Maya had a car accident, and she died at the scene. When the funeral was finally over, Ayden was grateful to be able sit down and process the shocking loss he's going through.
Ayden stared at his phone, swiping through the flood of condolence emails with hollow sympathies from acquaintances - too distant to attend the funeral.
He started to type a response to the first one: "Thank you for your kind..." but deleted it. Started again: "We appreciate your..." Delete.
"Half-assed pretentious snobs," Maya would have said. His brilliant, outspoken daughter. He could hear her voice so clearly, adding "At least send a handwritten note, it's basic respect."
A chuckle escaped him, only to transform into a sob. He marked the remaining emails as read. Let them wonder why he never responded.
A banner ad caught his eye: "Keep the conversations alive. Your cherished messages, continued. Try After Word."
Terror gripped him. Had he been speaking his imagined conversations with Maya aloud? No - just his grief-stricken searches leaving digital breadcrumbs for algorithms to follow.
Maya would have railed against such a service. She'd spent her PhD years warning about the commodification of human relationships through technology. But Ayden's engineer's mind had always been fascinated by the advancing capabilities of language models. Not tonight though. Tonight he wanted to rage at the unfairness, to smash every perfectly arranged photo frame that showed her growing up. Instead, he gripped the armrest until his knuckles went white, forcing down memories of weekend hikes through Redwood Park, of teaching her to play chess, of watching her perfect that ridiculous lasagna recipe she'd found on Reddit.
His wife, Evelyn, had been at her computer reading up questionable articles on alternative cancer treatments.
"Dear, did Maya not eat enough garlic, you think? It says here that garlic has been shown to increase the effectiveness of chemo in some patients." Perhaps she wants to assure ourselves that we'd done everything we could? That the next options are already in the realm of the ridiculous?
"Yeah that's ridiculous, dear," Ayden tried to sound reassuring.
"You're right, she's always spamming those fried garlic in her noodles." Evelyn said.
Ayden got up and went over to his wife. He met her eyes and saw tears welling up. He gave her a long hug, one that both of them needed.
In the following few days, he moved through his days on autopilot, basic routines keeping him functioning, his movements as mechanical as their robot vacuum, though more lethargically, and sprinkled with internal echos from Maya.
"Best investment ever, Dad," Maya's voice teased in his mind as he sat on the couch and noticed the clean hardwood. "Even if it is replacing human labor."
These mental conversations fascinated his analytical side. He'd begun thinking of them as his "Maya model" - a prediction engine built from their shared history, just like an AI trained on data. Or rather, AI was built to mirror these very human processes of knowing another soul.
The shower's warm rhythm brought back that advertisement. (Since when had he gotten into the shower?) What training data would such a service need? How accurate could it be?
"Are you seriously considering it?" his internal Maya demanded. "After everything I wrote about digital resurrection?"
"Just keeping tabs on the technology," he thought defensively.
But his body betrayed his interest - lethargy vanishing as he rushed to dress and find his laptop. Heart pounding, he located the website.
"Don't roll in your grave," he whispered to his Maya-model as his fingers moved of their own accord, uploading their entire digital history - texts, emails, her dissertation drafts, their shared code repositories - everything that remained of their relationship rendered as data.