The Midtown Tunnel takes me home. When I’m there, I press buttons on the alarm system. The apartment is dark when I enter, so I say, “Lights on.” And then I say, “Lights dimmer.” And the metal-framed windows come into view. Very slowly, I turn my head this way and that.
The boxes are gone, and so is the watercolor that Jules gave us when we first moved in, which I assured Cyrus, before he had a chance to ask, would be his. Other than that, there is a generalized sense of emptiness, a vague feeling that the space is hollow. Nothing I can quite put my finger on. I tell the TV to turn on Netflix, and I browse through a bunch of options until I retreat to Anne with an E, which is what I watch every night when I am alone. And then I fall asleep in front of the green hills of Prince Edward Island.
* * *
Later that week, Ren and I are reengineering the messaging service. Cyrus wants to turn it into a stand-alone app, and we have a few developers building a prototype. When I check the time, it’s past midnight, and I resign myself to staying over. I do that a lot these days; with the apartment empty, it’s a relief to have somewhere else to be. I’m just about to head to the nap room when the fire alarm goes off. At first no one notices—we all just assume it’s a drill—but after about a minute, people start to take off their headphones and shuffle over to the staircase.
Li Ann appears. She’s holding a mini fire extinguisher in one hand and a hardcover of Michelle Obama’s Becoming in the other. “Why are you all still here? Let’s go.”
“Is it a real fire?” someone asks.
“Of course it’s real. Come on, everyone out.” The devs grab their things and disappear down the stairs. “You stay,” she tells me. I put my hands over my ears. Finally, the alarm stops.
“There’s a man on the roof,” Li Ann says. “He’s got a can of gasoline and a lighter. Says he’s going to set himself on fire.”
In the minute it takes me to assemble this image in my mind, Jules and Gaby appear and the fire alarm starts ringing again.
I lean close to Li Ann and ask, “Is this guy—is he one of ours?”
She puts her hand on my elbow. “We don’t know yet.”
My breathing becomes jagged and loud. “Have you called 911?”
“They’re on their way. They told us to evacuate.”
There’s no way I’m leaving if someone who uses our platform is about to set himself on fire. “But we can’t.”
“I know. There’s a panic room. We can go there.”
“There’s a panic room? Why is there a panic room?”
She makes an irritated gesture which I think means Why wouldn’t there be a panic room? and leads us to the back staircase, down four flights, and then past the hydrotherapy pool and Rory’s lab. The siren continues to rise and rise. Finally, after we go through a maze of corridors, Li Ann taps her keycard and a heavy door slides open. Inside, it looks like a basement living room—there’s a sofa, a rug, a mini fridge, a television, and three desktop computers. The computers look like they’re a few years old, but otherwise everything is clean and new, and there’s even a little basket of snacks on top of the fridge.
Ren and I immediately get the computers online. No one speaks. Gaby makes coffee, and Jules makes the room shrink by pacing back and forth. Li Ann switches on the television. I wonder, for the millionth time, where Cyrus is. We have to tell him.
“Julian, can you call Cyrus?” I ask. I can’t bear to hear his voice right now.
Jules tries Cyrus. There’s no reply. I get on the phone with Charlie, our lawyer. We flip to the news, and so far we aren’t in it, but just as I’m about to tell Charlie everything, the story breaks. I hear the reporter saying, “… young man has posted a message on the WAI platform saying his wife, who died of leukemia last year, has asked to be reunited with him.”
Ren has been sifting through the users. He tells everyone who it is.
“Stephen?” Jules says. “The guy who’s been hanging out on the sidewalk?”
Ren turns his screen toward me, and I see that Stephen has asked the platform for a sati ritual three times, and that the platform has turned him down. Stephen’s profile picture is a man on a beach with his arm around his wife. He has bright green eyes and a big smile.
The Stephen at the door is the same Stephen who asked the platform for the sati ritual. And when the WAI platform said no, Stephen opened an account with AfterLight and asked to speak with his wife. The news is still on, and the reporter is saying something about the virus, how it’s hit the East Coast and that there is going to be a concentration of cases in New York. Everything seems to be falling apart at once.
“We have to delete his account.”
“Already done,” Ren says.
Charlie is still on the phone. “Decide how you’re going to respond. I’m sending Tina Vardalis to your office, and I need you to do exactly what she tells you. She handles these kinds of things.” I want to ask her if a man threatening to set himself on fire because an app sent him text messages from his dead wife is one of these things, but I already know the answer.
I turn to Jules. “Did you get ahold of Cyrus?”
Jules has stopped pacing. He’s on the sofa with his head in his hands. Gaby is stroking his back. “No.”
“Ren and I are going to disable AfterLight—do you agree?”
“I don’t care. Do whatever.” Then he says, “Actually, turn the whole thing off. Obit.ly too.”
I turn off Obit.ly and Afterlight. No one is hearing from dead people anymore.
On the television, there is a grainy image of Stephen on the roof of Utopia. A small figure with his arms outstretched, as if he expects to take flight.
I ask Jules to keep calling Cyrus until he answers. Li Ann tells us that the fire brigade has arrived and that someone is trying to get Stephen to put down his lighter.
I remember whose fault this is. “Where the fuck is Marco?”
“I tried. His phone is off.”
“Fuck that. Fuck him.”
“Asha,” Jules says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“We don’t have time to do this now. Let’s just try to fix it—you need to figure out what you’re going to say to the team.” Ren and I are going through all the chatter on the platform. As the news breaks, people start messaging one another about Stephen. I think maybe we need to get Cyrus online to calm everyone down. Where the hell is Cyrus?
There is a knock on the door. It’s Tina. She’s impeccably coiffed and wearing a white suit as if it’s a decent hour. She introduces herself, sits down beside me, and starts taking notes. “Asha, right? Tell me what’s going on.”
I start to tell her. “We have this service—it uses AI to send messages from people even after they’re dead. This guy Stephen—he was talking—thought he was talking—to his wife.”
She’s looking at me like What kind of fucked-up Internet Frankenstein did you make, sister?
“Then I guess somehow he got the message—not from us, I mean, not directly—that she wanted him to join her.” I show her the conversation between Stephen and his wife.
How could you leave me?
I never left you. I’m right here.
“And now he’s up on the roof?”
“He’s going to set himself on fire.” I explain sati to Tina: “It’s an ancient Hindu ritual. Women sit on the funeral pyres of their husbands so they can be together in their next life. It’s the ultimate sacrifice.”
She inhales sharply. “I deal in worst-case scenarios. So, just for the sake of argument, we have to assume he’s going to do it, and I need you all to be prepared. Can you reach out to your members now, maybe post a message on the site? Something along the lines of We are deeply concerned with the well-being of a member of our community, we have representatives on standby for anyone who is feeling vulnerable, et cetera, et cetera?”
Ren is taking notes. He suggests we ask the team members in Hong Kong, who are already awake, to get a help line together.
“I’m assuming you’ve dealt with all the technical issues,” Tina says.
“We’ve shut down the relevant parts of the platform.”
“You need to tell them why. You need to explain without taking responsibility for the whole thing.”