Gone Before Goodbye

Chapter Six

Nadia stands in the corner of what looks to Maggie like a spare office. She wears a plush white terry cloth bathrobe that seems to be swallowing her whole and makes her look even more petite. Her jet-black hair is wet. Her skin glistens.

Maggie smiles at her. Nadia is expressionless.

Speaking very slowly, Maggie says, “Let me see if one of the nurses can translate for us.”

“No.”

Maggie watches as Nadia crosses in front of her and closes the door.

“I speak English,” Nadia says. “I just don’t want them to know.”

“Oh.”

There is no examination table. Maggie had debated bringing her into the operating room for a full exam, but it seems more important to do a private consultation — just talk to her alone — than do a physical yet.

“Is it okay if I call you Nadia?” Maggie asks.

“Yes, of course.”

They both take a seat. Maggie isn’t sure how to begin. She wants to say, “My God, you’re gorgeous, don’t do this to yourself,” but that would be wrong and unfair and judgmental. But none of that lets Maggie off the hook as a physician and, well, a woman. There could be disturbing issues around this procedure involving consent, coercion, and power dynamics.

“How old are you, Nadia?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Do you understand what Oleg has hired me to do?”

“Augmentation mammoplasty,” Nadia says. Maggie tries to place her accent. There may be Russian or Eastern European, but she also hears something else. “In short, a boob job.”

“Are you okay with doing this procedure?”

“Yes.”

“I should go through the risks—”

“No need. I know them.”

Maggie nods slowly, leans forward. “Anything you discuss with me is between us. I will keep it in the strictest of confidences. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“You can trust me, Nadia.”

For the first time, Nadia smiles — and it’s radiant. “I do already, Doctor. You’re the only one who knows I speak English.”

“Thank you for that.” Maggie shifts a little more toward her. “I need to make sure you’re okay, Nadia.”

Nadia says nothing.

“If someone is pressuring you to have this surgery—”

Nadia laughs. “You can’t be serious.”

“—I can refuse to do the surgery.”

“Then Oleg would bring in someone else.”

Maggie lowers her voice. “If you don’t want to stay—”

“Who says I don’t want to stay?”

“—I can get you out.”

Nadia looks almost amused. “Do you really believe that, Doctor McCabe?”

“Believe what?”

“That you can get me out.”

“I’ll find a way.”

Nadia mutters something in a foreign tongue. “How? You, like me, are totally at their mercy. You can’t call anyone. Your phone won’t work. Oh, and your bedroom? It will be bugged. Just so you know — this is one of the few rooms in the house that doesn’t have cameras and listening devices. So how do we make our escape? Will you hide me in your suitcase?”

“Listen to me,” Maggie says, moving closer. “I can find a way.”

“You’re being naive.”

“Nadia—”

“And I don’t want you to,” Nadia says, her tone firm now. “I am here by choice. I can leave anytime I want. I understand the surgery. I know the risks. They are minimal, no?”

Maggie nods. “Most studies report a one to five percent chance of a complication.”

“Between one and five percent,” Nadia repeats. “That’s an average.”

“Yes.”

“But I don’t have an average doctor, do I?” Nadia says. “Oleg only hires the best.”

They lock eyes.

“It’s an easy choice for me,” Nadia says. “I want to do it.”

Maggie nods, giving herself time to think. “That’s fine. It’s up to you, of course. I just want you to know that I’m here for you. That I want to help you.”

“Many girls,” Nadia continues, “beautiful girls, would give anything to be in my place.”

“I understand,” Maggie says.

Nadia flashes the smile again. “I know what I look like, Doctor McCabe. I know the effect I have on men. But after this surgery, I will be, let’s be honest, irresistible.”

“You already are, Nadia.”

“Don’t be patronizing.”

“I don’t mean to be.”

“You heard what Oleg likes. That’s what I need to be.”

“Got it.”

“Will you help me?”

Maggie sighs but she also nods. “If that’s what you want, I will, yes.”

Then Nadia drops a truth bomb on her: “You don’t know me,” she says. “You don’t know my life.”

Which is fair. Maggie knows that. But she can’t just let it go either. “You’re right. I don’t. But know this: I’m here for you. I’m on your side.”

“I know,” Nadia says. “Tomorrow you will operate on me. You will keep me safe.”

“I will,” she says.

“That’s all I need.” Nadia walks to the door. Then she says, “I bet you’ve made sacrifices for the man you love, haven’t you, Doctor McCabe?”

Maggie feels the too-familiar pang.

“Doctor?”

“I have,” Maggie says. Then she adds, “But not something like this, no. He would never...” She stops and reminds herself of an obvious truth: They aren’t the same, Maggie and Nadia. As Nadia so aptly put it, “You don’t know my life.” It’s condescending to compare. Maggie gets that.

But then Nadia asks, “Are you married?”

Maggie feels the tears push into her eyes.

“I mean, you have someone special in your life, right?”

Maggie still doesn’t reply.

“Doctor?”

And then, because Nadia deserves the truth, Maggie gives her the honest, heartbreaking answer:

“No,” Maggie says, “I’m not married anymore. There is no one special in my life.”

Nadia leaves. Maggie stays in the office.

She checks the door for a lock. There is none. No matter. She turns off the light and moves over to the couch against the far wall. She sits on it, pulls her knees up to her chest, hugs herself. Tears run down her cheeks. She lets them. She isn’t crying, not by the medical definition. Crying involves facial muscles like the orbicularis oculi and mentalis. Crying involves the release of oxytocin and endorphins. Crying is usually accompanied by shortness of breath or increased heart rate.

But this is just tears sliding down her face.

For a few minutes Maggie doesn’t move. She can’t move. She just sits in the dark and hopes no one will knock on that door. This is her life now. The self-pity makes her sick. Still, she takes out her phone.

She hates this.

With a shaking hand, she clicks the blue icon.

Marc’s face appears.

“Why is it so dark?” he asks.

“I’m sitting in a dark room.”

“Why? I can barely see you.”

She moves her face closer to the screen.

“You’ve been crying.”

“I’m fine.”

“Where are you? What happened at your meeting with Barlow?”

She stares at his face, scrutinizing his expression, as she often did, for a tell.

“Mags?”

Her eyes close. “He offered me a job.”

“Oh, great.”

“Not so great,” she says. “I’m supposed to do surgery tomorrow.”

“Hold up. Where are you?”

“Not sure exactly. Somewhere in Russia.”

“Show me,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“Wait,” he says, “I can’t see your phone’s location. How come I can’t see your location?”

“I don’t know. They blocked everything. There is no way for me to call out or be tracked—”

The door bursts open. Maggie startles back, almost dropping her phone.

A voice bellows, “What’s going on here?”

Maggie looks up and sees the hulking form of Ivan Brovski standing in the doorway.

“Who are you talking to?” he shouts.

He steps into the room, flicks the light on, and closes the door behind him.

“You’re not allowed to call anyone!”

Maggie backs up.

“Stay away from me.”

“You made a promise! No contact with anyone!”

“It’s not what you think.”

Ivan is furious. He starts counting off on his fingers. “No phone, no email, no messaging app—”

“That’s not what this is.”

“I don’t understand. How could you even call someone?” His face is red. “The Wi-Fi is set so nothing can go out or in or...”

Without warning, Ivan’s hand shoots out with cobra-like quickness and snatches her phone away.

“Hey! Give me that back.”

Maggie tries to grab the phone from him, but Ivan holds her off with one massive, powerful hand. With his other hand, he brings the phone up toward his face so he can see the screen.

“It’s not what you think,” Maggie says.

“I heard a man’s voice.”

“It’s not—”

“Who were you talking to?” he demands. “What did you tell him?”

Maggie stops struggling. She sighs and gestures for him to have a look for himself. Ivan appears puzzled. He lowers his hand away from her. When he stares at the screen, his eyes widen.

“How...?”

“Press the blue icon,” Maggie says.

“What?”

“Just” — she lets loose a breath — “press the blue icon.”

With a thick thumb pad, Ivan Brovski does as she asks. Then he looks a question at her. “Do you want to explain?”

“You know about my husband.”

Of course he does. They investigated her financial situation, her sister’s, her malpractice suit. They’d know everything about her.

Ivan nods. “Doctor Marc Adams, renowned cardiothoracic surgeon.”

“And you know,” Maggie continues, trying very hard not to let her voice crack, “about his death.”

Ivan nods again, more solemnly this time. “He was on a humanitarian mission in Ghadames when a militia group raided a refugee camp. Your husband stayed behind to help a patient. It cost him his life.”

“Yes.”

Ivan lifts the phone. “But I just saw your husband on your phone.”

“No.”

“No?”

“You saw,” Maggie says, “a griefbot.”

He makes a face. “A what?”

“A griefbot. You’ve probably heard of rudimentary ones.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Maggie wonders how to explain this without sounding insane.

“When a loved one dies, and when someone misses that loved one, misses them so much that...” Maggie shakes it off, channels her sister, and tries a more analytical approach. “A griefbot is an artificial intelligence app that mimics a dead person via their digital footprint — for example, their social media content, emails, maybe videos online or photographs on their phone, whatever. The software then creates a lifelike avatar of the deceased, and a mourner can” — she hesitates — “a mourner can actually converse with it.”

“You mean talk to it?” Ivan says.

“Yes. When done well, the humanoid AI can replicate the dead person’s speech patterns, personality, temperament, mannerisms, intelligence, tics, gestures — everything that made the deceased unique. It can generate full conversations and even comfort the grieving.”

It takes him a few moments to get it. “And in this case, you’re the grieving?”

“Yes.”

“So you were talking to a computer?”

How to explain this...?

“It’s more complicated than that,” Maggie says. Then when she sees the look on his face — part pity, part... disgust? — she quickly adds, “I’m not doing it for me.”

“Oh?”

“It’s for my sister.”

“Sharon McCabe? But why would your sister...?” Then Ivan nods, remembering. “Her expertise,” he says. “She specializes in creating AI people.”

“That’s an oversimplification too, but yes.”

Ivan points at her phone. “So she created this... did you call it a griefbot?”

“It’s a beta version. It doesn’t have the last few months of his life on it. But it’s still her most advanced.”

“So you’re, what, testing it for her?”

“Exactly.”

Ivan stares at the phone for a few moments. “I see,” he says, and the pity in his voice almost chokes her. “Do you find it comforting?”

She settles for the truth, because why not? “I don’t know,” she says. “It’s weird. I feel embarrassed every time I talk to it.”

Ivan gives her a half smile. “And yet here you are — telling your AI husband about your visit here.”

“Like I said — to help my sister.”

“And if your sister didn’t need the help?” he asks. “Would you still talk to it?”

Enough, Maggie thinks. She doesn’t want to discuss this anymore. The truth is, Sharon’s griefbot would probably be less painful if it wasn’t so damn close to reality. Sharon had found a way to perfect her creation by not only getting Marc’s entire digital history, but by hacking into every database he ever visited. Do you have an Alexa or Siri or some other smart speaker in your house? It hears you, records the data, and stores it in clouds. Your iPhone’s built-in microphone does the same. So does your home surveillance system and doorbell and motion detectors and monitoring feeds — they all spy on you and listen to every word you say, even when you think they are off. This isn’t a shock — most people know this. The problem for big tech has always been what to do with all that stored raw data, how to sort it and make it profitable or at least useful.

Sharon had found a way.

She figured out how to use someone’s life data to recreate a near-perfect digital duplicate of a human being. Even Maggie can’t tell the difference most of the time. That’s what’s so incredible about Sharon’s invention — and, of course, what makes it so terrible. The “Marc” griefbot isn’t a comfort so much as a constant reminder that the real thing was hacked to pieces in a godforsaken refugee camp more than four thousand miles from his home.

And yet Maggie keeps opening the app.

Is that insane?

Or conversely, is it any worse than spilling your guts to a paid therapist — or talking to yourself? We all have constant inner monologues going on in our heads. We all have imaginary conversations with superior beings or dead loved ones. Is it any crazier to have these conversations with a nearly flawless AI replica of the man you loved?

These are either deep philosophical questions or delusional self-rationalizations. Maggie isn’t sure which.

Either way, Marc is dead.

You’ve heard about the five stages of grief — denial being the first, followed by anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Those stages are wrong, Maggie thinks — or at the very least, inadequate. When she first found out about Marc — when Porkchop knocked on her door on that terrible night, the devastation on his face impossible to hide — Maggie dropped to her knees and sobbed uncontrollably. There was no denial. She got it immediately: The only man she’d ever loved was dead and gone forever. Forever. She would never see him again. She would never touch him, never hold his hand, never feel safe and small in his arms, never pull him close when she couldn’t sleep, never help him go back to sleep when he had a nightmare, never know the peace and solace of just being with her soulmate — the real definition of love — or see his goofy smile across the breakfast table or roll her eyes at his intentionally corny jokes or...

Never.

She got that all in a mad rush, instantly, in a split second, and the reality of that truth crippled her. That’s when denial rushes in. Denial comes second, not first, because those first few seconds when you comprehend the awful truth — Stage One should actually be “total understanding” — are so devastating, so awful, so painful, so debilitating that your mind forces you to move on to denial in order to survive.

So total understanding is the first stage. Then denial. Anger, bargaining, depression arrived together, a toxic concoction, one overlapping and blending with the others. You spiral. And with that comes the need to numb.

Enter pills.

Maggie started taking them. Not many. Just enough to take the edge off. So she could sleep. So she could vanish. She still worked. She still performed surgeries and lived with Sharon and helped with her mother.

She had it under control.

But then her mother died.

So she took more pills.

She was still okay, she thought. The pills were there, a part of her, but they weren’t all-consuming. They were just a temporary buttress to shore up an otherwise strong woman.

But one day, Maggie took too many pills before stepping into an operating room. Or she toxically mixed them with something else in her bloodstream. Or maybe she didn’t get enough sleep the night before, so they hit her harder. Something. Something with the pills and her metabolism went very wrong that day.

And now she’s here.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Ivan Brovski says. “Your husband was a hero. I don’t know if that’s a comfort at all—”

“Thank you,” she says, cutting him off. “Could you please give me back my phone?”

Ivan stares down at it for a moment. Then he puts her phone in his jacket pocket. “Tomorrow.”

“What?”

“I can’t let you have it. The features are too advanced. Perhaps you can reach a person in the outside world with it. Perhaps even your sister.”

“The app is self-contained. That’s how I’ve been able to use it.”

“Is it? Are you sure? Doesn’t AI keep learning? You and I don’t know what it can or can’t do. How about if I give it back to you after the surgeries?” Then, with an almost mocking tone, Ivan adds, “You don’t need your griefbot, do you?”

She knows what he’s doing — needling her like this — but the shame still hits her deep. It’s just an app. It isn’t Marc. Like an advanced computer simulation. Nothing more.

“Unless,” Ivan continues, “I mean, if you really rely on it—”

“Fine, I get it,” she snaps. “Keep it.” And in truth he’s right — Maggie doesn’t know all of the app’s capabilities. Perhaps Sharon could use the app to reach her or at least figure out where Maggie is.

That could put Sharon in danger.

Maggie checks her watch. “I have to go. I’m supposed to talk to Oleg’s personal physician.”

Ivan Brovski smiles and spreads his hands. “You are talking to him.”