Steal Back the Ghost From the Machine

by Talia Lavin

I lost someone I loved two years ago and I miss her dearly. She was old and there is often a sense that if someone is old their loss, because it is more expected, is more acceptable; in the obituary there is only the death age and there is no other explanation. But her accumulation of years and experience only made her all the more valuable to me: how with half a century of gardens she could instruct me in cultivating my small new one; how she could tell me about the repartee she’d traded with authors now dead; how portraits of her, painted in the full black-haired beauty of her youth, adorned her house; and how that house was a place of treasures from decades past, cookbooks and pitchers and figurines and papier-mache masks on the walls.

She grew old and she was in pain but the disease in her blood was still a quick-handed thief, and stole a huge spirit that never dimmed. Two years on I do not approve, as Edna St. Vincent Millay said, I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the cold ground. It’s incredible and cruel that someone you love can simply be gone for the rest of your life. That you will never hear a word from them again. 

There are any number of companies looking to profit off this eternal conundrum by offering digital simulacra of the lost. Companies like Eternos, Project December, Replika, Seance AI, and HereAfter AI purport to preserve a loved one, artificially continue that forever-stilled conversation. So much money has been made from the human drive of eros that the question of huge profits from the equally universal fear of death and the sensation of loss comes naturally. In this age of digital ghouls, the answer is, of course, why not?