“There’s another option. Something new,” he said. “I’m wondering if you’d be willing to give it a try.”
On February 3, Holly, Catherine, and Corey all arrived in New Haven. Corey had been a last-second invite, not because Tony wanted him there but because it would save him from having to do this again with his brother-in-law. Corey had plans to launch the stalled family business in a new direction. His goaclass="underline" save and reinvent Miami. Having found the Lord on the issue of sea level rise, he wanted to turn the city from a doomed Atlantis into an impermeable floating citadel—the first of many cities to hybridize land and water, which all sounded like bad science fiction to Tony. When Corey began to grate on him, he tried to remind himself what Gail would’ve wanted and to recall seeing Corey through the smoke of Los Angeles, having run into the flames to bring in the cavalry and deliver him and Catherine to safety.
The four of them cooked and ate dinner together. Tony handmade the pasta, Holly and Catherine packed and seasoned the meatballs, and Corey opened bottle after bottle of wine. (Tony wondered if he normally drank this much around Catherine.) He could almost forget the reason he’d brought them all together. During dinner Holly projected holograms of Hannah from her phone. Dean had a pet turtle and Hannah could not get enough of it, pointing to it every time he set it on the carpet to crawl past her: “Toytle!”
Corey was about to go to the kitchen to open yet more wine when Tony asked him to stay put. “There’s obviously a reason I wanted all three of you up here.” He looked at Holly, then Catherine. “I’m joining your mother shortly. I have stage IV. It started out in the colon, but now it’s everywhere.”
He found himself talking in too much detail about the diagnosis and staring at the carpet instead of looking them in the eyes, but then Catherine cut him off, whispering first to herself, then louder and louder, “No, no, no, no, no, no! NO!”
And she launched herself across the living room at him, grabbing him by the neck, wrapping him up, painfully shoving the air from his limited lungs. Her sobs were hot and loud against his cheek and neck.
“No please,” she wailed. And he remembered how in the days after Gail went to the hospital for the final time, Catherine refused to brush her teeth. It was her hostage-taking strategy, demanding that her mother return or her teeth would go filthy.
Over Catherine’s shoulder, he saw Corey’s jaw agape and the empty wineglass dangling from his hand. Holly wasn’t crying. She stared at him, then looked away, dabbing a single tear from the corner of her eye.
The pain quickly got worse. He had trouble breathing, and he was prescribed an oxygen tank. He was never hungry anymore and forced himself to eat only to stay clearheaded. There was a question of what would kill him first, the tumors in his lungs or liver, but the tumor near his belly button, distending out of his retreating paunch, made him think liver. Cancer, after all, didn’t actually kill you until there was major organ failure. As with Gail, he knew that it got hungrier at the end, feeding on the body with ever-greater speed and lust until it consumed and killed the host it depended on for its own life. Yes, he’d heard the trope comparing cancer to humanity’s relationship to the planet. As the earth’s ecosystems buckled under the avarice of human systems consuming more energy, more soil, more water, and spewing more waste, would the species just get hungrier until it starved all at once? No point in fretting about a shitty cliché, he told the editorial AI.
“Why is that?” it asked him, the familiar voice issuing from the speakers of his computer, her tone curious.
“Why’s there no point in fretting?”
“Yes. Your whole life you have fretted about this topic, so why would you not fret now?”
He thought about this. “I guess because I know I’m dead as fuck. No point in agonizing about it. Especially since I truly don’t believe there’s an iota of experience after this. There’s nothing to fear about oblivion. It’s just… nothing. You’re born back into nothingness. No harm there.”
“Yet you are scared anyway?”
“Of course. It’s the onslaught of terror before the ultimate unknown. If anyone ever tells you otherwise, they’re lying.”
Jamie, the dog that was soon to become Catherine’s, and Tyrion, his loyal feline friend of so many years, both watched Tony do these interviews. At first the woman’s voice had spooked Tyrion, but Jamie took to it immediately. The dog would come into the office and settle on the futon, paws extended as he rested his snout on the edge to listen. After the first few interviews, Tyrion crept in to listen too, although he stayed alert, always ready to scamper back to the safety of the kitchen.
“This began as a discussion of your time in federal detention, but you have twice deflected questions about that experience,” she said. “Would you like to return to it or bypass it?”
“What’s to focus on? They took me to their out-of-network facility—quote, unquote—took my belt and shoelaces so I wouldn’t hang myself. Then they left me there for seventeen months.”
In truth, he did not much want to talk about the almost year and a half of his life in a black-site prison. He was not particularly proud of the panic that had engulfed him in the days after they took him to his cell. The worst part of the experience was the tedium, the lack of decent reading material, the awful food, the frustration so deep it made him want to scream and sleep at the same time. When the lawyers had finally pried him out, he’d left the facility at sunset, and it looked like the exact same sky he’d seen from the DHS office park before he went in.
But he didn’t want detailed descriptions of any of that in his book. He was trying to make this about his life, which was Gail, Holly, and Catherine.
“Let’s move on,” he told the AI.
Tony had been skeptical when Mel Son Park had explained the ghostwriting AI to him at their first lunch, but Park declared it the wave of the future. Already, many of PenguinSchusterCollins’s most profitable titles had been written by AIs. Renowned authors fed in the broad strokes of novels, and the program did the rest, like a street artist painting an enormous mural on the side of a building. The artist didn’t actually get up there and paint it himself, he had a crew. Soon everyone would be able to write their books in just a few days. The AI was simply the crew.
“Why do you need the human at all?” Tony asked.
“Soon we won’t,” said Park. Readers would be analyzed, and then the algorithms would write them novels designed to engage the most sensitive (and lucrative) neural pathways in the time it took to toast bread. As for memoirs, Tony would be one of the first authors to ever write his with the use of the interview program. Park took Tony to his office after their meal to show him.
“It just asks me questions?” Tony wondered.
“It begins by asking you to outline your life and the story you want to tell. What were the most important events, your greatest accomplishments, your greatest defeats and disappointments. That kind of thing. Then it hones in. And don’t worry about the AI overlord thing. Our company’s CEO got ousted because our algorithms voted against him, and that worked out incredibly well.”
“Algorithms tell investors to only bet on companies that turn over more power to algorithms, huh?”
Park laughed and tapped a few keys on the keyboard. The speech waveforms oscillated as a man’s voice issued forth abruptly and atonally.
“Where would you like to begin your story?” the voice asked.
“Hell if I know,” Tony shot back.
“Why don’t we start with your childhood?” it suggested.
Tony motioned for Park to turn it off. He tapped the spacebar to pause the program.
“This will really work?”