by Nicholas Conley
Recreating dead people is a complex process. The little details often get skewed. Mason’s software could usually whip up living dead folks with the skill and flair of an experienced barista, but not this time.
It was 2 AM. Mason had chugged too many energy drinks, rendering him so wired that he felt like he had injected 800 milligrams of liquid insomnia. Figures that I’m having a hard time with this project, he thought. That’s why I put it off for so long. Over the past four years, Mason had recreated 643 walking, talking holograms of dead people—the trademarked name was “Lyfers” —as the lead designer of LyfeVisions, a Silicon Valley startup whose patented holographic technology had been featured on everything from the New York Times to Vox. Throughout all those years of working on other dead people, though, he’d always known that this one was going to be his white whale—because while his other Lyfers were strangers, Janice Fletcher had been his favorite aunt.
Mason gazed, dead-eyed, at the touchscreen. He couldn’t figure out what looked wrong about Aunt Janice’s face. She totally wouldn’t approve of this. Mason could almost hear her lecturing him, ranting about how, “All this technology is what’s ruining the world, junior.” Mason had heard such platitudes a million times, because Aunt Janice had raised him since he was in diapers. In a real way, Janice was the closest he’d ever had to a mom. That’s why I need her back… at least, a Lyfer version of her.
Tears stung his eyes. He traced his finger down Janice’s digital cheekbone, to broaden her chin. He deleted her chin dimple and redrew it. He pinched up her smile. She was always laughing, whether something was funny or not. For the holographic backdrop, he sketched out the old farmhouse, where she’d lived until those last few rounds of chemo sent her to the hospital. She had spent her last weeks skeletal, pumped full of chemicals, with skin that resembled a popped water balloon.
Mason shuddered. I can’t let that memory mold the Lyfer. Glancing down at his phone, he examined a fifteen-year-old photo of her sitting on the porch with a toothy grin. Usually, Mason avoided photographs when building Lyfers—customers wanted their living dead to feel like their memories, with perfect smiles and no blemishes, instead of being truly accurate—but the photo seemed like his only way to prevent the cancer memories from infecting this new version.
Mason repositioned the model. Time to take this Lyfer off the screen. Do a live test. Check for bugs.
He pressed the DEMO key. The empty stage before him flashed white. Hazy outlines of a porch drew themselves. Multicolored pixels turned into a moving lookalike of Aunt Janice. As her mouth went from outlines to lips, she exclaimed, “Hey, Mason!”
Tingles went down Mason’s spine. “Oh, man. I’m so not ready for this.”
Aunt Janice released the full, hearty laugh that cancer had turned into a pitiful rasp. “Junior, look at that sunset out there!” She cocked her head a little, like she always had before. Mason didn’t say anything aloud—she wasn’t yet programmed to “hear” his responses, anyway—but he felt the inexplicable urge to hug her, as if she were made of more than laser light particles.
“Thunderstruck, eh?” she chuckled.
He teared up. God, I’ve missed her. Seeing her on the porch from his memories—in real life, that farmhouse had been bulldozed two years ago—reminded him of his childhood, sitting beneath an unpolluted, starry sky, as Aunt Janice told him crazy stories from her youth. Mason smiled, overwhelmed with emotion. He slid his chair over to the staff fridge and popped open a beer. “This one’s for you, Aunt Janice!” He raised it. “May you—”
He stopped, as a cold tapeworm of doubt wriggled up his stomach and clenched his heart. Wait. Looking at the bottle, then back at the Lyfer, he could no longer ignore the part of Aunt Janice that he’d forgotten to include. Except it wasn’t a mistake, was it? He knew that. He’d left it out because he didn’t like it.
Beer. He took a morose sip. Aunt Janice was always drinking beer.
Mason drew a bottle into her hand—then erased it, feeling sick. Is it even still her without it? She had started every morning with a beer. Every birthday of his life had ended with her trashed. Her drunken tirades had driven away countless guests. When he’d given her eulogy, he’d left that part out then, too.
“Check out this swell sunset!” Janice pointed her imaginary finger at an imaginary sky. Mason wanted to vomit. If you were the real Aunt Janice, you’d be drunk by sunset. That’s why her nighttime stories were so crazy, and why when he’d gotten older, those stories had sounded like the inebriated exaggerations they were. When he was a teenager, she cussed him out for coming home late, saying that raising her dead sister’s “no-good kid” had ruined her life. She’d been homophobic. Racist, even if she denied it. Judgmental. She’d never gone to his lacrosse games. All these things which Mason’s subconscious had carefully masked from his memories came flooding back, as he watched the sanitized hologram before him.
He still loved her. She was like my mom. The closest I ever had. But seeing her there, without the beer, he wasn’t sure who he was looking at it. He closed his eyes and remembered the real Janice on her deathbed. She’d been weak. Emaciated. Straining to breathe. Then, she’d stopped breathing, her lips went blue, and her jaw went slack. He’d squeezed her cold hand until she stopped squeezing back.
Mason swiped the touchscreen. The hologram went into the trash. Hours of work disappeared. Choking back on tears, he glanced at the old picture of Aunt J on his phone. For now, the photo was enough.
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