Connections

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Half the crystals of my projector needed replacing and my eyes were gummed with sleep, but I managed to recognize the grainy 3-D image that had appeared in my room. There was a dead man staring at me.

The image spoke softly in that familiar gravelly voice. “I hope I didn’t wake you, El. I know you keep odd hours.”

“Arden,” I said, trying to work some saliva back into my mouth. Arden Kirst, my old mentor. Last Friday his car disconnected from the power rail and plunged two hundred feet into a utility substation.

Slowly my brain got into gear. Things like this used to happen often back when I was growing up—people forgetting to make preparations beforehand to switch off their artificial-intelligence systems. I remembered getting a birthday greeting every year from a great-aunt who’d died in 2015. But it didn’t happen so much with the newer models.

The AI stood in my room, where the projectors were aimed, looking very much like Arden—piercing gray eyes and jutting chin—and squinted at me. The AI’s sensors were probably having trouble seeing me—the image transmission of my home communicator wasn’t in any better shape than the projector—and the system represented this fact in the AI’s image.

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