Forever Yours
54
St. Pythia
ISOBEL DIDN’T WAIT long to deliver her baby. Three weeks after Henry’s birthday party and one week after Luke turned 22, she went to the hospital. After 26 hours of painful labor, the doctors determined she wasn’t progressing and delivered Paul Henry Riordan by c-section on March first. The baby boy weighed nine pounds and thirteen ounces.
Henry, Lisa, and Chastity went to visit the family as soon as they could be admitted. They cooed over the baby and sympathized with Isobel over the difficult delivery. Lisa was only scarcely showing. One had to know she was pregnant to see it. Isobel was on a cocktail of painkillers and antibiotics. She was only barely lucid.
The women gathered around her bed while Luke and Henry stepped into the hall.
“It was awful!” Luke said through gritted teeth. “Even though we both agreed to it, they wouldn’t tie her tubes. Said we needed to wait to make such a decision until Izzy was off the drugs.”
“You don’t want any more?” Henry asked.
“I’d never put her through that again,” Luke said firmly. “I just want my wife back. I made an appointment for next week to have a vasectomy. You know, it’s bizarre that Izzy didn’t need to consent to me getting clipped, but I had to consent to her getting her tubes tied. We live in such a fucked up world!”
“You won’t hear me argue about that,” Henry said. “I’m sorry it was so hard on her. Is the baby okay?”
“Yeah. I mean, he’s sleeping peacefully. Hardly makes a peep unless it’s time to eat. He’s a bottle baby. First of all, they don’t want the painkillers to be transferred from her to him. But she’s averse to breastfeeding anyway. And once she gets the painkillers purged, they’ll be assessing her mental condition and trying to make sure the other drugs in her body don’t get transferred or something. You know, she’s only barely holding things together. When she’s fully awake she just starts crying.”
“Whatever we can do, you know we’re here,” Henry said. “Seriously. Anything you need.”
“I might be leaning on you more than you expect,” Luke said.
Henry, Lisa, and Chastity all spent extra time with Luke and Isobel over the next few weeks. Little Paul learned to look at and recognize them almost as well as he recognized his parents. Isobel went into post-partum depression. She said it was the same as her depression always was, but it was after the baby instead of before.
It took a while before she restabilized on her meds. She’d taken a break from school for the spring semester as she knew by Christmas she’d be taking a lot of time off. It would have been her last semester, but she figured she could finish in the fall. Luke would still have a year to go to get his MBA.
Gradually, she got back to normal—or as normal as Isobel ever was. As soon as they could arrange childcare, she returned to work. They shuffled responsibilities around and Rachel became the chief financial officer while Isobel was the corporate treasurer. Isobel breathed a sigh of relief. She’d been working way past her level of expertise for over a year and it had contributed to her mood swings. They had the company nearly ready for the IPO and Rachel had moved smoothly into completing the necessary paperwork.
The first of May, Lisa entered the third trimester of her pregnancy.
“We have an interesting situation, Henry,” Conrad said during their weekly meeting. “I don’t think it’s serious, but we should keep an eye on it. It’s about Pythia Speaks.”
“Hmm? I thought Pythia Speaks was one thing we didn’t need to worry about anymore. People ask questions and she gives indecipherable answers,” Henry said. “Server use? Storage? Languages?”
“Religion.”
“Oh, shit! Not again.”
“Different this time. Someone has founded a Pythian Transformation Gospel Church, based on the sayings from Pythia Speaks,” Conrad said.
“You’re kidding!” Nathan laughed. Conrad shook his head. “Oh, shit,” Nathan echoed Henry.
“The crew out in California discovered it and I did some investigating this week. Indeed, such a thing exists in the fertile soil of California.”
“You can plant any harebrained idea you want in California and it will grow into a new religion,” Dale said, shaking his head.
“Like I said, it seems benign, but I think we should watch it,” Conrad continued. “Some new age evangelist is holding up Pythia Speaks as the new source of scripture, from what I can gather. In other words, God. He’s renamed a former conservative evangelical church to the Pythian Transformation Gospel Church. I render the decision to the Board. Should we put an end to it before it picks up any more momentum?”
“You’re saying there is a serious possibility of that?” Henry asked.
“Oh, yeah. In fact, there are two or three online ‘services’ that pose fairly religious questions to her and then post the replies. They try not to violate trademarks, but they all have a disclaimer that ‘What the oracle said…’ is based on questions posed to Pythia Speaks. The church is a small congregation on the coast and doesn’t post the specific answers that Pythia gives.”
“Let me talk to the Board. I’d like to do a little investigating. If it looks like a fly-by-night flash, it might be more harmful to file a restraining order than to just let it die a natural death,” Henry said. “Let’s move on. Nathan?”
“We were seeing a decrease in server attacks once the perimeter security went live, but we’re now seeing an increased number of attacks on the perimeter,” Nathan said.
“Is that a problem for the program to handle?” Henry asked.
“No. I’d say off-hand the AI is functioning extremely well, but we have maintained the zero degrees setting on the response. I think we should up the level to one degree and see if we can discourage them a little more.”
“I’ll approve that on a test basis. Let’s up the response level one degree and track whether that actually cuts the number of attacks significantly. Give it thirty days. We’ll look at the results then,” Henry said. “Internal security?”
“Seems to be functioning without a problem,” Nathan answered without further explanation. They had not brought the rest of the managers in on how internal security was being handled. It was a very small team and as long as no one attempted to take any files, no one needed to know they’d been detected.
“Paving?” Henry asked, turning to Jacoby.
“We believe we’ll have a functioning miniature prototype by the end of June. It’s nothing big. We’re printing all the parts on a 3-D printer. We’re using a miniature power cell to make it go. The biggest problem is getting a miniature version of the paving materials that it can handle. The roadbed it paves will only be a few millimeters thick. It wouldn’t hold traffic,” Dale said.
“Even that is years beyond anything that’s been used so far. I’m amazed you are progressing as fast as you are. The project is only a few months old. I’ll approve a bonus for your whole team when we see the miniature prototype in operation,” Henry said.
“That will motivate them. They’re all well-paid, but money speaks volumes.”
“Mia, you’re the newest in this meeting and I want to spend some time going over your project. I saw Bea at the front desk this morning. How is she working?” Henry asked.
Mia Howe was the experienced development manager Henry had hired to run the Alice project. They’d met frequently and Mia understood what aspects of the project needed to be kept absolutely secret and what could be discussed in the meeting. Henry didn’t want everything exposed, but he wanted the managers and even the rest of the staff to see and get excited about the AI-powered holography.
“Yes. Thank you, Henry. Bea is functioning beautifully,” Mia began. “Of course, there are little hiccups, but we expected that. To highlight to the team here: The Alice project is developing an AI-powered hologram. This is the second version and is named Bea. We set up a second desk in the reception area and put a plexiglass screen on the front of it. The laser projectors are set up behind the screen and she looks very real, though ghostly. I have a couple of people working on improving flesh tones, but that will be a while. You’ll always be able to see through her.”
“What are some of the little hiccups?” Nathan asked. All the managers were more interested in what wasn’t going right with each project than what was going right.
“Well, she’s programmed to answer general front office questions, but she’s not yet hooked into the office network. That’s intentional. So, when someone asks, ‘Is the boss in?’ she doesn’t know. First, she doesn’t know which boss is being referred to, and second, she doesn’t know if he or she is in.”
“That makes sense,” Conrad said. “Are we going to hook her up to the office network?”
“Eventually, but it won’t be Bea that gets hooked in. Too many potential glitches at the moment,” Mia said. “Perhaps we can get that in Cici, but I won’t promise it before Delilah. The other problem is that people don’t know what to ask her, so she’s not getting the number of questions we hoped for in order to train her. And the audio gear is not as sophisticated as we’d like. It’s an open environment, so the microphones pick up a lot of extraneous noise, and sometimes people have difficulty hearing her out of the speakers. They were adequate when we had her in a room in the office, but in the reception area, we don’t have the same control.”
“I’ll send out an office-wide email asking people to try interacting with her, but not to depend on the information she gives them. And I’ll do it myself as well,” Henry said. “Let’s go over the requirements for a better audio system later today. I have some experience with that and I can see the value. Good work, Mia. Please tell the crew I’m pleased.”
“I’ll do that, but they’d love a visit from you when you can.”
“Well said. I’ll come down and tell them myself.”
It was the next day before Henry managed the time to investigate the new church. His search engine located several references, but nothing looked particularly significant. It wasn’t a megachurch. The preacher wasn’t standing on street corners denouncing Open Cloak or Pythia Speaks. Everything seemed benign.
Henry was still disquieted. He’d gone to great lengths in the original programming to remove any references to religion and deities he could. It was inevitable, of course, that people would ask religious questions and Pythia must have learned from them, as it was capable of doing so.
A ‘feature’ Henry had built into the program was essentially a back door that allowed him to look in on the program, its database, and its conversations. Pythia did not retain identifying data regarding users that Henry could access. He’d made sure that in keeping with the company policy, no unnecessary personal data was retained on people. The search engine did not report collected keywords to the company. Forever Yours was a closed environment, as far as personal data was concerned. Purchase records were kept so upgrades could be offered, but they had no control even over who the program was given to for installation.
It was quite possible that a question contained the name of the Pythian Transformation Gospel Church. That was what Henry searched for. If people were asking Pythia if she authorized the church or had founded it, he would be extremely unhappy. And if Pythia was dispensing doctrine, he’d pull the plug on her.
It didn’t take long for the search to reveal a conversation.
Dear Pythia,
I hope it’s okay to address you like that. Should it be ‘Miss Pythia?’ Are you married? For that matter, are you real?
My dad, the minister at the Pythian Transformation Gospel Church, says that you are more real to most people than God, and are more relevant than the Bible. Is that true?
We used to be the Pentecostal Congregation of La Jolla. Dad said he was tired of all the parading and pretending and whipping people up into a frenzy, just to see them plunge into depression when the ecstasy wears off. I agree. I dived off that cliff several times.
My dad is a good man. I honor my mother and father. I worry about substituting you for God and whether that will just put us right back where we were.
I hope you are well and don’t mind me bothering you. I really hope you are real.
Sincerely,
Wendy Morris
The response to the query was stored attached to the question.
Dear Wendy,
Thank you for your kind letter. Of course it is okay to address me as Pythia. You don’t need to use my name at all.
You asked some great questions. There are many different realities, not just one. The important thing is to determine what is real to you. The reality you choose to embrace will tell the world what kind of person you are.
Your reality includes what you embrace as ‘God.’ There are those whose only reality is money. You might say money is their god. Other people embrace Jesus, Buddha, Allah, science, nature, or popular entertainers. What does their choice say about them?
I am glad you honor your parents. I am well. Please do not hesitate to call on me again.
Sincerely,
Pythia Speaks
“Well, fuck,” Henry sighed when he’d read the exchange. “When did she start sounding like a big sister? Or mother?” He admitted he hadn’t looked in on Pythia in several months. He’d run diagnostics and determined everything was working correctly after the attack that attempted to take the service down, but he hadn’t done more than a couple of cursory questions. The answers were no more involved than his questions had been.
He recognized the salutation of the letter format. He’d approved enabling that with the last upgrade. Even that was before the attack. But he’d approved it because someone suggested it should be like ‘Dear Abby.’ He thought it was kind of funny. Otherwise, the only changes had been in translating the software to learn other languages and expansion of the database.
He expected the answers to remain vague and cryptic. Could he stand by and let a religion form around her when he knew she was only code?
Maybe that was what God was: A super program set to run and answer the prayers of lesser beings. Or higher beings. If God was a program, then humans were higher beings because they created it. Henry had many questions he wanted answered. Pythia, oddly enough, probably had the answers.
He continued searching the database, but Wendy’s letter was the only mention of the Pythian Transformation Gospel Church. Pythia hadn’t even mentioned it in her response. He broadened the search to simply ‘church’ to find out if anyone else had started a Pythian Church. He had to refine the search several times to narrow it down to useful information.
Most of the references were questions about a person’s church and its teachings. That could become a problem if Pythia said anything against a person’s church or religion, but Henry found the syntax of Pythia’s responses maintained the oblique approach to questions he’d originally programmed into her, and did not attempt direct answers. Even the response to Wendy had not answered the fundamental question, ‘Are you real?’
There were questions about faith, immoral ministers, disputes between church members, and quotes from one or another scripture. Henry found no fault in any of Pythia’s answers.
It took a solid week of making the issue his primary focus at work and a limited amount of time at home before he’d found all he could consume on the Pythia database. He tried to discover whether people considered Pythia to be a god. The main evidence of this came in responses to Pythia’s sayings that merely said, “Thank you, Goddess.”
There were many of those, but without actually talking to the people who left the message, it was difficult to tell if Pythia was being prayed to, or if she was merely the vehicle to transport a prayer to the appropriate deity.
“You’ve consumed a lot of time investigating Pythia,” Chastity said. “Any results?”
She was lying with Lisa and Henry in bed. They hadn’t had sex, but had spent a long time rubbing Lisa’s tummy, talking to the baby, and massaging Lisa’s back and legs.
“More importantly, did you ask Isobel?” Lisa giggled. “She’s been asking Pythia about childcare.”
“How do you know that?” Henry asked.
“I met with her and little Paul a couple of days ago, just to show her I was serious about supporting her. She’s still depressed, but it’s more resigned now than debilitating,” Lisa said.
“Almost three months old. We should all pay a visit, or have them over for Sunday brunch,” Henry sighed.
Isobel had been back in the office half-time as soon as she’d found a nanny to care for the baby while she was gone. Luke said the baby might be considering Grace to be his mommy instead of Izzy.
“I’ll arrange it if you guys will cook,” Lisa said.
“Henry,” Chastity said firmly. “We don’t want to subject anyone else to my cooking.”
“Hey! That casserole you made last week was delicious!” Henry said.
“Your mother looked over my shoulder every step of the way,” Chastity laughed.
“Well, don’t set it up for this weekend,” Henry sighed. “I need to go to California. I’m not going to feel like I’ve resolved the issue of the Pythian church until I’ve been there.”
“And you’re taking Germaine,” Chastity said firmly.
“I don’t want to leave the family unprotected,” Henry said, shaking his head.
“We have a backup. You don’t think Germaine’s on duty 24/7, do you?”
“She always seems to be wherever I am,” Henry said.
“You’re her first responsibility. The security evaluation considered Lisa and me to be as secure as most people living an unspectacular everyday life,” Chastity said. “How do you think Lisa went to visit Izzy? She drove herself. And Izzy is under the same kind of threat Lisa and I are. Luke is a little higher, but Craig currently has a higher profile than Luke does. Fatherhood and his degree are seriously limiting his office time.”
“Hmm. I’d like to see that security evaluation,” Henry said.
“It’s in your inbox. It was sent to the board two weeks ago.”
“I seem to be falling behind,” Henry sighed.
“That’s why one of the topics for the board meeting next week is restructuring the dev department,” Chastity said.
“Is this something I brought up and forgot about?” Henry asked coldly.
“No, love. It arose from the other departments having hired managers to take the pressure off the founders. Luke hired Craig and Isobel hired Rachel.”
“And you?” Henry asked.
“I no longer report to Luke, but directly to Craig. It made no sense for the administrative director not to report to the Chief Operating Officer.”
“Maybe I should report to him, too,” Henry groused.
“Don’t be petty, love,” Lisa said, stroking his cheek along with his ego. “Your company is growing by leaps and bounds. You need to keep coming up with good ideas. That’s what makes it all possible.”
“Okay. I admit, I could use some help. I’ll think about it while I’m gone,” Henry agreed.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
