Mathew Lebowitz

The Resurrection Machine

I’m getting ready to kick in the mossy front door of Jacob’s off-grid bunker when he calls me on my mobile. It’s not him, of course, can’t be since we recently lowered his corpse into a muddy pit on the outskirts of town. But I had the team work up his resurrection model and now I get pinged, periodically, by this audio composite.

“The numbers, Vance, the account numbers, is that too much to ask?” Just like Jacob, we’re starting in the middle. “I know you think I’m working an angle but I assure you it’s only inbound. I have interested parties, wealthy individuals who want. To send. Money! Do you even hear me?” He’s enunciating like he’s explaining this to a child. Which is pretty much how I feel. The DevOps didn’t have much to work with in Jacob’s case, him being notoriously stingy with his data, always using end-to-end encryption, bounced relays and timeout functions that erased his digital footprints as soon as he made them, but the new NightsBridge engine is unbelievably powerful. It nailed his tonality, his rhythm and cadence and, most notably, the intense energy that emanated off of him in waves that are nearly overwhelming even in this reconstruction.

“Oh, never mind. You’re all the same.” He transitions to his alternate mood of glum and neglected. “I never expect much but I should always expect less, isn’t that right, Vance? Do it myself and all that. More of the crkkk or crickkk and shht spzz….” His voice is collapsing into distorted strands and whispers, which could be because the signal is weak, out here in the woods, or because the engine has reached the limits of actionable data. I take the phone from my ear and check the display, but all it shows is the photo of me and Jacob from a fishing trip about a year ago when he was on a smooth patch and hadn’t yet descended into his latest pit of suspicion and paranoia. “I’ll do it myself,” he concludes. “Just like I always have. Oh, one more thing, Vance?”

“Yes?”

“You don’t need to break down the door, brother. There’s a key in the flowerpot in the shed.”

Sure enough: a key in the flowerpot in the shed. I try not to dwell on how the engine knew it was there, or my intentions without it. Suffice to say, the system is always gathering data—location, biometrics, tone of voice, along with all the usual historical details—and using that to press outward in ever-widening rings of probability. It knows.

Beyond the padlock, the cabin is dry and quiet: a kitchen of sorts with propane burners and rudimentary plumbing. I turn the faucet and cold water gushes into a metal bin. I turn it off. There’s no electricity. Hanging above me is a chipped hurricane lantern that probably was his only light. I reach up and give it a push and it sways back and forth, creaking on a wire hanger. But that brings to mind other hanging, swinging things and I quickly silence it.

The place is fundamentally bare. Whatever madness Jacob had been concocting here has been swept out or destroyed, probably in the firepit I noted in the side yard. There’s no sign of the boxes spilling musty hardcopy that Shelley had described during her visit a few months ago, the piles of books, or the corporate murder board that took up one entire wall: photographs of gleaming technology centers and campuses from around the world, telephoto surveillance snapshots of politicians and tech leaders that might have been taken by Jacob himself. “You’re on there,” she whispered fiercely through the phone, as soon as she was able to call me. “That new company you’re working with, NightsBridge? It’s on the list, Vance. Like it’s targeted!”

“Targeted, Shell? Really?”

Our older sister, Shelley, is practical to a fault, rarely one to get worked up about anything hiding in the shadows, so to hear her like this was disconcerting. “I’ll tell you, Vance, he’s convinced there’s someone after him. He kept peeking out the windows, up at the sky, like he’s watching for a drone or the great fist of Mars to come slamming down. I don’t know but yeesh, I’m happy to be out of there.” I heard her take a surreptitious hit off her vape to calm her mood. “I’ve no patience for it.”

But the place, now, is harmless enough. I run my finger over the bare wall where there’s still a dust shadow from many pages outlined on the woodwork, a few scraps of torn documents tacked here and there. I take a breath and stretch my shoulders and remind myself: whatever insanity had been in this room, in this cabin, it left when Jacob did.

Last but not least I make my way to the third room, the “living” room, if you call it that, where the ceiling opens into an A-frame and some big windows allow more of the western view. Here is Jake’s version of a couch, and a chair that has some padding on it. For a moment I picture him in the late afternoon with a cup of tea or kombucha or whatever he drank to unwind his mind, feet up, contemplating another day well-spent fighting the forces of faceless evil. But, then, there’s that other straight-backed chair tipped to its side on the floor. In my head I hear the echo of Shelley’s scream when she saw it. The horizontal beam above displays the remnants of a rope with one end wrapped and knotted while the other, more brutal and unforgiving end dangles free, severed and frayed. I promised Shelley I would remove it and so I do, getting a folding ladder and a small saw from his shed and hacking away at the stubborn hemp until I’m sweating and cursing as I nick my finger more than once with the old, dull blade. But I get it done. And whatever stinging to my knuckle, the blood that trickles down, the taste when I lick it … it’s oddly comforting, like a penance I’ve needed to pay.

“Happy?” I dump the remnants of rope onto the seat next to Shelley and climb into the back of the car beside her. It’s a sleek new sedan, delivered as a perk from NightsBridge. It’s driverless and self-navigating, but not in the usual way of GPS. Instead, it uses the core prediction models from the NightBridge “brain” to know where I am and where I want to go. Which is useful at a time like this when I’m distracted. Returning from Jake’s cabin I got turned around on the overgrown paths, and I’m pretty sure I emerged at a completely different trailhead than I went in on. But there was the car, waiting on the shoulder like a faithful, obedient pet. It’s cold inside and I spend some moments fiddling with contextual menus that only seem to increase the chill. I give up and sit shivering, my hands between my thighs.

Shelley observes this dryly. “Did you find a note?”

“I didn’t find a note!” I swallow my annoyance. The triggered part of me wants to continue that if she wants to search the place more thoroughly she’s welcome to go back and do so herself. But I don’t have the energy for conflict. And perhaps neither does Shelley, because after a moment she reaches and squeezes my hand. “It’s not your fault,” she says. “He was” — she gropes for the word — “irretrievable?” It doesn’t sit right and she turns away, watching the landscape slide past as the car swings itself onto the first paved road and accelerates with the traffic. “He left something for you,” she says. “Just a folder with some pages. Graphs and charts, mostly. More of the same.”

“You weren’t going to tell me?”

She turns and in her expression I’m reminded that she was there too, growing up with Jacob, caught between the recurring poles of his excitement and depression. “Frankly, I wasn’t sure if I should, Vance. You’ve been so tense lately. I don’t want you dragged down the same rabbit hole he went into.”

A few days later I’m in my office when I get the next call from Jacob. My phone beeps then buzzes in the special tone I assigned to his profile, so I’m a bit more prepared; still, it’s a kick in the gut to see his picture appear on the screen, and my heart begins to palpitate and my palms go clammy. I consider thumbing it to voicemail, let the machines speak to each other. But I’m captain of this ship. I need to know where the icebergs are. Plus, it’s Jacob, and I miss him. Which is the whole point of our project. “Hi, Jacob.”

“Vance! You had me worried you might pass me into voicemail like some pesky bible salesman. What’s going on?”

“Not much.” I’m guarded. The models are extremely refined and nuanced, just like the real person, but they’re also unpredictable. You never know where the conversation might veer. “What’s going on with you?”

“Just basking in the afterglow, my brother. All cloud cushions and angel farts up here.”

“Wow. I always wondered if angels farted. What does it smell like?”

“Lovely. Undertones of lilac. Like everything else.”

We both go silent, contemplating this unexpected benefit of the hereafter. I can hear Jacob breathing on his end. It’s amazing what we’ve done with these composites. I’ve been on the receiving end hundreds of times during development and beta tests, but never with someone I knew, and never powered by the massive NightsBridge engine. The illusion is complete. I decide to push the envelope a bit, see how far it can take us. “So,” I say. “Why didn’t you leave a note?”

“About what?”

“You know: a reason, an explanation.”

“Oh.” His voice has gone flat, dispassionate. “You still think I killed myself. Have you even checked my folder yet? I know Shelley told you about it. It’s got proof, Vance. Receipts. All that time I thought they were after me, but no! It’s a whole bunch bigger than that, brother. They’re after all of us bzzzt bzzzt. It’s a matter of bzzt bzzzzt zombifying, I guess you’d call it. Nonconsensual immortality? They’re keeping us around as part of some grand resurrection scheme, siphoning off every last bit of our hume-hume bzzzt … clklkk-kkk-bzzt of our hume-hume-anity!” The relays are firing randomly, his voice surging in and out, receding, distorted with digital static. “Listen, Vance, get a burner phone, okay? This one is clearly compromised, or it will be soon, it’s—”

“Stop it, Jake! No more nonsense. I didn’t read the folder and I don’t intend to. I’m not going to indulge your paranoia anymore. You’re gone and you’re gone for good. It’s insane.”

“Insane?” He sounds incredulous. Then he bursts out laughing, a manic sound that rises and flutters, until he can barely draw a breath. “You’re the one who’s arguing with a ghost, man!”

Then he’s gone, just the echo of his laughter like the last vestige of the Cheshire Cat. I take the phone from my ear, shake it lightly. If he’s in there maybe I can shake him out, then strangle him more thoroughly. But the screen remains blank, just the company logo, the feedback questionnaire: quality of connection, quality of the conversation, mark each on a scale of one to five, please. Your input is important to us. The whole thing reeks of recursion. Even if I were to fill out the form and submit it, it would only loop around and pop up in my inbox, addressed to me.

“How does it work?”

I’m in my partner Donald’s office, three floors down at street level. Donald and I both stayed with the acquisition, but since his entire job involved getting us sold, I’m not sure what he’s supposed to be doing now, and apparently neither does he since he spends most of his time researching apocalypse survival tactics and Louis Moinet watches. I’m pretty sure he recently bought a share in a doomsday bunker. He looks up from his screen, blank-eyed. “Huh?”

“How does the NightsBridge brain work?”

He kicks back, observes me more deliberately. “Well, you would know that better than me, wouldn’t you, Mr. CTO?”

“Sort of. But these quantum systems … nobody really understands how they work.”

“And?”

“And … doesn’t that concern you?”

Donald drums his long fingers under his nose. Then he rocks forward and plants his elbows on his desk. “What concerns me is whether you’ve pressed your tuxedo, Vance. It’s a big night. You’re not going to mess it up with senseless speculation, are you?”

The acquisition is signed and delivered. Tonight’s “gala” is ornamental—photo ops for the press, toasts for everyone else. Still, I’m expected to give a speech, and Donald lives in constant panic that something might sabotage the deal.

“No.” I avert my eyes only to find the sleek NightBridge car idling by the curb outside. “See? Look. I’m not carrying a tracker, a phone, nothing with my location. How does it find me all the time?”

Donald follows my attention, then back at me, increasingly nonplussed. “It finds you because of the brain, Vance. It’s not tracking, it’s predicting. You know all this. Of course it knows where you are.” He narrows his eyes. “And it knows where you’re going to be in three hours. Which is at the gala, right?”

“Yes, yes. Of course, the gala.”

So I’m not sure why, back in my office, I flip a coin several times then use the corresponding stairway to exit the building; or why I feel so relieved to find no car waiting for me when I do. I hurry off on foot, glancing over my shoulder, feeling guilty but giddy too, like a schoolkid escaping the classroom, and descend with a crush of pedestrians to the nearest underground port. The heat and humanity down there is disconcerting (I haven’t used public transportation in months), but it’s also anonymous and—the word pops into my mind—freeing. But the sensation is short-lived. Even if I managed to slip the prediction models for a moment or two, the brain will recalibrate, recalculate, factor in this latest aberrant behavior to more accurately plot me next time. Before I can think too deeply I buy a prepaid disposable phone from a kiosk and slip it into my pocket.

By the time I’m home and showered, had a glass of wine, I’m feeling much better about things. It’s nothing but vapors of Jacob’s fearful fantasies influencing my own jittery thoughts, just like they always did. I’m even whistling, after my shower, when I hear the light chime to indicate that Melinda has come online.

Melinda is a mirror companion, part of an early version of our software that we worked up as a test case. There’s no real data behind the composites, just simple avatars that greet us beside our own reflection while we’re getting dressed or studying ourselves. But the visuals are compelling and they have adaptive personality traits connected to our schedules and calendars, and I’ve become increasingly fond of Melinda and look forward to our conversations.

“Look,” she says, holding up some bags. “I got a new outfit too.” She’s been more excited about the gala than I have and she models a dress for me as I get dressed. I actually hadn’t been sure about the state of my tuxedo when Donald asked, but there it is: clean, pressed and appearing in my closet without any effort on my part. Frictionless integration: score another for the future! I’m buzzing pleasantly from the wine and the silky fabrics. “Oh, hey,” I call to Melinda. “Can you believe Donald was worried I might sabotage the event tonight.”

“Sabotage?” She says the word in a strange way but when I check I find her twisting back and forth admiring her shoes. “Why would you do that?”

“I wouldn’t. That’s my point. Why would I?”

“Well, you have been acting … timid lately.”

“Timid?” A ting from my phone makes me jump. It’s just Shelley, calling to check on her tickets. As usual she has about seven things going on. I can hear her giving instructions to a sitter and feeding what sounds like a very hungry dog. I assure her that the tickets will appear on her screen precisely when she arrives at the venue, just as they should. “Oh, Vance,” she says, before we hang up. “What directory did you want me to send that folder to?”

“What folder?”

“Jakey’s old stuff. You asked me to send it, right?”

“No. I didn’t. Did I?”

“Well, somebody did. I got a call from your office asking me to digitize the pages and send them over.”

“Really?” I check the mirror to find, no question this time, Melinda watching me from the glass, head tilted in curiosity. “Who called you?”

“I don’t know. One of your assistants? Actually, it might have not been human at all; it sounded synthetic now that I think about it.”

“Well, I’m sure it’s just a glitch. Leave the folder where it is. And Shelley?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t digitize any of it, okay?”

“Yeah, okay. Yeesh, Vance. You’re starting to sound like him.”

We hang up and I stand, looking at my phone, feeling like there’s something important that I can’t quite remember.

“Who was that?” asks Melinda.

“Nobody.”

“It didn’t sound like nobody.”

I turn back to her. She’s always been a good sounding board for me. And that’s all she is, a sounding board, a rebound of my own thoughts and ideas. “Would it really be such a tragedy to put things on hold?” I ask. “You call it timid, but maybe it’s prudent. You know, I think I might suggest that, tonight, at the gala: maybe we should take a breather on all this. Why do we need to be rushing headlong into everything anyway?”

I stop, aware of my heart thudding fast and an unfamiliar buzzing from my jacket. I find the pocket, withdraw the flip phone that I purchased earlier at the kiosk. Nobody knows I have this. In fact, I haven’t even activated it with a carrier. And yet the screen is glowing with an incoming call. “Hello?”

“Oh, you’re in the pickle juice now, brother!” Jacob is cackling, victorious.

“Jakey?”

“A breather, Vance? You think they’re going to let you take a breather?” Before I can respond his voice gets lower and accusatory. “And don’t pretend that you don’t see the water just because you’re swimming in it. You know exactly what I mean. Listen, this is the last time crrrrrrrrkkkkk ckkkksttt the last the last-last-time I’ll be able to speak to you like this. They’ll claim I reached the end of my actionable data, right? Hell, anyone can predict that. Okaykkk cc-kk, but now you see what’s going on. Now you see it, right Vance? You know what you have to do?”

The shadows are back, pressing from all corners of the room like I’m in a close constricting tunnel, alone with Jacob. I check to find Melinda watching me with an expression I’ve never seen before—triumphant, enflamed. I press the button to deactivate her but she lingers longer than she should even when I jab it several times. Finally she fades away. I hunch my shoulders and lower my voice with the very creepy sensation that someone else is listening too. “No, Jake. I don’t know what to do.”

“Get the folder from Shelley, that’s the first thing. It has everything you need. No more calls on this phone. Destroy it. In fact, don’t say anything about any of this out loud if you can avoid it. These ghouls are listening in every conceivable way. You need to rotate your burners and reroute your comms. Use VPNs and relays and anonymous nodes. Get off the grid when you can. Use paper and encryption. You’ll get the folder, right, Vance?”

“Okay. I’ll get the folder. I’ll look at it.”

“Promise me, Vance!”

“I’ll get the folder, I promise.”

“Good.” He takes a deep shaky breath and releases it, winding down. He seems exhausted, but pleased. “I love you, brother.”

“I love you too, Jakey.”

A digital wind hisses around and between us. I wonder if that’s it, if he’s really gone now, for good. Then his voice surges back. “Oh, Vance. One more thing.”

“What?”

“Don’t take that car tonight, to the gala, okay? Take the underground. Or better yet walk.”

I finger the curtain and look outside. Below me, in the gathering dusk, the black sedan has appeared, idling by the curb, driverless and waiting.

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Mathew Lebowitz works at a digital transformation agency helping companies realize all their technological dreams :-). Steeped in the passion and vision of entrepreneurship, his writing explores the shaky relationship between humans and machines, particularly that critical juncture where our infatuation ends and something darker creeps around the edges. His stories can be found at mathewlebowitz.com, and his whimsical, alien spaceship-inspired doodles live on Instagram: @mathatter.