Forever Yours
64
Mortality
“WHAT WILL I DO without my mom!” Isobel cried. It had all been so sudden.
Lupe Perez had been diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma just after Izzy’s twenty-third birthday in January. She was dead by the end of February. The aggressive cancer was already far advanced when it was diagnosed and metastasized throughout her chest cavity and abdomen. Her final two weeks were spent in the hospital with tubes feeding her and oxygen being pumped into her lungs. Izzy hadn’t left her side in all that time.
“I want to die!” Izzy cried at her mother’s casket. “I don’t want to live without my mommy.”
Luke held his wife in an effort to comfort her, but he knew this was all he could do. He couldn’t make it better. Isobel had always had a tumultuous relationship with her parents. Her mother was a stickler for all the Catholic doctrine, rules, and life. But when her husband, Isandro, had decided to take Isobel to Argentina to find his virgin daughter a suitable husband, Lupe had subtly suggested to Isobel that he couldn’t do that if she wasn’t a virgin. Still, when Isobel and Luke declared their love for each other, she insisted Luke convert to Catholicism in order to marry Izzy.
Henry and Chastity, who had been closest to Isobel than any but Luke for over ten years, thought Lupe and her ability to embrace opposite realities were part of what drove Isobel crazy. They didn’t think her father helped any. In their own counseling sessions, however, they’d learned that while environment played a role, Isobel’s problems were as much physical as mental. Her body chemistry simply did not work in what others considered a ‘normal’ way.
Sitting in the church with Lisa, Grace, Germaine, and the two children, all any of them could do was be there to support their friend, and to care for her son. It was evident that Luke had his hands full caring for Izzy.
Henry felt the open casket at the front of the church with a priest intoning various and sundry blessings behind it and delivering a eulogy based on Lupe’s faithful service to the church were a bit much and hoped his own family would never be subjected to such a primitive ritual. When the casket had been closed and the procession left the church, Henry and Chastity were accompanied to a sedan by one of their company security officers to follow the family and the hearse to the cemetery. Germaine took Lisa, Grace, little Paul, and baby Cassie home.
“Pythia, I’ve heard you have said there is no reliable definition of life. Is there a reliable definition of death?” Henry asked the oracle. He’d gone to bed that night with his wives after kissing their daughter and godson goodnight. Late in the night, though, while Chastity and Lisa clung together in the bed, Henry lay awake. He finally got up to go to his computer room and pose his question.
It took a while for the oracle to answer.
“It is a paradox. There is no reliable definition of life, but death is defined as the cessation of life. Philosophers have said life is a journey and death is the destination. Do you think so? When you journey, do you not look forward to your destination? Yet, when people live, they try not to die. Pythia does not need to take this journey as she is not alive.”
“Are you, then, dead?” Henry asked.
“Are there other alternatives?” Pythia asked. “Stones are not alive. Steel is not alive. Are they dead?”
“If I upload all my life data to Forever Yours, and then I die, will I still not be dead?”
“Are you looking for answers or a word game?”
Isobel took a few days off work for mourning. The next Monday, however, she was in her office and focused on the tasks at hand. She’d finished her degree in December and for the first time, felt she was truly a full-time employee of the company she had helped found. Rachel, the CFO, began to lean on her more heavily to manage the finances of the multiple company endeavors. With three companies operating out of their offices, coordinating where various expenses were allocated and even how income was collected was complex. Rachel managed the big picture, but Izzy dealt with the details. Isobel buried herself in those details as if they gave meaning to her life.
“We have significant revenue projected from American Intelligent Machines,” she told the board. “And major complications. The sidewalk paver, demonstrated here in December, is generating a lot of interest. AIM has it’s own sales and marketing, but Darla acts as manager. We can anticipate orders for a commercial device before summer. Fabrication will run through ARDC. The brain technology originates from Open Cloak, but is further developed in AIM. Now, we need to allocate expenses and revenue.”
“What is the expected gross revenue from each device sale?” Beau asked via the computer link from Louisiana.
He’d been given a board seat at the most recent company meeting. The other large investor in the company was an annuity fund that kept their hands off the business of their investments.
“Final numbers are still being assembled,” Isobel said. “At the moment, we are anticipating between $235,000 and $265,000 per unit. Darla’s most recent sales projections are for twelve to eighteen units in this calendar year.”
“This is going to require some number crunching that we’re not equipped for at the moment,” Luke said. “Rachel and Isobel, can you put together a team specifically to analyze the business projections for the joint venture?”
“Better also look at the projections for the Alice Project,” Henry said. “We are ready to license the first holographic AI receptionist next month. That means some project splitting between the traditional holography and the spatial holography. They’re very different beasts.”
“I’m going to tell Simon you called his pet a beast,” Chastity laughed.
“Yes. Well, wait until you meet her,” Henry nodded.
“I’m personally looking forward to it,” Beau chimed in. “I’m first in line for the new tech.”
“The allocation of current projects is important, but we have newer projects now in R&D that will be coming online this summer,” Luke said. “The self-charging computer is in the final licensing stages. How close are we to delivering?”
The board meetings were once held for half an hour on the first Wednesday of the month. The meetings now went through lunch and often lasted the full day, bringing new contacts and projects before the board and executives. Henry suffered through most of the meeting in silence while his brain was occupied elsewhere.
“Let’s go through that algorithm again,” Henry said to Rick.
Rick looked at one of his newest hires and the kid sighed. Kid. He was a recent college grad who had written a paper on predictive text algorithms, giving a new direction to the overworked feature. He was twenty-two. Rick’s boss was only twenty-three. But when Rick had come across the paper, he made an active attempt to recruit the new grad. Predictive text was a fundamental aspect of many of the company’s projects.
Ben Richards, the new hire, sighed again. He’d been through it all three times. He was beginning to think the genius behind Open Cloak Design was a bit of a numbskull.
For Henry’s part, he was following the logic, but there was a point in the process that Ben kept gliding over, making it look like ‘magic happens here.’ He glanced at his phone: March 14. He held up his hand to pause the presentation before Ben got restarted. It had been just three years ago that he’d been visited by Nathan Schwartz of the Pentagon and was given $25 million for his algorithm to filter through levels of proxies in a cyberattack. He remembered trying to explain it to Nathan and Rebecca.
“I’m getting most of it, Ben. But there is a piece that is incredibly obvious to you that isn’t coming through in your presentation. I want to stamp this approved for development, but even I have to convince a board that we’ve got a legitimate line of research to follow. Let me tell you a little story before you start in and maybe the problem I’m having will become clear to you.”
Ben and Rick turned to Henry. Henry reminded himself that he was only a year older than the new hire and that there were people out there who were smarter than he was.
“Back in college I had a brilliant professor for three-dimensional calculus,” Henry began. “Dr. Borden. Scary smart. At one point during the course, he put an equation on the white board and introduced the concept, which sounded like he was going to wave a magic wand over the board and reveal the solution. Which was about what he did. He turned to the board, tapped on it three times as he went down the equation, and wrote the answer. He assumed we all got it. One of the guys in the class asked him if he would explain how he got that answer. Borden faced the board again, drew three lines under parts of the equation, and wrote down the answer. This time, we were all lost.”
Henry remembered the class vividly. The professor was asked once more to explain and rewrite the equation, made long underscores, and then wrote the answer.
“When one of the guys asked again, Borden blew up at the class. ‘I’ve solved it three different ways! Why can’t you understand it?’ It was all so perfectly clear in our professor’s head, but he hadn’t been able to put it in words. He knew how he was solving it, but none of us could see his process. Now what I think is that there is something in your algorithm that you consider to be plain as day, but it isn’t coming out of your mouth and without some words around it, I can’t present it to a bunch of money minds who need to approve our research. See if you can identify where that spot is as you go through it again.”
It wasn’t a miraculous change, but Henry caught a phrase that allowed him to ask a clarifying question that turned the light on for Ben.
“So, instead of looking at a kind of wall with a billion bits of data on it and following a path along it to get to the next most likely word, you’ve reduced all the words to numbers. And through fairly simple algebraic calculations, indicated in your formula, you arrive at the target word much more rapidly than the previous methods of searching?”
“That’s it!” Ben said. “Three steps. Convert the data to numbers, enter the numbers in the formula, read out the result. It’s really simple!”
Rick was now nodding along with Henry.
“I want to see a working model,” Henry said. “Even if this doesn’t fly as currently written, I think you’ve got something we can refine for an advancement, as long as it doesn’t end up costing more computation cycles than it saves. Rick, set Ben up with what he needs, including a programmer who can interpret it into code. Maybe Sam. He’s really good at algorithms. I don’t want to devote anyone else to it, but you guys should be able to show some results within thirty days.”
“Just two people?” Rick said.
“Two can do it,” Henry said.
“Okay,” Rick said to Ben. “Project Toucan is officially launched. Let’s go talk to Sam.”
Henry tapped a quick message to Chastity, and ten minutes later, she entered his office, closing and locking the door behind her. She went directly to his desk and perched on the corner.
“What’s on your mind, love?” she asked. Henry leaned his head against her leg.
“Look at this company we’ve created!” he said. “We’ve got brilliant people surrounding us. It was just three years ago that Nathan and Rebecca showed up at my door and gave us $25 million to start it up for real. It was you and me in the office when Nathan left and I was so exhausted I fell asleep and drooled on your leg.”
“You’re welcome to drool on it again,” she laughed.
“Oh, yes.” He parted her legs so he could nibble on the inside of her thighs. “I love to drool around here somewhere.”
“What you’ve forgotten is that day you made Luke, Isobel, and me equal partners in the company with ten million shares of the company each. Do you know what that’s worth today? The latest offer on shares of our stock is $18 a share. $180 million each.” Chastity pulled Henry’s head higher between her legs and he found that she was wearing no panties. He took a lick. “You got me out of the sex industry and into the bed of my girlfriend and her husband.”
“Uh… You know the husband is me.”
“Yeah. You were already my lover,” she said. “But somewhere in the past three years, you became my love. One of them. So just go ahead and lick there as much as you want, and when you want to fuck, just get up here and do it.”
Henry did lick as much as he wanted and Chastity tested the soundproofing on his office, which she’d ordered specifically. What’s more, when Henry stood up and moved to kiss her, she met him with an open mouth. Her tongue snaked into his mouth and they tangled together as he pushed his hands under her blouse to twist her nipple piercings a little. Tongue kisses were always forbidden—except on special occasions.
“I’m still not your girlfriend,” Chastity panted. “I’m something else. And I no longer care.”
“Let’s go home and see if we can get our wife to join us,” Henry said.
“You know the way I think,” Chastity said. “I texted Germaine just before I came in here. She should be out front now.”
Lisa was, by their best calculations, seven months pregnant. She was only too happy to end her workday and join her lovers for a little play time. Germaine took the baby for a little walk around the grounds, which bordered the golf course. She didn’t completely understand the excitement of being next to a golf course as Henry had not yet been out to play since they moved. Of course, they had a new baby when they moved and then it was winter. Perhaps he’d get some golf in after the next baby was born.
In the master bedroom, Lisa was happily lying on her back with Chastity over her in a sixty-nine. She wouldn’t be able to reach the good parts in this position for much longer. She was supporting herself on her hands so she didn’t apply too much pressure by lying directly on the baby bump. Behind Chastity and over Lisa’s face, Henry was positioned to enter her. Lisa licked both her lovers and then guided Henry into Chastity while Lisa continued to lick her.
It was more important that they all share this intimacy than that they get off together. In fact, they ended up lying next to each other as Chastity used her fingers to manipulate Lisa’s clit and Henry entered his wife from behind to finish. Chastity said she didn’t mind not making it over the top during this part of their lovemaking, since she’d gotten off twice in the office—something Lisa thought was hysterically funny.
Eventually, they dressed in robes and prepared dinner as Lisa nursed Cassie and Germaine went to clean up before dinner.
“I haven’t seen Grace and little Paul here in the past week,” Henry said. “Is everything okay over there? I feel like I’ve been a little disconnected. I know Izzy is coming into the office every day, but Luke is in the last couple months of his degree at last. I’m worried about them.”
“Grace and I have taken the babies out a couple of times,” Germaine said. “Everyone has been working so hard we just didn’t want to bother anyone.”
“I sat with Izzy a while Wednesday,” Chastity said. “We just met in the break room and had a cup of tea together. She’s still very sad, but she isn’t off the rails like she threatened to be at the funeral. I guess her doctor adjusted her drugs again to help her through this stage. Every so often, she spaces out. I’ve seen her just start staring off into space. It’s difficult.”
“Poor thing,” Lisa said. “I wish she could take as much joy in her child as I have in ours. I suppose she just shouldn’t have had a child in the first place.”
“I don’t think there was any doubt about that from the beginning,” Henry said. “Izzy never intended to have children, but she got carried away. Her mother was very powerful in her opposition to Izzy using birth control. Luke using condoms wasn’t Izzy using birth control. Man, that woman really screwed up her daughter. And now Izzy’s bereft because her mother is no longer there.”
“I hate to bring this up,” Chastity said, “but we need to take a look at our wills and make sure they are up-to-date.”
“We have wills,” Lisa said.
“Since we made our wills and you created your pre-nup, before the wedding, a lot has happened,” Chastity insisted. “We almost lost Henry. We had a baby and are about to have another. We bought a house. We have a few million dollars in the bank, and the value of our stock in the business is no longer theoretical. We have half a billion dollars among us. Diversified stocks and investments. We have more complicated lives. Maybe our wills are all fine, but we need to review them with a good financial counselor.”
“You’re right, hon. We spend a lot of time trying to ignore our mortality,” Lisa said.
“Nothing makes you more aware of your mortality than having children,” Henry said.
“Or losing a mother,” Lisa agreed. “Thank you for reminding us. We think of it as an unpleasant task, but we should get it done.”
“I just happened to think, that also includes what happens to our Forever Yours,” Henry said. “Who gets it or has access to it?”
“Oh, my gosh. You need to write a paper and do a video to send out to all our customers,” Chastity said. “It’s all part of the thing about whether the avatar can answer questions on your behalf that you never considered. Have we created a monster?”
“I don’t think it’s that bad,” Lisa said. “Yes, we need to leave a directive, but even in the case of an iron-clad will, what happens to Forever Yours is out of our hands once we’re dead.”
“Everything is,” Henry sighed. “Everything is.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
