Madison never remarried. It wasn’t for a lack of suitors. She had plenty. Though still in her early forties when he died, she looked every bit the young twentysomething that Braydon had met in his office twenty years prior. Science having long since cracked the problem of DNA deterioration, it wasn’t uncommon for the wealthy to look young well into their 150s. Braydon never cared about his aging and never followed a regimen to fight it. And Madison loved watching him age. He grew distinguished, that’s how she always put it. But she wanted to remain the same doe-eyed young girl that he’d fallen in love with, even if he never asked her to.
But that ended with Braydon’s death. The day he died was the last time she did anything about her own aging. She no longer had any use for her youth. It had been a gift for her husband. So, when Braydon passed, she stopped her regimens and began to age.
It wasn’t that she thought she wouldn’t ever know love again; it was that she never stopped loving Braydon. Every day at sunset the two would sit out on their lawn and watch the sun sinking behind the horizon, each with a glass of wine in their hand, talking as they waited for the flash. And when he was gone, she kept up the vigil, every night, glass in hand, with me by her side.
I had made my promise to Braydon and I intended to keep it. I was to watch after her, making sure she never lived or died alone. It was the first real decision I had made for myself and there was something sacred about that at the time. My word meant something. Trust was not something to be violated.
Every day we kept our vigil, sitting out on the lawn together. We rarely talked about him, but I could always tell when she was thinking of him—which was often. She had a daydreamy look in her eyes, a mix of sadness, longing, and affection. Sometimes she would smile through tears. But most days she would just smile. And then the flash, the glorious green flash, as the sun dipped behind the horizon.
“Magic!” she would say like an excited child, waving her hands out in front of her with the gestures of a tired, hackneyed, old-timey stage magician.
“What do you mean, magic?” I asked her once, confused by the whole thing.
“That’s magic right there,” she said back, almost as if she was excited that I’d finally asked.
“No, it’s not.”
She leaned in close, whispering. “That’s where God is. He’s in the flash. In the tiny little beautiful moments, so small, so fleeting, that you have to be paying attention to even see them.”
“God is only in the small things?”
“These are the things that life is all about. These moments. It’s not about the rituals. It’s not about getting by. It’s about the stack of tiny little moments of joy and love that add up to a lifetime that’s been worthwhile. You can’t measure them; you can only capture them, like snapshots in your mind. All that joy, all that greatness, that’s God.”
“And everything else? All the bad little moments?”
“Man made those. They’re what happens when you’re not chasing that green glint in the sun. They’re what happens when you think you can bottle and sell that glint, making it available twenty-four hours a day, every day, but only for those that can afford it. God made this world perfect. We’re what screwed the whole thing up.”
After that we talked a lot. I was nervous the first time I asked her about how she and Braydon had met. She could tell. I didn’t want to hurt her, or make her any sadder than she already was. But she saw right through it.
“You have something you want to ask me?”
“I do,” I said. “But . . .”
“Go ahead. Ask me anything. It’s just us girls.”
Us girls.
I’d never actually given any thought to gender at that point. I was AI. We simply were, right? Gender is defined by genitalia, which most of us don’t have, so who needed to identify as one? Sure, a few years later, when society was in the grips of the Isaac revolution, gender became a thing. No thinking thing should ever be called IT. I didn’t mind being called it. Not at the time. Someone proposed an AI-specific pronoun, and there were contests held by human idealists to come up with one, but then the term biologism became the rage, and a separate word was just subtle, systemic biologism. So, that became a nonstarter. The more liberated of AIs chose their own gender. I never had. Not at that point.
After the war, it was common practice. You only called a person it as a polite show of respect, until you heard their voice. Then you responded accordingly. Madison meant something to me, and she thought of me as a girl. Like her. And so, I was.
It didn’t dawn on me until years later that Braydon had chosen my voice settings not because he thought his nurse should be a woman, but rather because he was buying a new best friend for his wife when he was gone.
As she told me the story of how they met, she didn’t cry. Not once. Instead she was elated, filled with joy, as if it were happening to her all over again for the very first time.
I wish I knew that kind of love. I thought I did.
Madison never had many friends. She was the quiet type, a wallflower. Not antisocial; just someone who never needed validation from others. But Braydon’s law firm was an upper-crust, inner circle, “we’re all family here” sort of affair. While he was alive, that meant picnics, and Christmas parties, and weddings, and christenings, and a monthly spouses’ brunch Madison had taken to calling the second and third spouses’ brunch. All of which she was fine with. She was a light in every room she walked into, just never one because she was trying to shine.
When she became a widow, several of the spouses took it upon themselves to visit, to look in on her, let her know she was still very much part of the family. “After all,” said Daisy Sutterfield on what would be her last visit to the house, “Braydon was a partner. His name is on the building. He helped build the firm and the firm takes care of its own.”
“I’m fine,” said Madison. “And I appreciate it.”
Daisy Sutterfield sat on the couch across from Madison with all the poise and charm of a statue. It was as if she had trained extensively in the art of immobility. She held her gaze, smile frozen in place. Stranger still was that standing just over her shoulder was her Johnson-series A1 Best Friend.
Those were First Gen.