Gone Before Goodbye

Chapter Nineteen

Sharon slides into the corner booth at Vipers.

Porkchop is already there. He looks up, sees the expression on her face, and waits. Sharon puts both hands on the table in front of her. She stares at them for a bit — her hands — and then sits back. Sharon’s eyes are everywhere but on him. Her left leg has the jackhammer shakes, but that’s pretty standard for her.

Porkchop knows Sharon is working up to something, so he just gives her space.

A few more moments pass. Then Sharon says, “Do you know what a griefbot is?”

The question is unexpected. But so is his answer. “Yes.”

“You do?”

Porkchop nods.

“I always thought you were the ultimate Luddite.”

“Pinky told me about them after Marc died. I guess he tried one with his mother.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He said it’s some kind of software program where the dead, I don’t know, they text you? Supposed to help you cope with losing a loved one. It’s like a digital replica of them or something.”

Someone hits the jukebox. Tears for Fears start telling everyone to shout, shout, let it all out.

“Did you try one?” Sharon asks. “A griefbot, I mean.”

“No,” Porkshop says. “I don’t want a digital replica. I want my son.”

Sharon nods slowly. Then she says, “But you know that will never be.”

“I do. Death is final.” Porkchop gets that Sharon can sometimes be clumsy with her words or overly blunt. “Is there a point to this, Sharon?”

“I created a griefbot of Marc for Maggie. But it’s not like any other griefbot.”

Sharon takes the next ten minutes explaining the machinations, details, ingenuity that have gone into the AI development of the Marc griefbot. Porkchop listens and tries not to react. Sharon talks fast. She rambles a bit. She loses him when she gets too deep in the woods with the technology, but he just rides that out. Again, this isn’t atypical with Sharon. Her mouth is always trying to keep up with her brain, and that’s an impossible task.

Toward the end Sharon veers into the economic realities of her potential startup. “Unfortunately, I’ve concluded that as of now, my griefbot is not a viable marketplace product, fiscally speaking.”

“Why not?”

“It took me two months of working full-time to gather the information on Marc — coding, hacking, researching, development. This is a beta version, a prototype, but I don’t see how I can mass-produce it to the point where it would ever be profitable. It’s too time-consuming to extract and organize the data.”

“If your griefbot works the way you say it does—”

“Oh, it does.”

“Then some people will pay anything for it.”

“That’s probably true,” Sharon says. “But I have no interest in spending two months digging up information on, say, a billionaire’s father, no matter what they’d pay. I want everyone to have access to whatever I create.”

Porkchop sits back. “How long has Maggie had your griefbot?”

“Two weeks,” Sharon says. “She didn’t tell you about it.”

“She did not.”

“She thought it would hurt you.”

Again with the blunt words. Behind them, Tears for Fears are singing that if they could change your mind, they’d really love to break your heart.

“You don’t approve,” Sharon says.

“Not my place.”

“But it’s not something you’d be interested in.”

“The dead are dead,” Porkchop says. “You’re not supposed to get over it. You’re supposed to live with it.”

“Other people may feel differently.”

“I’m sure that’s true.”

“Suppose it offers comforts?”

“It would be a false comfort.”

Sharon shrugs. “All comfort is false, when you think about it. That’s almost the definition.”

“I’m not looking for comfort,” Porkchop says. “It’s not about me. It’s about my son. It’s not about what I miss — it’s about what he missed, what was stolen from him. I don’t care about my pain. I can live with that. It’s the least I can do. What I can’t live with — what I can’t get past, what I don’t want to get past — is what was taken from my boy.”

Sharon says nothing.

“Do you think your griefbot can help with that?”

“No,” she says.

“I don’t mean to sound harsh.”

Sharon puts up her hand. “I get it.”

“What made you decide to do this?”

“Make a griefbot?”

“Make one of Marc for Maggie.”

“Selfishness maybe. I wanted to see if I could do it.”

“And you thought it would help Maggie.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“She needed answers. Do you remember when you and Maggie flew over to Tunisia?”

Porkchop does, of course. “She wanted to see where it happened.”

“That would have taken you a day, maybe two,” Sharon says. “You two spent three weeks there. Visiting patients in the hospitals. Talking to every TriPoint camp survivor you could find. Maggie immersed herself in all the horror. She didn’t want to be spared. She wanted to hear how awful that day had been. Maybe Maggie thought hearing it all would be cleansing or healing or help her move on. But it was the opposite. When she came back, she wasn’t the same. I could see it in her eyes. She started self-medicating. She almost killed a patient during surgery. She lost her medical license. She spiraled.”

Porkchop just sits there. His expression doesn’t change, but Sharon’s words are shards of glass ricocheting through his chest. “So you tried to help with this griefbot.”

“Yes.”

“If I’m being kind, your invention is a crutch.”

“Sometimes a crutch is all you need.”

“In the short term. You can’t keep using a crutch.”

Sharon tilts her head. “Why not?”

Porkchop doesn’t have an answer to that.

“We all have crutches,” Sharon says. “We all have something to numb or distract or get us through the day. You have Vipers and your members. You have your bike rides. And...” Sharon points to the center of the room. “Do you think I don’t know what that is?”

Her finger is aimed at Vipers’ display area — more specifically, at the 1996 Honda Blackbird. Porkchop had bought it for Marc as a graduation present. After he died, Maggie had insisted Porkchop take it, ride it himself or give it to another Serpents and Saints member. But Porkchop couldn’t. He tried, but he couldn’t bear seeing someone else on his boy’s favorite bike. So Porkchop put it in here, in Vipers for Bikers, and every day, he stops in front of it and just stands there.

Yeah, who needs a crutch?

Porkchop stares at the bike now. “Did it help her?”

Sharon knows he’s talking about the griefbot. “I don’t know.”

“But Maggie’s been using it?” He wrests his eyes away from Marc’s bike. “She was talking to...?”

“Yes.”

Porkchop thinks about that for a moment. It stings. The thought of Maggie talking to some computer-generated version of Marc. It stings more than he wants to admit, but what doesn’t? Part of him gets it. Part of him finds it infuriating.

“No wonder Maggie believes Marc might be alive,” he says.

“What?”

“She’s been ‘talking’ to him,” he says with more disgust in his voice than he intended. “Not him. Not her husband. Not my son. Just whatever Frankenstein version of him you created.”

“It’s not like that,” she says.

“I said at best, it’s a crutch.” He tries but he can’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. “But more likely, your griefbot is a delusion. It’s a full-on lie.”

Sharon sits back. Porkchop immediately regrets his words.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean—”

“No, no.” Sharon waves him off. “Don’t do that. You do mean it. And I get what you’re saying. It’s fair.” She tilts her head. “Why did you say Maggie thinks Marc is still alive?”

“She doesn’t. Not really.”

“But someone is giving her hope?”

“Yes.”

Sharon shakes her head. “That’s cruel.”

Nothing crueler, Porkchop thinks. He turns his head and looks at his son’s bike again. He flashes back to the smile on Marc’s face when he rode it. That smile. His son’s perfect, joyful, life-affirming smile. Gone. And not just gone, but intentionally extinguished.

Intentionally.

Premeditated. A conscious decision someone made to snuff out his son’s existence.

His hands tighten into fists. Again. And again. It is an unbearable outrage. It cannot stand. If Porkchop stops and thinks about it for too long, he will go mad. He will start screaming, and he’s not sure that he’d ever be able to stop. Still. Even now. Even after all he’s done to quiet his own screams.

He’s lied to everyone to quiet the screams.

Even Maggie.