The ads were not meant to use the likenesses of the deceased. What they could do was almost as bad, but far less illegal—taking those likenesses and shifting them ever so slightly until the ad looked familiar, but not sufficiently to be recognized.
Whether it was an act or not, the ad looked just as surprised as she was. Its eyes opened wide as it accessed her file and, for an instant, it looked like Robert had when he realized he’d said something he shouldn’t have. The ad opened its mouth as if to speak, but Marie hadn’t wanted to know what it was about to say. She’d slammed the door shut.
It turned out later that the malfunction had been semi-common. Marie could have gotten in on a class action lawsuit but, instead, she’d packed up and sold the condo. She’d moved to the cabin shortly afterward, wanting a place that wouldn’t remind her of Robert, who had always loved cities.
All the ads except for one shifted back to their default appearances after Marie returned indoors, but they didn’t go away. She kept her shades down and tried to ignore the tromp-tromp-tromping noises of footsteps outside her house.
The gardens had seen better days.
The most curious thing was that no matter how content she had been with her hermit’s life before, now the ads were outside her door she missed the sound of Robert’s voice. She wished she could hear it again, as long as it wasn’t a haphazard lead-in to a sales pitch.
Marie sat alone on these mornings, extremely alone, now she had the rustling sounds of the ads to remind her.
That was why, on one fine Wednesday afternoon in mid-April, Marie invited an advertisement in the guise of her dead husband inside for lunch.
They sat together at a white table with a blue-checkered tablecloth and a plate of tiny sandwiches inside Marie’s small kitchen. Ad-Robert had attempted to pull her chair out for her, but she would not allow it. She had placed her hammer under her seat before letting the ad in. Even though she didn’t think it was dangerous, Marie thought it best to be prepared. Once they were seated, she poured mint tea for them both.
Marie had cultivated the mint herself, of course.
The ad that looked like Robert smiled dumbly at Marie, and the sunlight that filtered into the room lanced brightly across faintly silvered hair. When it smiled, crow’s feet spread from the crinkled skin around its eyes. Try as the ad might, however, the months without upkeep had so eroded its ability to keep up with its reference recordings of Robert’s inimitable gestures that the resulting attempt looked like a badly choreographed farce.
Marie sipped her tea, watching the ad in silence. It had asked her a leading question, as they’d walked through the front room: something about stock options, which would never draw Marie’s interest, even if stocks or money had meaning anymore. Ads were designed not to speak again until the thread of conversation was taken up by a human. She looked out the kitchen window. Ads still filled the back yard. She wondered if they were sharing her location, like bees dancing to show each other the path to fresh flowers. The ads wandered back and forth through what was left of the pansies.
Marie sighed, and Ad-Robert cocked its head.
Either the conversation lag had been too much for its memory banks, or it parsed the sigh as an answer.
The ad asked, “I mean, I don’t mean to pry, dear… but you have thought about retirement, haven’t you?”
The ad sounded like Robert and, at the same time, sounded like the ad that had spoken to Robert six years before. Marie thought of the hammer under her chair and had to wait to respond because of the sudden thickness in her throat. “Of course I have.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, but at the same time, the question was moot.
Ad-Robert looked down at its tea but did not drink. It held the cup a few inches above the table and let it steam out into the air. “You ought to be buying biotech. I can help you find the right companies.”
Marie said, “I’m sure they’re not in business anymore.”
The ad tried to do one of Robert’s dismissive hand waves, but its wrist motors jerked and the effect was lost. The ad didn’t seem to notice. “Of course they’re still in business!” Its eyes focused on the space above Marie’s left shoulder, as it tried to connect to the Net. Marie was fairly certain that, with the exception of any identification chips she may have, there had never been a wireless connection in a twenty-mile radius.
Marie finished her cup of tea and maneuvered the conversation into a realm she cared for a bit more than imaginary finances. She poured more tea and dumped a spoonful of honey into it. “I’ve been thinking about planting corn soon, but it’s hard to get to a flat patch of ground that isn’t constantly underfoot these days.” She’d heard rumors that some of the ads were able to carry on regular conversations if prompted properly. A few companies had discovered their ads had been held hostage by lonely people for weeks or months on end.
Ad-Robert didn’t move, frozen with what would have been confusion if it had been human.
Marie waited, but the hope she had for a decent conversationalist faded when Ad-Robert only asked, “So, about your retirement?”
Marie had tried to look for survivors a week after the satellite television signals had gone out. She’d loaded up her old pickup truck with water, emergency bandages, and even a few fall vegetables to share with her neighbors.
One eye on the road and the other on the gas gauge, she made her way down the mountain, looking for turnoffs to the isolated cabins of her neighbors. She hadn’t known them well before everything went to shit, but she figured now was a good time to make an exception. It was a beautiful, quiet day. She pulled onto the highway, and no cars passed her in either direction. All the cabins were empty. This confused Marie, since she hadn’t taken the people who lived in them to be the sort who would run for civilization at the first sign of trouble. She supposed she had been wrong about them, for whatever that mattered. Marie filled the back of her pickup truck with canned and dried food from their pantries and tried to ignore the smells that emanated from their closed refrigerators.
She only made it halfway down into the valley before the wind shifted to come up out of the south. She gagged, slammed on the brakes of her truck and pulled over onto the shoulder. Even a few miles away, the collective stench of several hundred thousand bodies, rotting sour in the early September heat, was too much for her.
She couldn’t imagine anyone living closer. Reluctantly, she had turned the truck around and headed back to her house.
Marie couldn’t destroy the ads. She had trouble even thinking of it because, no matter how wrong their gestures, every ad looked too human.
The ad she kept indoors at least pretended to listen to her from time to time. She could almost ignore the outdoor ads, except for when she had to pass from her house to the well, from the well to the garden, or from the garden back to her house. She had given up on her makeshift pump system the second or third time the ads had trampled holes into the hose. She’d forgotten how hard it was to carry water from the well to the garden by hand, and it didn’t help that the ads were always underfoot.
“Get out of the way,” she said, exasperated, when the ads stumbled into her few well-worn paths. Even if the ads were not in her garden, it was hard to get enough water to the plants. Every trip with the bucket took twice as long as it should have.