Forever Yours
51
Never Here
HENRY CALLED GERMAINE and had her take him home. It would still be a long time before he was able to drive and he wasn’t going to rush it. In fact, he didn’t really have an interest in getting behind the wheel. He liked having Germaine as his driver and the added level of security he felt when she was around.
It was only the middle of the afternoon and Lisa rushed downstairs to greet him when she heard him arrive. They’d installed a security system in the house with Ray’s help and entry required a code as well as a key.
“Honey! You’re home early. Where’s Chastity?” Lisa asked as she reached him and gave him a kiss.
“Still at the office,” Henry said.
“I’ll go back and bring her home when she’s ready,” Germaine said.
“Thank you, Germaine. We really appreciate you,” Lisa said.
Germaine left and Henry asked for Lisa’s help getting upstairs to their bedroom. He silently undressed and lay down on the bed. Lisa was supposed to still be at work in the other room and he waved her away, saying he just needed to rest a while. Two cats curled up beside him.
When she’d left, Henry pulled his computer from his bag and went to work. Phase I of his anti-Reeves project was completed. The bastard was dead. He set parameters for his next search and used his personal AI to execute it. Then he went to sleep.
The cats purred.
“Are you okay, Henry?” Lisa asked when Chastity got home and joined her. This time, both women were naked and lay on either side of him in the bed. Henry woke up to their loving caresses.
“He’s dead,” Henry said flatly.
“What?” Lisa asked.
“Who?” Chastity said at the same time.
“Reverend Daniel Reeves of the Sword of the Spirit Evangelical Church,” Henry responded. “Nathan told me this afternoon. He’s dead.”
Lisa and Chastity glanced at each other and then focused on Henry. Tears were leaking from his eyes. At last, Lisa said what they’d all been thinking.
“Did you kill him?”
She expected the standard response, “Don’t know. Don’t care.” But Henry was silent as he wept.
At long last, he looked into his wife’s eyes and hoarsely said, “Yes.”
It was a conversation with many long pauses as each carefully considered all the implications. It was Chastity who broke the silence.
“Good. I feel safer already.”
“You protect us,” Lisa said. “Having you is like having ten Germaines. No one protects us like you do. You are our fortress.”
The women attempted to rouse Henry’s desire, but even though he returned their caresses and their kisses, he didn’t rise to the occasion.
“You haven’t left town,” Lisa finally said. “Did you program a robot to do the deed?”
“He committed suicide,” Henry said.
“That can scarcely be because of you,” Chastity said.
“I haunted him. I programmed an AI bot to find and expose every detail of his sordid life. The one thing he stayed clear of was unholy sex. I think he would have been a better man if he’d gotten laid now and then. What he didn’t stay clear of was his love of money and power. He embezzled millions from the church he founded and funneled most of it to the hackers who attempted to take down Pythia Speaks. I had the AI monitor them, as well, and halted every new attempt to attack us before it was launched. When the Feds uncovered the embezzlement and fraud, since the bulk of his funds came in from online donations in several states, the congregation removed him from the pulpit of his own church. When all his money was gone and the FBI uncovered his connection to the Russian hackers, they accused him of cyberterrorism. They went to the mansion to arrest him and found him with his brains blown out in his private chapel.”
Henry had not been satisfied with Nathan’s report. When he was home in bed, he hacked into the investigation files which hadn’t been released to the public as yet. The first wave of news stories from the ultra-conservative religious press had already surfaced, blaming the entire enterprise on the Russians and claiming he’d been killed by thugs sent to the United States to attack him and silence his evangelical message.
“It can’t be blamed on you,” Lisa said. “He brought it all on himself.”
“I used Forever Yours,” Henry said.
“What?” Chastity asked. “How?”
“I had the AI search out every shred of evidence and record of his life, just as if it was a singularity. Every horrid nasty breath he took.”
“You’re not going to release that, are you?” Lisa asked.
“No. I’m going to erase him. Over the next few months, every scrap of data that remains of him will be erased. Nothing will be left. Even the records at the FBI and the burial site will be expunged. It will be like he never existed.”
They let that bit of news sink in.
“Not Forever Yours, but Never Here,” Chastity finally whispered.
They were solemn for the rest of the day, dinner, and the night. Henry had done all this on his own to protect them. But the data that led to the preacher’s death had been hidden from Lisa and Chastity.
He’d made them accessories to his erasure of the memory.
Though the night of the confession was somber, the rest of the month of November was filled with sex at every opportunity. It was an attempt to affirm their commitment to each other in the face of the drastic news. Nor was the sex confined to trying to get Lisa pregnant, though that was often the case. Henry loved both women equally and they spent a lot of time loving each other.
For Henry, what he’d managed to do with Forever Yours was not what the program was designed to do, but it pointed out to him some of the flaws in the software. Some of the AI-based revelations about Daniel Reeves had been what the AI deduced he would have done in certain situations. What was a selling point for the program was revealed as a weakness. When the AI did not have literal data to answer a question, it made things up based on the type of person the data revealed. Just like most AIs did.
Henry began investigating ways to limit what the AI could generate beyond the literal words of the subject.
“Answer the question ‘What is the best internet security solution?’ as if you were Abraham Lincoln responding,” Henry posed to a popular chat AI.
Of course, Abraham Lincoln had no context with which to answer such a question, but the chat program returned, “The only online security you need is to post the absolute truth and to post it perfectly.—Abraham Lincoln”
In looking up quotes by Abraham Lincoln, Henry found elements of the response, but there was simply no way Abraham Lincoln could have even imagined the necessity for online security. He posed the same question to his grandfather’s Forever Yours and discovered an equally preposterous quote, attributed to Henry Kenneth Pascal, a man who had died long before the present popularity of the internet or its risks.
Something had to be done to limit the made-up responses of the program.
It also reminded Henry to cross-check to see if anything on his own data wall was actually scraped from information about his grandfather. Henry’s middle name was Dremel, his mother’s maiden name. But the AI could have scraped ambiguous references to his grandfather. The development was far from over.
Having spent a day puzzling over the problem, Henry had Germaine take him and Chastity home, where they dragged a willing Lisa to bed before dinner.
Germaine joined Henry’s parents with Lisa and Chastity for Thanksgiving dinner. Lisa had promised to spend the following weekend in Baton Rouge with Chastity. Lisa would need to attend meetings in the office on Thursday and Friday, but Chastity would work remotely.
They weren’t anticipating the news that awaited them between the two weekends.
Chastity’s birthday was Tuesday. Lisa and Henry planned a special night out to one of her favorite restaurants. Then they planned to bring her home and double team her until she couldn’t come any more.
They’d all agreed that birthday presents should be modest and not extravagant. For Lisa’s twenty-second birthday in September, they’d had a special dinner catered in so Henry didn’t need to have Germaine haul them around. Henry had given her two tickets to a dance company that she especially liked, and she’d taken Chastity to the show while Henry’s parents visited.
They hadn’t really discussed what the gift for Chastity would be on her birthday, but Henry left it to Lisa to determine it. Once they were home from the restaurant, Lisa gave Chastity a long slim package that might have held a necklace.
It didn’t.
It was a white device that looked almost like an electric thermometer, but had a cover over the end.
“What is this?” Chastity asked, puzzled. She pulled the cap off to look at what was inside. In a small window above an open slot, the word ‘pregnant’ appeared. “Oh, my Goddess!” she cried out. She handed Henry the EPT and he understood what it meant immediately.
“It’s been six weeks since my last period. I decided to take a chance and test,” Lisa said. “We’re going to have a baby!”
Henry and Chastity fell to worshiping Lisa’s fertile body, but she soon redirected the efforts to Chastity’s birthday sex. Chastity had become so turned on by Lisa’s news that her juices were flowing as Henry lapped them up and Lisa kissed her deeply. When Henry moved up to slot his cock into Chastity, Lisa straddled her face and Chastity had two of her favorite things happening at once. It also gave Henry a chance to deeply kiss his wife while playing with both her and Chastity’s breasts and pumping into their maîtresse.
As soon as he’d come, he backed up so Lisa could lean forward in a 69 with Chastity and both women mounted to a resounding climax. They cuddled and kissed, exclaiming over the good news, then started over with a new series of positions, Chastity riding Henry’s mouth as Lisa rode his cock.
Isobel would have been furious had she known Lisa was pregnant and experiencing none of the nausea or other side effects she had endured. By mid-December, everyone knew Isobel was obviously pregnant, but no one dared comment to her, even to say congratulations. Her moods finally began to balance out a little by Christmas and she entered her third trimester. Both the Riordans and the Perezes celebrated the coming child.
Henry, Lisa, and Chastity left for Baton Rouge on the 20th of December, deciding they would tell parents and grandparents their good news, even though it was only eight weeks, by the doctor’s estimate.
Lisa, of course, had to spend Friday in her father’s office while Henry and Chastity worked remotely from Bill and Jackie’s home. They went to Beau and Solange’s house for dinner Saturday.
Henry accepted a drink from Beau, sampling a Southern Comfort for the first time. Lisa and Chastity both declined. Solange quickly got them soda water.
“Here’s to a happy holiday with all the family,” Beau said expansively.
Solange served deviled eggs and boudin balls as appetizers as they stood around the fireplace.
“We’d like to propose a toast, as well,” Henry said. Everyone turned to him. “To the next generation.” Chastity joined him as he raised his glass to Lisa.
“Oh, my!” Solange said. Jackie dropped her glass.
“My baby? Is going to have a baby?” Jackie cried, rushing to hug Lisa.
“It’s a little early to be announcing, but we knew we couldn’t keep it a secret for the holiday,” Lisa said. “The doctor says I’m eight weeks.”
“That’s long enough to celebrate!” Beau declared, pouring Jackie another drink. “Was it just last Christmas you surprised us with word that you’d be getting married? Hoowee! You got right down to business!”
The celebration continued right through the meal with Solange’s own rendition of Cajun jambalaya and gumbo. It included a spicy coleslaw and cornbread. Of course, the parents and grandparents already had ideas for the baby’s name, all of which the trio said they’d put in their file of possible names. Everyone knew that meant they’d choose their own baby name.
Henry and Lisa had kept their names after the wedding, so the family had three family names to choose from: Pascal, Hartman, and Pappa. They decided it was just too risky to change names these days. Having to keep a paper record of their marriage and name changes at hand so Lisa could prove her identity and citizenship was not going to happen in their world of electronics. They kept very little in the way of personal documents on paper. Chastity, of course, was meticulous about keeping paper backups of all business documents. One of the first purchases she’d made for the company was a fireproof file cabinet.
They’d already spent a few late nights of loving, tossing around name ideas and a couple of those on the list from their families were included. Henry knew his parents would want to add to the list as well. But everything was in good humor and eventually Beau started pulling out old Cajun names: Rémy, Lucien, Boudreaux, Thibodeaux. Not to be outdone, Solange responded with Cajun girl names: Aurelie, Euphemie, Pelagie, Ryleigh.
Henry thought some of the names were pretty cool but wasn’t sure how a child in Pennsylvania would feel about growing up named Euphrosine. Nonetheless, they used their phones to capture the names as they were suggested. They figured if they showed the list of possibilities to their friends and families, no one would blink an eye if they named their child Fred.
The time with the family went all too quickly. They flew back to Pittsburgh the day after Christmas and prepared to go through the same rituals with Henry’s parents.
“You’re pregnant!” Sylvia said when she saw the trio for dinner on Thursday evening. They hadn’t had a chance to say anything about it.
“Did my parents call you?” Lisa cried. “I’ll strangle them!”
“No, no, dear. Wait! It’s true? Congratulations!” Sylvia said.
“Are you predicting the future these days?” Henry asked.
“Oh, no,” Ryan said. “When we found out at Thanksgiving Isobel was pregnant, Syl and I agreed that you’d be pregnant by Christmas. You and Luke have always done everything together.”
“Not exactly,” Henry said, a little miffed.
“Hmm. Put a new sound system in the school gym. Started a business together. Got married almost exactly a year apart. Expecting children a few months from each other. Close enough,” Ryan said.
“But we should have let you spring the news on us,” Sylvia said. “I more than half expected you to say no. So, what is your due date?”
“The end of July,” Lisa said, recovering her excitement. “It’s too early to be spreading the news around, but we felt we had to tell our families.”
“Okay. We won’t tell anyone else,” Sylvia said. “Congratulations to both of you.”
“All three of you,” Ryan corrected her. “I don’t see any sign that this changes your relationships.”
“We can’t expect everyone to understand that,” Chastity said. “I’m just as excited to be a combination mommy and daddy for this child.”
They sat for dinner at the restaurant and talked about the trip to Louisiana.
“You know, my parents traveled all over the world as part of an international medical team,” Sylvia said. “When I was pulling things together for their Forever Yours page, I discovered my mother had collected names from everywhere she’d been. The collection had to date from long before they were traveling professionally.”
“Well, we haven’t gotten any name ideas from Forever Yours yet,” Henry said. “Should we ask her what her suggestion is?”
“Sure. But I warn you, she might tell you to name the child C’Hola or Serepte or Minneola. The list contains names from all over.”
“It will be fun to look at the list, anyway,” Lisa said.
“I’m trying to set some new parameters for Forever Yours,” Henry said as they waited for dessert. “Limitations, if you will.”
“How so?” Ryan asked.
“It’s a feature of Pythia Speaks that was just assumed to work for Forever Yours, too,” Henry explained. “Basically, Pythia Speaks can make stuff up from a database of philosophical and mythological sayings. She’s an oracle and it’s supposed to be unpredictable. She can learn from the questions she’s asked, too. She doesn’t represent any individual. But Forever Yours is supposed to represent a person. You. Or Mom. It shouldn’t have the freedom to just make up stuff that you wouldn’t say.”
“Hmm. Why?” Ryan asked.
“Forever Yours is data. It isn’t personality. It doesn’t have the capacity to respond in love or in anger. It doesn’t have emotions. It doesn’t have personal values. All it has is access to your data so it can predict what you would say based on the likelihood of one word following another. I’ve said frequently, it isn’t alive. So, what right does it have to make up things and credit them to you? It should only be able to say what you would actually say,” Henry said.
“It’s an ethical decision, then,” Sylvia said. “In a hundred years someone might ask a question and get an answer that we would never have thought of, let alone given voice to.”
“It might not take that long. It might do that at any time and suddenly, there I am saying, ‘My daddy said it doesn’t matter what you believe—just how you act.’ And it isn’t something you ever said or implied.”
“Well, I can see how I might have come up with that response to some questions, but if you’d just fed it a statement like ‘I believe God wants me to kill someone,’ and you got that response, it could lead to damaging reactions, one way or another,” Ryan said.
“So, I have a new level of training we need to establish for the AI. No quoting Abraham Lincoln’s opinion on internet security. He didn’t have one. Forever Yours has to be honest.”
“Is there such a thing as an honest AI?” Lisa asked.
“Somehow, we need to figure out how to program that,” Henry answered.
“I’m glad that’s your responsibility,” Chastity said. “Not just because I would fail at it, but because I wouldn’t trust anyone else to do it.”
The holiday was nearly over and culminated with the company New Year’s Eve Party at the club. It had changed significantly from the days of just four partners plotting their future together. Even with the people in the company who were out of town or had other commitments, over fifty had dinner and drinks on the company.
Isobel was furious.
“Why are we wasting $5,000 on a fucking party? There’s no reason for this!”
“It’s good for morale,” Luke explained. “Good morale is good for productivity. Happy employees are more productive employees.”
“You read that in a management book. I’ll bet it didn’t compare the amount of happiness generated by a New Year’s Eve party compared to just giving everyone a $100 cash bonus and telling them to have fun,” Isobel complained. There was no question what she’d prefer.
Isobel was just entering her third trimester. She’d gained more weight than the doctor wanted her to and was out of sorts with the dietary restrictions, imbalance in hormones, and poor self-image. No drugs were effective in helping balance her emotions, and she was rigidly avoiding alcohol—a challenge even if she hadn’t been pregnant.
“Honey, let’s just enjoy our own little corner of the party,” Luke suggested. “We’ve had all the holiday greetings and toasts we need to make. If you’d like to go home, we can spend the rest of the old year with me massaging you until you fall asleep.”
“You’d do that?” she whined with a tear in her eye.
“In a heartbeat.”
“Okay.”
Luke gave a quick nod to Henry and said they needed to leave because Izzy wasn’t feeling well. Henry agreed to take over as host.
“You know, if you treat me like that when I’m six months along, I’ll be your groveling servant for the rest of my life,” Lisa said as she kissed her husband.
“I already am,” Chastity agreed, kissing each of her partners.
“I’m afraid Isobel isn’t going to get much of a massage before midnight,” Henry said. “Here come the bottles for the midnight toast.”
“Ah. Sparkling Catawba. My favorite,” Chastity said as she poured each of them a glass.
“I like being completely sober on New Year’s Eve,” Henry said. “And I can hardly wait to get the two of you home.”
“Ten. Nine. Eight…” the crowd shouted. And then it was time to begin 2030.
The three sat in the back of the van as Germaine drove them home from the club. As they approached the traffic light, Henry became agitated, looking all around. He clutched Lisa and Chastity to him and held them tightly until they reached home.
Even though he wasn’t driving, the aftereffects of the collision in July still haunted him.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
