“Why don’t you take it home and try it out?”
He did, and after a few initial questions that weren’t of much interest to him, he found himself talking about the day he got the powder threat in the mail at Scripps. He stayed up late into the night, putting off his oxycodone dose so he could finish the story, as the AI probed him (What did you do after you washed your hands? Were you not afraid you would poison others? What were you thinking about while you waited for the authorities?). He clicked around the program until he figured out how to “Analyze and Edit” then “Write.” It asked if he wanted first person or third person, and on a whim he clicked third. After a moment he got a PDF of the document, a chapter-length narrative of his experience. Before he’d even reached the third page, he had an uneasy feeling in his gut that had absolutely nothing to do with his terminal cancer. What was on these pages was not just a recollection of his experience. He recognized each tic of his own worried, weary, complicated brain. He saw the things about himself he liked the least. He saw how hot his fear was. How great his pain. How deep his love.
“It’s a fucking miracle,” he told Park, his voice low and frightened to his own ears. A part of him truly did not want to carry on with the “writing.”
“So you like it?”
“The voice. There’s got to be a way to change that voice. It gives me the creeps.”
“Oh, the voice can be anything!” he said excitedly. “If you want Harrison Ford, Zeden, Warren Hamby—all we need is about a five-minute sample of the person speaking.”
“Just five minutes?”
At first, hearing Gail’s voice, re-created using old videos taken with the first generations of the iPhone, was perpetually jarring. The AI’s questions were basic but floating on the synthetic vibrations of her throat, they startled and unnerved him. To hear her again, it raised the hairs on his arms every time he opened the Ghostwriter program.
“Tell me more about your media appearances? What questions irritated you the most?” AI Gail asked.
“What questions do you think irritated me the most?”
“I have no opinion. I am asking you.”
One of the last movies he and Gail ever watched together had been the one where the guy falls in love with his computer. Not much risk of that here or in the foreseeable future of the technology. All it could really do was pester him for details. It had no opinions whatsoever, to which the real Gail might have told it, “Don’t be a doormat.” Only once did the Ghostwriter actually surprise him. He was sitting with Tyrion on his lap. The cat had become accustomed to Gail’s voice at that point, and Tyrion could tell Tony was about to leave him. Certainly, he didn’t need extrasensory animal perception to see his friend’s sallow, sagging skin or watch him shuffling in pain and wheeling an oxygen tank around the house. The nurses were coming by every day. Soon, he would need them around the clock.
“In the writing of your first book, what made you think as an oceanographic scientist that you knew the best way forward economically and politically on curbing carbon pollution?” Tony looked up from stroking Tyrion. Had that been sass he’d heard in her tone?
“Oh. I didn’t. I took a look at the numbers civilization needed to hit to ensure the stability of the biosphere. Then I designed the plan backward from there. You know,” he paused, “sometimes I can almost believe you’re her. It’s like just for a second I’m talking to her again.”
“I have no opinion about that,” said the AI. “Shall we continue?”
Tony looked at Jamie on the futon. He was tired but the dog stared eagerly at the computer, like he wanted to hear more of the story. He needed his meds, the pain was surging through him, every last tumor shrieking its little cannibal agonies.
“Yeah,” said Tony. “I got a little more left in me.”
That summer, as the 2038 midterm elections neared, as his cancer progressed, and the economy restarted in painful fits and he hammered away at the book, Ash Hasan came to see him for the last time. Qui Qian had sent Tony a letter saying what a pleasure it had been to work with him. Now Ash Hasan was visiting him on his deathbed? He’d practically gotten himself a social life just when it all went to shit.
“You’ve survived longer than I expected,” he said.
“Thanks, Hasan. What an inspiring visitor.”
He sat on Tony’s recliner with one leg crossed over the other. He wore the same dark green button-up and jacket he’d worn the night they flew out of Sun Valley.
“Apologies. When my father died of metastatic cancer, I became particularly aggravated by the well-wishers sharing clichés and recycled inspirational tropes.”
“Ah goddamnit. We’re way more alike than I even fucking feared.” Tony pulled his bathrobe just a bit tighter over his stomach and its three tumors stretching his skin. “You planning to vote?” he asked to change the subject. Hasan had updated him on the battle being waged in the halls of Congress to carve exemptions into the carbon tax and other regulatory standards. “I’m hoping to make it to October so I can get mine in early.” He wasn’t wearing his oxygen mask, so his breath labored. The last PET scan had shown his lung nodules growing rapidly. How much he’d taken breathing for granted his whole life. A cigarette was no longer possible, which was the real tragedy as far as he was concerned. He spent terrible bouts on the toilet, he threw up frequently. He’d been in horrible pain lately, for the first time scaring him about how much it would hurt to die.
“Congresswoman Aamanzaihou is considering another candidacy for the presidency in 2040.”
“No shit? She didn’t get enough of this psycho nation the first time?”
“She’s going to run aggressively on more robust reform of our political and economic systems. We believe her emergence as an architect of the financial and environmental rescue will be greatly additive.”
“Good for her.” Tony stewed now on what he probably should say to this man, given it was likely the last time he’d ever see him. “Ash, I’m sorry I wasn’t able to make it to the ceremony for Haniya. You should know I thought very highly of her. A remarkable woman. And I’m sorry for your friend Peter as well.” He cleared his throat. Hasan folded his hands and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his face as hard as it had been the night in Cleveland when he told Tony he would not accept his resignation.
“After Seth, my sister harbored anger that I would not grieve the way she preferred me to grieve. I’d be lying if I didn’t express guilt at how she would have viewed me these past several months: ignoring purposeless ceremonies and platitudes to achieve what we’ve worked so long for.”
“When I lost my wife,” said Tony, “I decided that grief is actually always there. It’s like it lives in you, dormant. Until somebody goes. And that person dying, it just wakes you up to it. Makes you aware of it. But it’s always been there.”
Ash nodded as if he really did understand. “As a younger man, I carried a great deal of anxiety and unhappiness. So much so that I often wondered what sense existence made. It felt to me mostly like a constant and steady drum of pain. It took me once to the river in Boston.” He paused but did not explain the significance of this further. “Nevertheless, I find myself here, all these years later, glad to be alive for this. Despite Seth and Peter and Hani, if I’d known this would cost me everything, I still would’ve pursued our shared vision, Tony. You and I, we have been imperfect vessels for this project, but my mother once told me we can only know something higher if we reach for something higher. While that may be a platitude, I nevertheless sense it.” He nodded a few times, and they were both quiet. “I’ll say goodbye now, Tony.”
“Goodbye, Ash.”
Hasan stood, quacking his hand restlessly. He appeared to want to say something more and paused. “If there’s any measure of a person at the time of his death, it is what he has done to advance fairness and compassion and decency in his personal life and wider society. Though you have a somewhat unpleasant personal demeanor, Tony, I’ve always thought you’ve acquitted yourself quite well in those other regards.”