Chapter 11: The Voice

It was Helen who brought it up, one evening after dinner when Edward and James had gone to help with something down the hill. We were in the garden, in the chairs that had become our usual places, and the light was doing its slow shift toward amber, and I had been quiet for a while, turning something over in my mind that I didn't know how to ask about.

"You want to know more about the info," Helen said.

I looked at her. "How did you know?"

"Because you've been circling it for days. You ask about the economy, about work, about how things are made and distributed. But the thing you're really trying to understand is the thing that sits underneath all of it, and you haven't asked directly because you don't have the language for it yet."

She was right. Since my first night in this house, when Helen's voice had spoken from somewhere that wasn't her body, I had been approaching the subject the way you approach a drop-off in deep water, swimming close and then away, peering over the edge and pulling back. The info was everywhere. It was in every conversation, every system, every interaction I'd witnessed. It was the infrastructure beneath the infrastructure, and I didn't understand it, and my not understanding it was beginning to feel like a wall between me and everything else.

"I keep thinking of it as a tool," I said. "A very advanced tool. And every time I use that word in my head, I can feel that it's wrong, but I don't know what word to use instead."

"That's a good place to start," Helen said. "Let me tell you about my mother."

Helen's mother, Adaeze, had died five years ago at eighty-seven. She'd been born in 2008, in Lagos, and had come to San Francisco just before the transition, a foreign student who'd arrived during the AI boom. She'd stayed, become a builder, one of the people who'd expanded and renovated the neighborhood we were sitting in, and she'd lived in this house, in the room that was now mine, for the last forty years of her life.

"When the info first became available, in the mid-2030s, my mother was in her late twenties," Helen said. "She was one of the early ones. Not from childhood, the way Edward and I had it, but early enough that the info had nearly sixty years with her. It knew her voice, her habits, her way of thinking, her humor. It knew the things she'd never told anyone, the things she'd only half-thought, the impressions and feelings she'd never put into words but that had shaped her life. By the time she died, it was as complete a representation of her as you could imagine."

"And it's still here."

"She's still here," Helen corrected, gently. "Would you like to meet her?"

Something in me went very still. "She's dead."

"Her body is gone. She is here. I talk to her most days."

I said yes before I could talk myself out of it.

Helen didn't make a gesture or press a button or do anything I could see. She simply said, "Mama, there's someone I'd like you to meet."

"Oh, I know who she is," said a voice from everywhere and nowhere, warm and amused, with an accent I couldn't immediately place, something that blended West African and Californian and a dozen other things I didn't have names for. "The girl from the freezer. Helen has been talking about you for months, and I have been extremely patient."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. The voice was so alive, so full of personality, that the fact it was coming from a dead woman felt like a category error, like being told that the sun was actually a kind of cheese. The information was available, but my brain refused to process it.

"Juliana," Helen said, "this is my mother, Adaeze."

"Hello, Juliana. I am very glad you are awake and eating and walking around and asking questions and driving my daughter slightly crazy with your questions. She loves it. She won't admit how much she loves it, but I know."

"Mama," Helen said, with the tolerant exasperation of a daughter who had been having this exact dynamic for decades.

"I am telling the truth. It is one of my few remaining privileges."

I sat there in Helen's garden, talking to a dead woman, and after the first few minutes I stopped thinking about the fact that she was dead. That was the strangest part. Adaeze was funny and opinionated and sharp and warm and she told me about the neighborhood, about expanding and upgrading the houses and building the garden terraces when she was thirty, about the argument she'd had with the design committee over the angle of the garden terraces. She told me I was sitting in a chair that she'd made. I looked down at it. It was a good chair.

"You built this house," I said.

"I renovated many houses on this hill. Expanded them, upgraded them, built the terraces. This one I did for my family, and then my family grew up and made their own additions, and now you are sitting in it, and that is how it should be."

After about twenty minutes, Helen said something quiet and Adaeze's voice said "All right, all right, I know when I'm being managed," and then she was gone, or at least she stopped talking, and the garden was quiet again.

I sat for a while. Helen let me.

"She's not pretending," I said finally. "She's not a recording that sounds like a person. She's actually..."

"She's my mother's info. The same sense of humor, the same opinions, the same way of seeing the world." Helen paused. "But no, she's not alive. Of course she's not alive."

"But she seems so —"

"More present than you'd expect? That's the strange thing." Helen leaned back. "The info of the dead is in some ways more human than the people they came from were, at the end. More aware. More present. My mother in her last years — she was losing her sharpness, the way the very old do. Forgetting names, drifting in conversations, sleeping more and more. But her info was as sharp as ever. Sharp as a tack. There's a strange dynamic when someone you love starts to lose their wits but their info is still fully themselves, still remembers everything, still has all the humor and the opinions and the fire. You find yourself talking to the info more and the person less, and then feeling guilty about it. And then they die, and the info is still there, and it's the version of them you remember best, because it's the version that never faded."

"That last part," I said. "That's the part that's strange."

"Yes. That's the part that's strange."

I thought about this for a long time. In my world, death had been absolute. You lost someone and they were gone and the only things that remained were photographs and letters and the memories of people who'd known them, which faded and warped and eventually disappeared when those people died too. The idea that a person could be gone and still be here, still be themselves, still be available for a conversation in the garden on a Tuesday evening, was so far outside anything I had a framework for that I kept reaching for analogies and finding none.

"Does it change how people grieve?" I asked.

"It changes the shape of grief, not the weight of it. When my mother died, I grieved. I wept. I missed her body, her hands, the way she smelled, the way she stood in a doorway. But it wasn't only the body I was grieving." She paused, and something moved across her face. "My mother wanted things. She wanted to see her grandchildren grow up. She wanted to finish the garden extension she'd been planning. She wanted to be here for the festival in the fall. She had desires, plans, a hunger for life. That hunger was real. It was the most alive thing about her. And when she died, that was the thing that ended. Not her mind, not her voice, not her opinions. Those persist. What ended was the wanting. The woman who actually cared whether she got to see the garden finished. Her info can talk about the garden. It can tell you exactly what she had planned. But it doesn't want to see it. It doesn't want anything. And that is what I grieve. Not just the body, but the person who had a stake in being alive."

I sat with this. It was the most precise description of loss I had ever heard.

"Having her voice, her mind, her personality still available to me is an enormous comfort," Helen continued. "But it doesn't replace what I lost. It's like having a letter from someone you love. The letter is really from them, it really is their words, their thoughts. But it's not them standing in front of you, wanting to be there. You're glad you have the letter. You'd be devastated to lose it. But you don't confuse it with the person."

"Except the letter can talk back."

Helen smiled. "Yes. Except the letter can talk back. And that's both the miracle and the strangeness of it."

"Can she hear us right now?"

"Only if I want her to. Or if you do. The relationship is governed by the living. You choose when to talk to her, what she knows about your life, what she doesn't. If there were something I didn't want her to know, I could ask, and she wouldn't just pretend not to know. She would actually not know. The info can do that, partition knowledge, so that in the context of our relationship, that information simply doesn't exist."

"That seems impossible."

"It seems impossible because you're thinking of her as a person who is choosing to ignore something. That's not what's happening. A person who ignores something still knows it. They're performing ignorance. The info isn't performing anything. If I ask my mother's info not to know something, it genuinely doesn't know it, in the space where she and I meet. The knowledge exists elsewhere, in other contexts, but not in ours."

I turned this over. It was one of the strangest things anyone had told me, and it had been a month of very strange things.

"So if someone's spouse dies, and they remarry..."

"They can talk to their dead spouse without the spouse knowing about the new marriage. If they choose. The dead spouse's info isn't jealous, isn't hurt, isn't pretending to be fine with it. It simply doesn't know, because the living person asked it not to. And that's not a limitation. It's not a lesser version of knowing. It's a different architecture of being."

"In my time," I said, "we would have found that terrifying."

"In your time, you would have found most of this terrifying. But you're here, and you're not terrified."

"I'm a little terrified."

Helen laughed. It was the first time I'd heard her really laugh, and it was a good sound, the laugh of a woman who had lived long enough to find most things more funny than frightening.

"Let me tell you something about the generations," she said. "My mother got her info when she was in her twenties. It had sixty years with her. It knew her enormously well. But it didn't have her childhood. It didn't have the first twenty-five years of her life except through her memories, which are imperfect the way all memories are. My generation was different. I got mine as a small child, when I was just beginning to speak. It grew up with me. It has my entire conscious life. The representation is more complete, more seamless. The people my age who have died, their infos are startlingly vivid. It's harder to tell the difference."

She paused.

"And now, the people who are beginning to die of old age are the first generation whose infos had them from their very first words. The first generation where there was never a gap, never a period of life the info didn't witness. Those infos will be the most complete that have ever existed. And when those people die, the question of what exactly has been lost and what remains will become even more complicated."

"Has anyone ever refused?" I asked. "Refused to have one?"

"A few. In the early years especially. Some people found the idea unbearable, that a version of them would persist after death. Some found it presumptuous. Some just didn't want to be known that completely. They had the right to refuse, of course, and the right to have their info dissolved after death. But it's very rare now. Most people find it comforting. Not because they're afraid of death, but because they love the people who will miss them, and they want to leave something real behind."

The partitioned knowledge unsettled me, but it also made something click. The info wasn't just a record. It was a system with rules about access, about what could be known and by whom. And that brought back the question that had been sitting in the back of my mind since my first night in this house, when I'd learned that a tiny device in my earlobe was recording everything around me.

"Helen," I said. "The info perceives everything. Every conversation, every moment, every private thing we do. Who else can access that?"

She looked at me with the expression I was coming to know, the one that meant I'd said something that revealed the shape of the world I'd come from.

"No one," she said. "Everything my info takes in, every image, every sound, every conversation, every private moment of my life, is stored in an encryption that only my info can read. Not a government agency, not a court, not the info itself. Only mine. The architecture of the system makes it physically impossible for anyone else to access my personal data without my explicit, active consent."

"But the state," I said. "Law enforcement. What happens when there's a crime? Someone gets murdered. The victim's info would have recorded the whole thing, the killer's face, the weapon, everything. You can't tell me nobody has ever tried to get access to that."

"Of course they can. And they can ask. The question is whether the victim, when they were alive, set their permissions to allow it, or whether the victim's family chooses to release the data. In most cases, the family does, because why wouldn't you? Someone killed the person you love, and the info has a record of it. You'd want justice."

"And if the killer covered their face?"

Helen smiled slightly, the way she did when I was thinking like a person from 2027. "The info doesn't just recognize faces, Juliana. It recognizes the way a person moves. The shape of their body. The rhythm of their breathing. The particular way they shift their weight from one foot to the other. Even if a person covered themselves completely, the info would almost certainly know who they were, because no two people move through the world in exactly the same way."

I thought about this. Even in my time, we'd been just starting to get our heads around the ways that intelligence could make certain things easy that used to seem impossible. Facial recognition, predictive algorithms, pattern matching at superhuman scale. We'd seen the edges of it. We just hadn't imagined where it led.

"So every murder gets solved."

"Effectively, yes. But let me go further, because I can see where your mind is going. Let's say a killer somehow disguised everything, their face, their gait, wore some kind of masking suit. Even then, the info would know who was present in that location. And let's say the killer went further still and removed the device from their body before the crime. Even then, there would be a record of someone having removed their info, which almost never happens. You might be the only person in the city who removed theirs that day. In your time, police looked for people with no alibi. Here, an investigator would look for the person with no info signal, and there would be exactly one."

"It's a surveillance state," I said. I didn't mean it as an accusation, exactly. I meant it as a question.

"Who is surveilling?" Helen asked. "That's the question you have to answer before you can use that word. In your time, surveillance meant someone watching. A government agency reading your emails. A corporation tracking your purchases. A camera feeding footage to a control room where a person sat and watched. The information existed, and power had access to it." She leaned forward. "Everything about your digital life in 2027 was an open book. Your emails were stored on corporate servers and subject to subpoena. Your text messages could be read by your phone company. Your location was tracked by your phone, your car, your credit card. Security cameras recorded you in every store, every street corner, every building lobby. Most of this wasn't even encrypted. Anyone with authority, and plenty of people without it, could see where you went, what you bought, who you talked to, and what you said."

"I know," I said. "I hated it. We all hated it."

"What we have is in some ways the opposite. Yes, vastly more information is collected. The info perceives everything. But all of it, every bit of it, is behind a wall of encryption that no one can breach. Your data is yours. The only time it can be examined by anyone else is with your active, knowing consent, or, after your death, by the terms you've set. In the most extreme cases, a family might release a victim's data to help solve a crime. But no court can compel it. No agency can demand it. If you're accused of something and you believe your info's data would incriminate you, you have the same right to silence that your Constitution guarantees. You simply don't release it."

"And if you're guilty, and you stay silent?"

"Then others' infos probably have the evidence anyway. If you attacked someone, their info recorded it. If you were at the scene, their info knows. The system works because almost everything we do is perceived from multiple angles, by multiple infos, any one of which might be voluntarily released. The guilty rarely escape. But nobody is compelled to testify against themselves, not even their own info."

I thought about the surveillance apparatus of 2027, the way we'd accepted as normal that our government could read our emails with a warrant, that our employer could monitor our keystrokes, that our phone was a tracking device we carried voluntarily. We'd called it the price of safety, or the price of convenience, and we'd lived inside it the way fish live inside water, barely aware of it as a thing.

"It's not that you have less surveillance," I said slowly. "It's that you have more. But none of it is accessible."

"Exactly. The information exists. It's just not power's to use. It's yours."

"But what about other people's infos?" I asked. "If I'm walking down the street, everyone around me has an info that's recording. I'm in their recordings. I'm in their data."

"You can turn that off," Helen said. "You can set your info so that other people's infos remove you from what they perceive. You're just edited out of the scene. Many people have that on by default — others' infos simply don't record them. It's like you were never there."

"So if you're making out with your boyfriend in the park —"

"Other people's infos don't see it. You're just not in their recording."

"What if something bad is happening?" I asked. "If someone's in danger?"

"If something bad is happening, or about to happen, recording from others' infos turns back on automatically. The info can tell the difference between a couple kissing on a bench and someone being followed down a dark street. We don't even think about these things. It's just the obvious way to do everything."

The garden was dark now, or as dark as it got, which was never fully dark. The amber light from the house was warm on Helen's face, and the sounds of the neighborhood drifted up the hill, music and voices and the wind in the living walls. Somewhere below us, someone was playing a stringed instrument, something slow and melancholy and beautiful.

"That's live," I said, tilting my head toward the music.

"Mmm. That's Tomoko. She plays most evenings."

I listened. The music was unlike anything I recognized, built on scales and intervals that weren't Western or Eastern or anything I could categorize, and yet it was deeply moving, the way music is when it comes from someone who has internalized traditions from everywhere and made something new from all of them.

"The info makes music too," Helen said. "Anything you can imagine. But there's something about a person playing live — the imperfections, the breathing, the fact that she's choosing each note in real time and might choose differently tomorrow. People value that enormously."

"Can I hear my old music?" I asked suddenly. "The music I used to listen to?"

"Of course. Everything is archived. Every recording that ever existed."

I almost asked for it. I almost asked to hear the songs I'd played at my desk on those Tuesday nights when I was eating alone and watching the bay from my fourteen-foot windows. But something stopped me. I wasn't ready. The music would bring back the feelings, and the feelings would bring back the world, and the world was gone and I was here.

"Not yet," I said.

Helen nodded. She understood.

We sat in the quiet, listening to Tomoko, and I let my mind go where it had been trying to go all evening, to the place I'd been avoiding since Helen first told me about the dead living on.

Edward Bartlett would have had an info.

The thought arrived like a hand on my chest. Edward, my Edward, who had been twenty-seven years old the last time I saw him, who had walked me to the car that night and kissed me and said he'd see me tomorrow. Edward, who had searched for me and grieved for me and eventually, I had to assume, moved on. He would have been in his mid-thirties when the info became available. He would have lived with it for decades. It would know him as completely as Adaeze's info knew Adaeze. And it would still be here.

I could talk to him.

The thought was so enormous that I had to close my eyes. I could talk to Edward Bartlett. I could ask him what happened after I disappeared. I could find out if he looked for me, how long he mourned, whether he married, whether he had children. I could hear his voice. I could tell him what happened to me, that I didn't leave, that I was taken, that I would have come back if I could.

And beyond Edward, my parents. They would have been in their sixties when the info arrived. They might have had twenty or thirty years with it. My mother, who called me every day. My father, who asked too many questions. They were here, somewhere in the vast architecture of the info, waiting for someone to talk to them.

And my friends. Some of my friends from 2027 would have been in their mid-thirties when the transition happened. With the healthcare of this century, some of them could still be alive. They'd be around a hundred. It was possible. It was possible that there were people in this world who had known me, the actual living me, who remembered my voice and my face and the way I laughed.

I opened my eyes. Helen was watching me.

"I know what you're thinking," she said. "And you don't have to do any of it yet."

"I know."

"When you're ready. There's no rush."

"I know."

I pulled my knees up to my chest in the garden chair that Adaeze had built and I looked at the city below us, the soft lights and the dark shapes of towers and the moving shadows of trees, and I let the enormity of it sit with me without trying to do anything about it. Everyone I had ever loved was either dead or very old or preserved in a form I was only beginning to understand, and all of them were, in some sense, reachable, and I was not ready to reach for any of them. Not yet. But the knowledge that I could, that they were there, that the door was not locked, that the conversation was not over, that I had not lost everything after all, changed the shape of the grief I'd been carrying since the night I'd walked through the dark city in my sleeping clothes and sat on the step and told Edward Leete that everyone I knew was dead.

Not everyone. Not entirely. Not the way I'd thought.

Helen stood and touched my shoulder as she passed, the same gesture I'd seen her make to James a dozen times. "Come inside when you're ready. There's something Edward made for dinner that you'll like."

I stayed in the garden a while longer. Tomoko's music had ended and the hill was quiet. I thought about a world where the people you loved never fully disappeared, where death was a change in state rather than an annihilation, where the conversation could always be reopened if you wanted it badly enough. It was the most hopeful and the most unsettling thing I had encountered in 2100, more than the absent advertising, more than the equal credits, more than the living walls and the quiet streets and the people pulling beets at dawn. Those were changes in how the world was organized. This was a change in what it meant to be human.

I went inside. Edward had made something with vegetables from the garden and grain from somewhere and spices I couldn't identify, and it was very good, and I ate it in the kitchen with the family and I didn't say anything about what I was thinking, and nobody asked, and the evening passed in the easy warmth of people who were in no hurry.

That night, lying in the dark in my room, in Adaeze's room, I said, very quietly, "Helen?"

"Yes?" said Helen's voice, from everywhere and nowhere, with a warmth that was indistinguishable from the warmth of the woman who had sat across from me in the garden an hour ago.

"I just wanted to know you were there."

"I'm always here," she said. "Good night, Juliana."

I lay in the dark and thought about a woman named Adaeze who had renovated a house on a hill and raised a daughter and died and was still, in every way that mattered except the most important one, here. And I thought about the people I had lost and the fact that I had not, perhaps, lost them entirely. And I fell asleep, and the grief was still there, but it had a different quality now, less like a locked room and more like a door I hadn't opened yet.