The People We Remember

Part 1

When I was a little girl, I once asked my parents who created God.

They didn't quite know how to answer me. I guess no one had ever asked them that question before. We lived in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. The only place my parents had ever lived. The only place their parents had ever lived. The kind of place where you catch fireflies in the summer and scrape ice off the windshield in the winter. The kind of place where change arrives slowly but inevitably.

My mother and father had always been believers, even if it wasn't always clear what they believed. They were Baby Boomers born into Catholic families, who then became the first hippies in their small town in the Seventies, dabbling in Yoga and a hodge-podge of New Age spiritual ideas in the Eighties when I was a child.

Through all my parents' transitions, from hamburgers to tofu burgers, from Sunday Mass to Ram Dass, they always believed in some higher power guiding us as eternal souls. A supernatural and mystic force spiriting from one world to the next.

So when I asked my parents who made God, they could never come up with an answer that seemed to stick. I decided for myself who made God. People made God. They made him to keep from getting lonely.

That was the moment I decided that my parents did not know the answers. That no one in my hometown knew the answers. And I plunged into my books, never listening to the taunts of the kids in the neighborhood. The ones who called me the ugly nerd with the weirdo parents. The Internet arrived and I discovered a bigger world out there. I dreamed of the day I would leave my hometown for good. I would always love my parents. But I would leave their world behind.

***

Thirty years later, during the quarantine, my own six-year-old son would ask me the same question.

"Mommy, who made God?"

"What's that?" I was not expecting him to be awake this late. I switched gears, turning away my computer screen to face him.

"Grandma and Grandpa were telling me they pray to God. I asked them who made God."

"What did they say?"

"They said I should talk to you."

And suddenly I understood how my parents felt. It took me a long time to think of how I should respond.

"What do you think Andrew?"

"I think God made herself. And she made the whole world after that."

"That's good," I said. "Sometimes no one can tell you what to believe. Sometimes you have to decide for yourself."

***

When the pandemic first spread throughout the world many people were shocked. The bubble heads on the news referred to it as a "black swan" event, a statistical improbability that would've been impossible to forecast. This was ridiculous of course. It wasn't a black swan event. It was a white swan event. Scientist had been predicting this very thing for decades.

But most people aren't scientists. Most people stumble through life in a fog of delusion. Projecting their film of how they want the world to be onto the screen of reality. Seeing themselves through the lens of their mind like a reflection in a fun house mirror.

I was wealthy and divorced, living with my son in a spacious home in the hills of San Francisco. I had studied psychology and computer science at Stanford where I met Steven, my ex-husband. We sold our first company for $2 million and our second company for twice that. None of that seemed to matter now. It wouldn't change the fact that I hated Steven for cheating, that I played hard ball with visitation rights during the divorce. It wouldn't change the fact my parents were far away, and no one was getting on planes anymore.

It wouldn't change the fact that millions of people around the world were dying and I wasn't doing anything to prevent it. That weighed on me in a very personal way. Because I was always someone who had difficulty with people at the micro-level but really cared about them at the macro-level.

The little things that other people take for granted had always been so difficult. I had always been a failure at relationships. I found them tedious, irrational and infuriating. It was my inventions that had always been my saving grace. My intellectual property, the start-up companies I founded and incubated, were moon shot ideas. Contributions that created a better future for humanity.

Sheltering in place with my son in the middle of the world-wide lockdown, I had to do something meaningful.

That's when I returned to Project Itako.

***

"You're not talking to anyone else are you, Sara?" Chamala inquired.

We were on an encrypted video chat in my living room overlooking Dolores Park while Andrew played video games on his iPad.

"You're the only one I trust," I replied.

Chamala was a venture capitalist based in Menlo Park, one of the early investors in all my prior ventures, the only one who took my side during the divorce. Steven was brilliant and charming and manipulative. When he told all our connections in the Valley that he was the brains behind our husband-and-wife software creations, everyone believed him. Everyone except Chamala.

"Do you need capital?" Chamala asked.

"Not yet."

"Do you need coders?"

"Not yet. Not until I finish the proof of concept. Right now, all I need is time."

"So, you want to tell me why you took your mysterious project out of mothballs? Why now when the whole world is falling apart?"

"You'll understand. Just wait until the demo."

***

When the pandemic first arrived, it hit us like a tsunami. This first wave was only the start. In fact, it was a whole cycle of tides, with ebbs and flows. It morphed over time, sometimes calm and barely visible, then rising out of the depths with a vengeance.

The modern world was not prepared for this continuum of grieving. We had become so confident in our technological progress, treating death as an enemy who would finally be vanquished. Steven and I used to attend conferences in Palo Alto with titles like "The End of Aging", hosted by billionaires who made it their life's work to never die.

Suddenly all the great minds were humbled in our quest for immortality. Death had won. It had routed us. But what if there was a way to help us cope with so much loss. What if we could provide some consolation prize for the people who would need to survive this defeat, the ones who would go on living.