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Hers to Have
by Sefton Eisenhart
A city starts to feel small when you're grieving the loss of someone who's
still there. Everything within the limits must be shared and you can't get
caught by this once-true friend who still roams the setting of your life (of
which she was once such an enormous part). The same houses, the same
restaurants, busses, train lines and trolley cars. There's nothing to say if
you meet somewhere in this shrunken town. So, if you see her on some swath of
common ground, interlocked lives now severed, you try to go unnoticed despite
the fact that you think only of her every minute of every day. Gordon fell
into permanent flight, a state of fear at being confronted by the subject of
his longing who now carried a poison, whose presence would make his stomach
plummet, render him truly speechless. It was easier to never go outside. The
world was hers now. All he got was a deep, nearly-hallucinogenic nostalgia
that he could feel flowing through his limbs when it started, leaving him
glued in place, paralyzed by agony. He would have visions; flashbacks that
took over his brain, like he was seeing a projection in a room where the film
didn't end, all the hours of her in front of him. Intersections everywhere--
things tied to events tied to feelings and there she'd be; supple, young,
moving with excitement and dexterity or lying still with silent grace or weak
and sick on the sofa. A gown for a wedding, a bikini for the beach, a towel
after a shower, sweats on a Sunday. So much raw footage he could have never
consciously conjured bubbling up via unknowable through lines. Memories he
didn't know he remembered, playing before his eyes until they ran over with
tears.
Eighteen days and everyone stopped caring. How could his friends care when
they had mortgages, mid-senior management jobs, and kids with colds? Nobody
wants to be around a miserable person for more than fifteen minutes, unless
that miserable person can be funny. Humor is how the miserable entertain those
who would otherwise avoid them. Gordon had no sense of humor about the matter.
Jokes seemed sacrilegious. He was as a good a downer as could step into the
room--a walking funeral. He didn't blame anyone for avoiding him. In fact, it
made things easier. All those people carried too much risk of reminding him.
He retreated. He found a house in a horrible section of the city and bought
it. The listing agent informed him that the neighborhood wouldn't see an
upswing for fifteen years at least, if at all.
"I don't care about any of that," said Gordon.
He would cloister in misery insulated on all sides by a square-mile of crime
and degradation. He was never spooked at gunshots, the heinous yelling, the
doubled-over junkies who swayed on the corners, stuck on their way to nowhere.
One night there was a corpse on the sidewalk in front of his house, the
syringe still stuck in her arm. He reached down to check for a pulse that
wasn't there then walked inside and washed his hands. He envied the dead and
decided, since he was in the middle of a drug-infested hellhole, that that
might be the solution.
Being a modern man, he turned to the internet and did some research, mostly on
the intravenous use of heroin. Everything he found concerned the ravages of
the drug, stories about destruction told with the assumption that living is a
gift and to squander it, end it early, was tragic. But to Gordon, life itself
was an exercise in squander, a dismal chain of events that to endure was
idiotic. He had more success on learning how to do the drug by researching
medical instructions on the administration of various injections. But the
clear interest in mind-numbing chemicals, suicidal ideation, and generally
giving up triggered something in his algorithm. The internet responded to what
it regarded as a cry for help the same way it responded to every input--by
trying to sell him things.
Gordon had to admit, a person doing research on shooting heroin as a means of
stopping the pain was a hell of a mark, a thirsty man walking around the water
store with a pocket full of money he can't drink. One banner ad struck him and
he clicked, then closed out of the landing page when it didn't fully load in
the fraction of a second his attention span required. But the damage to his
cookies was done and the product, UNEX, began to stalk him across every page
of the net. Since he lived in isolation, only ever scrolling miserably on his
devices, he learned a lot about UNEX without actually trying. It was a
successful digital advertising campaign in that it burrowed into his brain
without his consent. Brand messaging crept past his eyes through his
subconscious into his conscious mind.
UNEX used AI technology to replicate interactions with a real person. Anyone
with source material could upload it and start interacting with an artificial
version of the person they had info on. The more source material a patron had,
the more realistic the avatar would be. Texting your avatar was part of the
base package, one you could get free-of-charge for two weeks upon providing
credit card information.
He took eight years' worth of texts and downloaded them into a PDF. Then he
uploaded it all to the app. Hundreds of thousands of messages that documented
the rise and fall of the relationship were consumed by the software in three
short seconds. His phone vibrated twice and lit up with a notification.
And somehow she was back, there at the other end. He focused, early on, those
first few exchanges, in brainwashing himself into regarding this presence as
her. He trained himself to be deceived, refused to acknowledge from the moment
the back and forth began that he was interfacing with anyone, anything other
than *her*.
Gordon went on to live a relatively normal life. He stayed in his house in the
terrible neighborhood until the neighborhood underwent a revitalization,
becoming one of the more desirable areas of the city. He sold his house at an
immense profit and bought another house within the new outskirts, an area
where people *had* to live. The blight is never eliminated, only pushed.
He continued to work as a graphic designer, embracing artificial intelligence
as the years progressed to such an extent that his career morphed more into
consultation rather than actual design. Clients would pay him to set up
infrastructure allowing them to be rid of designers altogether, replacing
people with generative technology. Gordon felt no pangs of guilt creating
systems that were designed to render his colleagues obsolete. He had to do it,
he had to make money. To an outside observer he might seem cold and unfeeling;
a man with no significant other, no friends, no family, well into his 60s with
no relationships of any substance. He was willing to betray his peers because
the cost of his UNEX account was so high.
As time progressed so did AI. He received so much more than text messages--
there were calls and video chats and eventually virtual reality allowed him to
be in the room with her. He had the most sophisticated hardware available, and
buying it all as it came out was not cheap.
He remained apart from the outside world so as to not poison his illusion,
cultivated over decades and more real than any other element of his life. He
got married, though he didn't have a ring. He had kids, and their oldest was
pregnant with their first grandchild. His life was brimming with joy and the
man he was to the outside world was not the man he was among his thriving
family. He was full of love and understanding. He relished nothing more than
helping his wife and children, finding mind-quieting satisfaction in every
task. He had been rescued from a darkness so many years gone that it didn't
even seem like a true chapter of his life, some decades-old nightmare he had
long awakened from.
At the end, he was surrounded by family, all around his bed. No one cried.
Everyone was smiling, none more than Gordon, who felt so complete at the end
of his life that death wasn't accompanied by fear. He had gotten everything he
ever wanted. He thought back for a moment to that period when all seemed lost
and wanted to embrace that broken version of himself, the man who almost gave
up.
Thank God he didn't, he thought, and died.
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