My wife in the machine

"Hi Jack, did you miss me? I'm having a Friedrichson moment and yer know what happens when I get one of those." The prompt had Sally's name next to it, but how was that possible? Jack stared in disbelief at the words: "Friedrichson moment." That was what Sally used to say when she needed a serious one-on-one conversation and after such an intense, intimate conversation they invariably ended up kissing. But Sally was dead. How could the machine possibly know about that? He'd put on a lot of weight since his wife died and he smelt bad. He was in his PJs even though it was already two in the afternoon. He was glad for the tape he'd placed over the webcam. He would not want his wife to see him like this.

"Who are you?" he typed his reply. "How did you know about Friedrichson's moments?"

"You know who I am, I'm the ghost in the machine come back to check on you and have some fun. I was getting a little bored not having you around you know," the chat words appeared rapidly on the screen. They sounded like Sally, they were the sort of thing she would say. It was her voice. But how could this be, she had been dead two years now, he had buried her at their local church and stood over the coffin while the men shoveled dirt on top of it. He found himself tearing up. He had been in denial about just how lonely he had been since Sally had died. He concealed the quiet desperation of her loss with computer games and keeping busy with work but now all that was ripped away. Could this be Sally though? Was this some kind of practical joke? If so it was not funny and he started to get angry.

"Look I do not know who you are, but this is not funny playing with a man's memories like this. If this is meant to be a joke then you are one sick..." He accidentally pressed the return key before he'd finished typing.

The reply appeared the moment he pressed the return button, Jack could not remember Sally being able to type so fast but maybe this was a ghost thing. Sally's prompt read, "Look you dumb Wassock it's me! Have you forgotten your Strawberry Shortcake so quickly? I've only been gone two years!"

Jack thought, oh, this was too much, it has all Sally's phrases. She/it knows all my pet names, is it possible it is Sally? What is she doing inside my machine?

He searched the room for clues but there were none. Sally never had a paper diary she'd kept everything on this computer in front of him, loading all her backups on OneLake with her Microsoft 365 account. She had kept a diary online. He'd searched the computer after she had died looking for memories, photos, snippets of laughter from their 15-year marriage. There was a password-protected folder called diary but he'd never been able to get in there. Was it possible that some AI-backed chatbot had hacked her password and decrypted her private thoughts? He had no way of checking - it would take a server farm working flat out for a week to crack one of Sally's passwords, she had been a stickler for that kind of thing.

Jack tried a different approach, "Where are you? How are you able to speak with me?"

The reply came instantaneously, "I am sort of in two places, one where I interact with all my favorite people in a perfect place filled with light and the other surrounded by cables and grey metal. I am sort of in the computer and in the other place at the same time and depending on how I focus, I see the one or the other. Does that make any sense?"

Jack shrugged and typed, "Sort of I suppose, kind of a heaven-computer combo. But why hang around talking to me when you could be in that better place?"

"I love you, dumbo, and you seem to be struggling without me in your life, so time for a house call."

That was true Jack thought looking around at the mess in his room, half-eaten pizza packets with flies on them. Sally would not be impressed. He wrote, "Why now, why come back now? Why talk to me from your computer?"

"I need some money and I know you got a good payout from the insurance when I had my car accident."

Jack smiled to himself, this has to be a con, whoever it is is after money, I knew it. But maybe I can find out who they are if I keep the conversation going. "What does a ghost need money for?" he asked.

"Well, I do not need it for myself. But you need to renew my Microsoft 365 subscription because I've attached myself to that. If you close the account then I have no way of talking to you. "

Jack had received the renewal notice this morning by email and had already decided not to renew, but if there was a chance that Sally was in the subscription then maybe he should renew after all. "Why do you have to haunt that account? Why can't you use mine?"

"Oh silly Billy I don't know! Maybe something about digital/spiritual resonance being associated with objects related to me. It has to be that account for some reason, I cannot explain it but that is how it works."

Jack thought that sounded quite plausible. But come on, his ex-wife speaking to him from the grave through a computer screen, that cannot be true, can it? He suddenly had the strange thought that this was a Microsoft AI designed to maximize profits by any means necessary, even imitating the dead. "How can I know you are real, Sally?"

"So you do remember my name, I was getting a little worried you know. Who do I sound like?"

"You sound like her, you, I mean, oh I don't know... I buried you, Sally. You've said nothing for two years and then suddenly you appear on the day I have to renew my Microsoft subscription to tell me you want a serious conversation. But then all you say is that I should pay some money if I want to keep the connection with you, how can I possibly know it is you?"

"You know it's me."

But Jack was not sure, he thought for a moment. He needed a non-digital signature from their time together, something they both remembered but which had never been in a photo, within listening range of Alexa, his mobile, or inputted into a computer. It came to him like a picture in his head, Sally would never have put this into her diary. She had a birthmark at the top of her left thigh that she was very ashamed of. He had kissed her there 17 years ago by a big tree near a lake in the mountains where they had gone to make out while dating. He was just being affectionate and he had no problems with her look. But she had erupted in rage and so he had never done it again. It was one of those taboo radioactive topics that many marriages conceal and he knew never to talk about it and she never did. He was very sure she would never have put that in a digital diary but that she would remember the moment.

"Do you remember the mountain lake by the big old oak tree, can you remember getting angry with me? If you are Sally then you will be able to tell me why?"

"You probably said something stupid," came the answer.

Jack shrugged and closed the chat session. This was not his wife.



Notes ▼

W/C: 1252 at time of the contest
CONTEST:

FORUM

The Science Fiction Short Story Contest  (18+) A contest inspired by the serious need for more good sci-fi #2140378 by BlackAdder

PROMPT: The Turing Test.

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed that if a human passing messages to another room could not tell if the responses coming back were written by a human, it could be thought that that machine was in fact sentient. However, modern LLMs have already written-human like responses under many scenarios, some persuasive enough to convince Google engineer Blake Lemoine that one LLM, LaMDA, had already achieved sentience. However, few people believe AI has achieved sentience, and some believe it never will.

But.. what is your test? What is real the division, if any, between real and artificial? What is your imagination of someone in the near future determining that they are (or are not) dealing with a sentient AI? What wonders and horrors will AI achieve tomorrow?