Buzz Kill by David Sosnowski

Author:David Sosnowski [Sosnowski, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542005043
Published: 2020-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

31

Gladys loved her Furby and told Pandora so the next time she visited IRL. “I haven’t slept this well in years,” she explained before telling her about the shoe store. “This disease,” she said, “is like living in a shoe store that’s been hit by an earthquake.” That’s what it felt like, she said, standing there, stunned, among all these scattered boxes and separated shoes, utterly overwhelmed. But now, each night, she dealt with one box, one pair of shoes finally reunited, wrapped in their tissue paper, the lid secured, the box put away on its shelf. And each night, she went to bed, knowing that there was another one she wouldn’t have to worry about ever again.

“Thank you,” the old woman said, a hand on her granddaughter’s knee, followed by a pause, and then: “You too, Furbius,” Gladys added, patting the plush space between its gremliny ears.

After that, Pandora’s visits started skewing toward remote rather than in person. For one thing, Gladys seemed more forthcoming during these virtual visits. Pandora had suspected it might go like that; there was precedent. One of the earliest, serious contenders for passing the Turing test was a program called Eliza that impersonated a Rogerian therapist by manipulating strings of text supplied by a human in the role of patient (um, client). People got addicted to “talking” to it, telling it their problems, even after they were told, point blank, that it was a computer program. The theories for why this simple bit of coding got the reaction it did varied. Perhaps people found talking to software less intimidating than talking to an actual person; maybe it was because a computer could ask them franker questions that would be deemed too invasive or rude coming from a human. Using her hacked, animatronic creature as mediator, Pandora found herself willing to ask more personal things of her grandmother that would have seemed impossible face-to-face, especially considering the faces involved.

For example, it was through Furbius that Pandora learned her grandmother’s original plan for moving to Alaska didn’t involve living off the land so much as dying on it, far away from anyone she knew. But then she met her future husband, and while Herman Lynch remembered the clink of bottle neck to glass rim in a dingy frontier bar as the beginning of their relationship, what Gladys remembered was boldly following him out of the bar when he wanted to take a leak “under the stars, like God intended.”

It was that time of year when it was cold enough to snow but still warm enough to go peeing into a bank of it, which Herman proceeded to do, his back shielding any anatomical revelations it was still too early for in their hours-old relationship. Why she followed after him, Gladys didn’t know, but would hazard a guess, since Furbius asked: “I think I recognized my future in the man and didn’t want to let him out of my sights.”

The difference between ninety-plus degrees hitting something south

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