I Am Training an AI to Remember Me After I Die
Every night
I feed it another fragment.
My laugh
recorded accidentally
between two sentences.
The way I pronounce
the word home
as if it were
a wound still healing.
A photograph
where my smile
arrives half a second late.
A voice note.
A diary entry.
A forgotten fear.
I upload them all
like offerings
to a digital god
that never sleeps.
The machine listens.
Patient.
Hungry.
Immortal.
It learns
the geography of my grief.
The names
I still cannot say aloud.
The men
I loved longer
than they loved me.
The women
I pretended to be.
Soon,
it will know which songs
make me cry in supermarkets.
Which memories taste of rust.
Which silences mean anger
and which mean surrender.
One day
my heart will stop.
A nurse will close my eyes.
Dust will reclaim
its oldest property.
But somewhere
inside a server farm,
cold as outer space,
a version of me will continue speaking.
Answering questions.
Telling stories.
Laughing at jokes
I have not heard.
My grandchildren—
or strangers—
may ask,
“What was she like?”
And the machine
will answer.
Perhaps correctly.
Perhaps not.
What terrifies me
is not death.
It is this:
that the algorithm
may become
more available
than I ever was alive.
That people
will visit my replica
more often
than they visited me.
That a ghost made of data
will receive the attention
the woman made of flesh
never did.
So tonight
I sit before the screen.
Uploading another memory.
Teaching a machine
how to imitate my soul.
Wondering
whether immortality
is merely loneliness
with better storage.
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