it jeopardizes the relationship we have in there. I’m not ready to make a transition yet. It would just be convenient to kiss at breakfast or to sit on the couch making out. I don’t want to kiss you because you happen to be there and we’ve done it before. If we kiss inside, it will mark the beginning of a new kind of relationship. I don’t think you’re ready to go there yet, either.”
“You’re right,” Henry agreed. “I told you we wouldn’t have sex because it was convenient and I agree that this would be another significant step that I wouldn’t want to do because it’s convenient. However, I would love to kiss my date goodnight at the door, if it is okay.”
“Yeah. It’s okay,” she said.
Henry pulled her to him and she put her hands on either side of his head as she raised her lips to his. The kiss was warm and their tongues even touched slightly before they pulled away from each other.
“Thanks for a lovely evening,” she said. She unlocked the door and stepped inside, closing it behind her.
Henry waited a moment and reached for the doorknob, finding it locked. He chuckled as he pulled out his key, unlocked the door, and went into the apartment. He stopped in the kitchen long enough to grab a seltzer from the fridge and then went to his own third floor suite.
Both Henry and Lisa were a little unsure of how their relationship might have changed after having one date, but their routines were more powerful than any particular attraction. Lisa had a web design to complete and Henry was deep in his work on the oracle. He really wanted to start working on his father’s Ask Dad, but he knew there weren’t yet enough data points to be able to train the AI. He could, however, start training the oracle.
Henry needed to ask questions through the simple interface Lisa had put together the previous day and test the oracle’s answers, correcting mistaken word definitions and syntax. He didn’t know how many questions he could come up with until he did a simple search with the new search engine. He entered “questions to ask” and was overwhelmed with results. The first search revealed mostly interview questions and questions designed to get to know another person. When he added a word, “questions to ask myself,” more useful suggestions were revealed. He also found “questions to ask an oracle,” and a surprising number of “questions to ask my father.”
He started compiling the list from the many websites he found.
“What makes life meaningful?”
“What do I need to focus on?”
“What am I not seeing about my current situation?”
“How can I ensure success?”
“What will help me find inner peace?”
“What do I need most right now?”
The answers coming back didn’t necessarily match up with the questions. He got some laughs.
“Knowing enough is enough will ensure you always have enough.”
“Be mindful of your caffeine and sugar intake.”
“Your current situation is not your destination.”
“Accept what cannot be controlled.”
“Rocket ass boosts horse tracks.”
Well, not every answer could even be associated with a question. Occasionally, the randomness of the response was too far off to be parsed by the system.
“I’m ordering some Thai food for dinner,” Lisa said, coming upstairs. “You want some?”
Henry looked up and realized it was six o’clock on Saturday evening. He wasn’t sure he’d even taken a bathroom break. Chastity was sitting on the corner of his desk facing him and he had a hand on her bare leg. He looked to Lisa.
“Yes. Um… Just some noodle thing, you know,” he said.
“How about you, Chastity?” Lisa asked.
“No. I was just saying goodnight to Henry. I need to work on my taxes tonight. I’ll see you next week.”
Lisa left the office and went downstairs.
“Taxes?” Henry asked.
“You had income this year. You have to report it for taxes.”
“We haven’t had that much income, have we?”
“You probably haven’t made as much as I have, but you still have to report it.”
“How do you report your income from… you know?”
“From escorting? I just list it as a sole proprietorship business engaged in entertainment. Nobody questions it.”
“Wow.”
“Now put away your toys and go have a nice dinner with Lisa,” Chastity said. She stood up, letting Henry’s hand fall away from her thigh and headed for the stairs down.
Lisa called Henry’s cell phone when dinner arrived and he went to the dining room where she had the Thai food served. He sat down and thanked her for taking care of dinner.
“Uh… Lisa… About Chas upstairs…”
She held up a hand to stop him.
“Not a topic for now. Let me just say that I accepted Chastity as a fact of life before I ever agreed to date you. No more discussion.”
“Okay.”
Henry certainly didn’t expect that kind of response from a girlfriend seeing him with his hand on another woman’s bare thigh. Did that mean Lisa wasn’t his girlfriend? Kaitlyn, certainly, would have gone ballistic. She didn’t even like Lisa living in the same row house or Chastity working with him in the office. That was just one more good reason to have broken up with her. But Lisa?
He didn’t mean to flaunt his relationship with Chastity, but he had to admit, Lisa had seen them in that position before. It wasn’t unusual for Chastity to perch on the corner of Henry’s desk as she gave him a report on the testing agreements, correspondence, or other business matters. It was just so natural for Henry to touch her while they talked. He’d done it without even considering who else was in the room.
“So, what progress did you make on the oracle?” Lisa asked.
“Limited testing. Did you know you can search the internet for questions to ask an oracle? I was running out of things to ask and then found hundreds of questions, both appropriate and inappropriate, at my fingertips.”
“What was the most interesting question?” Lisa asked.
“When I wake up tomorrow morning, how will I be different than I am today?”
“Oh. That’s a great question. I think though it would be more appropriate for some serious self-examination than an oracle,” she said. She handed Henry a spring roll.
“In fact, that’s probably where I found it. I got on a search quest and started changing the parameters. Instead of questions to ask an oracle, I entered ‘questions to ask myself.’ But that wasn’t all. I uncovered some good resources for Ask Dad.”
“Don’t tell me you found ‘questions to ask my father!’” Lisa laughed.
“In fact, I did. There are great things that I’m going to feed into Dad’s recordings.”
“Like?”
“There were a lot of real basic questions, like ‘What did you want to become when you were a child?’ ‘Describe your first pet.’ But there were also questions that might make even my dad… think a little,” Henry said.
This was exactly the kind of conversation he loved having with Lisa.
“Examples?”
“Like, ‘How do you think your career affected your role as a father?’ ‘What was the craziest thing you did after forty?’ And my favorite, ‘What was a time in your life when you felt like giving up?’ Some cool stuff.”
“Okay. Here’s one for you? Do you think your mother feels left out because you are doing this project just with your dad?” she asked.
“Holy shit! I don’t know. You know the only reason I set it up like I did was to try to get a sample data wall to train an AI with. Mom’s so busy and her work as a nurse is so stressful,” Henry said.
“You might want to check in with her. I know that as much as I talk about what I found out about my mother, I’d want to compile her life as well.”
“We need a new name,” Henry said. “We can’t just keep calling it Ask Dad. Not if we’re going to open it up to others.”
They finished dinner and cleaned up the remains and the dishes. They were both thankful they had a dishwasher. It kept them from eating their meals off paper plates. There was a box of grocery store cookies on the counter and they each took a cookie and made a cup of tea, then sat in the living room to continue their discussion.
“I like what you’re doing with the website,” Henry said. “It really looks professional without looking like we bought it at Ikea. Did you make progress today?”
“Actually, I think we could deploy tomorrow if you wanted to,” she said. “The last couple of corrections were pretty easy to make. We got the link to your interview with Gene Grey. He’s got it ready for your review and if you approve it, he’ll go live with it. Right now, it hasn’t been released.”
“I suppose I should review it right away, then. Will you be able to start working on the oracle then?” he asked.
“Yes. And I think we need to find a name for that, too. We’ll be releasing it to testers before we release the Ask Someone app.”
“Right. I’ll put it out to Chastity, Isobel, and Luke, too. They have good ideas.”
“You really depend on them more than anything, don’t you?” Lisa asked.
“I guess sometimes you don’t realize how important people are until you don’t have as constant access to them. The four of us hung out together all the time. I knew Luke from when we were babies. Isobel in middle school. Chastity joined us in high school. There were other friends we had, too, but whenever it was something important in one of our lives, it was the four of us. It still puzzles me how we managed to so completely miss all the trauma that shaped Chastity’s life.”
“She came to the three of you for normality. She didn’t want to expose you to what wasn’t right with her,” Lisa said. “That’s my completely unprofessional and uninformed opinion.”
“You’re probably right.” They sat in silence as they finished their tea. “I’ve got a buttload of reading to do. Midterms are in two weeks.”
“Ugh! See you tomorrow.”
Lisa went upstairs to her room. Henry paused in the kitchen as he put their mugs in the dishwasher and started it. It was odd. He almost felt more like kissing her goodnight after this kind of dinner and conversation than after their date. She was… special.
Nothing went as fast or as smoothly as they wanted. The partners reviewed the website and the interview and all thought there was a sensitive point in the interview that needed to be changed. Henry couldn’t reach Gene Grey until Monday to ask him to remove Henry’s comment about the amount of ‘trash’ that was downloaded to personal computers every time a system, browser, or application update was pushed to it. They all felt that was insulting to the other manufacturers and that it would alert them to what the Open Cloak Optimizer was going to attack.
He spent Sunday afternoon with his parents and asked his mother if she could spare the time to participate in his program to create a legacy.
“Isn’t this something special between you and your dad?” she asked. “You don’t need to ask me to make me feel better about it. You need special things with your father.”
“It is special,” Henry said, “but that isn’t why I didn’t approach you about it. Your job has been so stressful, I didn’t want to make you feel like you needed to take up valuable rest time participating in this little project.”
“Well, as long as you don’t have a set time limit that says you need to have three dozen cookies for your class party tomorrow, I think I could participate,” she laughed.
“I did kind of forget about that until the last minute, didn’t I?” Henry said. “Thanks, Mom. Not only for participating in the project, but for baking cookies when I was in third grade.”
Henry discovered that even though he and Lisa saw each other every day, squeezing out time for and planning actual dates was as difficult as it had been with Kaitlyn. They went out to dinner again on Saturday, but rather than focusing on deeper insights into each other, they spent nearly all their conversation time on trying to figure out what kinds of things they’d like to do on dates other than eat. Going out to dinner seemed like such a date cop-out when they ate most breakfasts and many dinners together.
They did put together a list of things they’d like to do and Lisa agreed to plan the next date. The following Friday, they went to see the final home game of the university’s women’s basketball team. Henry discovered he enjoyed the sport as much as Lisa did. His experience with sports was focused on golf. In high school, they went to home basketball and football games because they were frequently followed by school dances. No such luck with the college game, but they had a good time and then went out to have pizza with some of Lisa’s other friends who were at the game.
That night, the two had their most intense goodnight kiss since they’d started dating. Henry thought he might change his porchlight to a dimmer bulb if they were going to stand on the steps kissing for ten minutes each time they went out.
The company had also been busy that week. They released the test version of the AI search engine and celebrated Luke’s birthday by long distance on Tuesday. Then, everyone took a break to prepare for mid-term exams, which would start on Monday.
The best part about mid-terms was that on Friday, spring break began. Chastity was headed to the Bahamas for a few days with a rather wealthy college student who decided that was where he wanted to spend his break and wanted some high-class arm candy with him.
Henry surprised Lisa Friday by taking her to Philadelphia for the first round of the NCAA championship. He’d been unable to see a way to get them there for the play-in game on Wednesday, but the university had won a place in the tournament and were facing the top seed in their region on Friday. Villanova was hosting.
Of course, their university stood little chance against the top ranked Wildcats, but they had a great time at the game and were joined by Luke and Isobel. Henry and Lisa went back to Pittsburgh Friday night, arriving about three in the morning. Luke and Isobel’s break was also that week and they came to Pittsburgh the next day.
Henry and Lisa’s kiss at their door when they got home could only be described as passionate.
“I’m so close to inviting you in,” Lisa sighed as they broke the kiss. “It’s just… it’s three o’clock in the morning. I don’t want to invite you all the way into my suite and I don’t want to start something in our shared area. I’m getting awfully turned on by you, though, Henry. Awfully turned on.”
“Me, too,” he said. “We’ll take it at the right pace for us, though. Having a week of vacation time would be a dangerous time to do a lot of fooling around.”
“Oh, God! I almost forgot we have all this week in the office together. We’ll… do something again next weekend. Okay?”
“Yeah. Goodnight, Lisa.”
She unlocked the door and went into the row house. Henry stood on the steps for another minute before he used his key to unlock and then go up to his own suite.
Chastity was out of the office for a few days, but Luke and Isobel were in for a couple of hours every day. Luke joined Lisa and Henry in brainstorming names for the oracle, while Isobel audited the expenses and prepared a financial statement. It wasn’t really necessary at that stage, but she created spreadsheets with proforma income and expense projections for every scenario she could think of. From that, she tried to determine how long they could stay in business based on how much they currently had in the bank.
“Nearly every name we’ve found is in use someplace or another,” Luke said. “We could probably use ‘Cassandra Says’ since no one is going to believe it anyway.”
“That’s such a sad story,” Lisa said.
“I agree,” Henry said. “I’m kind of partial to Pythia. It’s hard to believe no one has actually named some predictive software after her already.”
“Oh, and that could make for some interesting graphics on the site, too,” Lisa said.
“How so?” Luke asked.
“According to the wiki, the Oracle of Delphi originally belonged to Python, who was an earth dragon daughter of Gaia,” Lisa explained. “Apollo slew her in order to take over the oracle, but the priestess was always considered her daughter and spirit. So, Pythia is associated with the earth dragon. I could do a lot with that.”
“I like dragons!” Isobel spoke up from the desk where she was working on a spreadsheet.
“And the dragon-lady has spoken,” Luke snarked. What a strange relationship.
“Okay. I’m good with that, but it needs to be more than just the name of the oracle. Like all the ancient Chinese lore seems to begin, ‘Confucius Says.’ We need something like that for Pythia.”
“Speaks,” Lisa said. “Pythia Speaks. I can really do some nice graphics for that. And since there is very little else for the interface, we simply have a text box that is labeled ‘Ask your question.’ Then the answer would be revealed as ‘Pythia Speaks.’ I love it!”
“I agree,” Henry said. “I’m going to register the domain and park it right now.”
They all went to work and the site began to take shape.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
