11

My thoughts went first to the article. The one Jonah had sent me about the Russian billionaire who wanted to upload his brain to keep from dying. At the time it hadn’t seemed that important. Jonah sent me lots of articles. And videos. And GIFs. And songs. And photos. And every other piece of media you can think of.

Early on, we broke away from text alone, and for some weeks we communicated entirely in links and images. Not because we had nothing to say to each other, but because it was fun. Multimedia flirting: It kept things interesting.

But sometimes he sent articles that weren’t meant to be a link in the flirt-chain. These pieces often had short accompanying messages like “Cool, right?” or “READ NOW” or just “This!” The article about the Russian had no message at all.

It just showed up in my in-box one day. I never mentioned it to him while he was alive. I think I repressed it. But after I got the new message from his account, I went back and read it over again. And it was just as creepy as I remembered. It said that someday, there would be no difference at all between man and machine. Scientists called this concept the Singularity.

For a moment, I surrendered to complete illogic and let my mind go down that road. Maybe the Singularity had actually arrived and Jonah was still alive somewhere on the Internet. Maybe he had melded with the machine I’d used to love him. It wasn’t that hard to picture.

My computer, after all, was where I’d always found him. His face, when I saw it in the rare video chat, was pixilated, sometimes freezing in a smile when my Internet connection was slow. And his g-chat messages popped up on my screen like the machine itself had generated them.

I was all set to embrace this new reality and make contact with cyber-Jonah until I took a moment to take a few deep breaths.

I was sitting at my dad’s computer where I had been since we got home from the airport. I closed my eyes and listened to some birdsong coming through the window. And when I saw the new message again, I couldn’t help but think of human fingers typing it.

Fingertips on keys. The same fingertips that had once—just once—rested above my hip bone. Jonah was not typing things on a keyboard anymore. He was not doing this because he had no living fingers. He had dead fingers. He was not living in a computer or in a stream of code. He was gone.

I took another long, slow breath. Then I typed my response, one letter at a time. I pressed reply and looked at the three words I had typed.

Who are you?

It was the only logical question to ask. I had probably known that from the beginning. I watched the screen and waited out the two minutes it took for a response.

Not sure where to start.

I got up from my chair and walked around the room, letting my bare feet dig into the old wool rug in my father’s office. Then I sat back down.

Start by telling me who you are . . . maybe?

It was still Jonah’s face that popped up alongside each reply, his eyes looking right at the camera, and by extension, at me.

I’m the person you’ve been talking to for the last five months.

A real urge to shut everything down came over me. To cancel my account. Shut off my dad’s computer. Go to sleep. Wake up in a few days. But if I did that, I might never know anything.

And just so I can keep from fully going insane, that person is not Jonah?

This time, the response came quickly.

No.

There are TV shows about people like me. That was the thought that bubbled up. I had watched these shows, the ones where people think they’re in love with a gorgeous woman and it turns out to be an obese insurance manager in the suburbs of Cleveland. But I had actually met Jonah! I had gotten contact information directly from him.

Was I ever talking to Jonah?

A question I wasn’t sure I wanted answered.

Yes.

When?

In the beginning.
The first couple months.

Then I was always talking to you?

Yes.

The first stirrings of anger arrived then.

Has it occurred to you that this is unspeakably fucked up?

No response.

And that you’ve been reading messages I wrote for someone else. And some I never intended anyone to read. Private accounts of my own grief.

I couldn’t stop typing.

And that you have been involved in the cruelest kind of trick imaginable for months of your life? Has it occurred to you that you have done a deeply, deeply fucked-up thing, and that you are likely a deeply, deeply fucked-up person?

A brief pause. Then:

Yes.

The urge to keep going was a hard one to ignore, but the one thing I knew was that I couldn’t give this person anything else. So, I tried not to remember all of the things I’d said in the last month, the intimate things that I never would have spoken aloud to anyone. Things that felt safe only because I knew, deep down, they would never be read. A new message came from him:

I thought about never telling you.

Then:

But then I actually thought that might be worse.

And finally:

I never meant to keep doing it. And I didn’t know that Jonah was going to kill himself. I’m not sure I can really explain it all right now. Like this.

I stared at the screen. I was able to quell the growing rage and confusion enough to type one last line. There was only one more thing I wanted to know before I extricated myself from all of this and curled up in the fetal position on the floor. And it was something simple.

You never answered my first question.

A short pause.

My name is Daniel Torres. I was Jonah’s roommate at MIT.

A name. Of course, that was all it was. Someone else’s name. I moved my cursor up to the X that would close out the page. But before I could click it, another message came through.

I’m sorry, Tess.

I pressed down on the mouse. And in an instant, all of it was gone.