The People We Remember

Part 5

I continued to keep Chamala posted on my progress. We worked together on the patent filings, the intellectual property strategy, the articles of incorporation and cap tables for the Stealth Co. I knew this would be the one. This would be my unicorn. This would be my chance to be Ada Lovelace and make a dent in the universe. I would do it by inventing something that gave humanity a better way to stay connected to the people we remember. Love is what makes us different as a tribe, as a species. I would give the world a better way to capture and preserve the love that we create.

Chamala knew how I liked to work. I started with an idea. But idea doesn't hold much value until you build a proof of concept. I had built one. Now it was time to bring in the big guns, to raise serious funding and hire engineers to scale it out. We would have a short window to build this bigger and better than anyone else.

"We're far enough along," Chamala said. "Now you can tell me the backstory behind the name."

"You remember I was a foreign student in Japan during undergraduate?" I asked.

"I remember you tell me about it."

"I did a homestay in Aomori Prefecture. It is a remote part of the country, on the northern edge of the main island Honshu. There is a mountain with a shrine called Mount Osore. In the Shinto religion it is believed to be one of the gates to the land of the dead.

"There is ancient tradition where blind women were trained to become Itako, which is a word for a spiritual medium. These women were said to be able to communicate with the spirits of the dead. The woman would begin studying at a very young age, they would recite chants and sutras. Part of the training was exposure to cold water, with hundreds of buckets of ice water poured over their bodies.

"The Itako were banned from most of Japan during the modern era, but there are still a few left in Aomori. Every year there is a festival at Mount Osore, where the Itako help people communicate with the spirits of friends and family who have passed into the land of the dead."

Chamala appeared dumbfounded on the screen. She knew that whatever I was working on was big, but clearly she hadn't expected this.

"So, is that what you've created? Something that provides the illusion of talking with dead loved ones?"

"It is not an illusion."

"What do you mean?"

"I've recreated their minds, Chamala. People will never be satisfied with a parlor trick. It can't be a few poignant interactions once or twice a year. People will want a window to their dead loved ones that can be opened at any time. They will want to do more than relive memories. They will want to ask they will want to talk with them about the present. They will want the relationship to continue over time."

"But it's not the real person, Sara. It's a digital reconstruction."

"Who are you to say that, Chamala? Am I talking to you, the real person, right now? I am talking to a screen full of pixels, connected to a video algorithm, connected to the wireless Internet, connected to a camera observing you fifty miles away? When we follow an old friend's posts on Facebook, the one we haven't seen in twenty years, can we really say we know them? Or is just a digital reconstruction? Who are we to say where the technology ends, and the human begins? They are extensions of each other."

"Have you told your son yet?"

"Told him what?"

"That he's not really Facetiming with his grandparents every night?"

"No, I haven't told him that. Because it's not true."

***

The virus took them quickly, within days of each other, like so many elderly married couples in towns and suburbs all over the country. No one was sure how they got infected. They'd exceedingly careful. On one hand it was a complete shock. On the other hand, my whole life had prepared me for the idea that the future holds inevitable surprises that our mind takes great effort to avoid confronting.

No one was there for the funeral. It was all online. All of us in the extended family logging into the video chat. Saying our remembrances. Praying and lighting virtual candles. I did it all in my room, locked away from Andrew, careful that he didn't hear the news.

I needed a way of coping with my grief. I tried meditating. I tried reading the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita. It hadn't helped me when I was young. It didn't help me now. My work had always been the way I dealt with the pain of being human.

By this point, I had already completed the proof of concept. It had always been a race against time. I was confident that I had won. I had defied the odds. It was my goal to defeat the reality of death in the same way the Wright Brothers had conquered the law of gravity. The same way modern geneticists were amendments to Darwin's law of natural selection.

This project would be my tribute to my parents and to myself. If I could do something to blunt the trauma. I understood why people needed to invent God, why they need to believe in the notion of the soul, the persistence of a spirt that survives our mortal bodies, the ability to communicate with the people they remembered. This need to believe is what makes us human beings. This necessity gives us the energy and tenacity to reshape reality.