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As much as he had tried – to ignore the nagging doubts and unresolved questions; to focus on work, on his disloyal lawyer and employees, on the twenty-million-dollar lawsuit slapped on him by Pinky – he could not quite make one thing leave his mind: his conversation with Dr. Ho, the demonstration at the computer terminal, Katherine appearing to him from within phosphorescent pixels, a silicon wraith.

The thought that kept returning to him, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it, was this. What if it is not a hoax? What if it is all true?

27

He knew that he would call Dr. Ho, but delayed as long as he could, because somehow he understood that once he called, nothing would be the same.

So he ate dinner, alone again at the kitchen table, another bowl of pasta and oil, and a bottle of cabernet from the cellar. When he had finished, he wandered into the living room and watched TV. He poured himself a Dalmore on the rocks, sat on the couch, and didn't bother closing the curtains. The back yard was dark, the windows open, the night air warm; and he sat staring at the television screen, comprehending nothing, running his finger along the condensation on the outside of his Scotch glass. A drop of water gathered at the bottom of the glass and fell into his lap.

When he finished the Scotch he padded back to the kitchen, where he replayed Dr. Ho's telephone message, and scribbled his phone number on a yellow Post It. He dialed.

A voice answered. ‘This is Clarence Ho.' There was noise in the background – voices, glasses clinking – it was probably a cell phone.

Timothy said, ‘It's me.'

‘Mr. Van Bender?'

‘Yes.'

Ho said, ‘Hold on.' In the background, Ho's voice said something to his companions, and then came the sound of amplified rustling, and breathing, and a door closing. Now the line was quiet and crisp.

After a long pause, Ho said: ‘I tried to explain to your wife what happened last night.'

Timothy was silent. He was leaning with his forearm against
the kitchen wall, over his head. The plaster was cool. He closed his eyes.

‘Are you at home?' Ho asked. ‘Do you have a computer in your house?'

‘Yes.'

‘Write this down.' He proceeded to dictate a single, arcane computer command. Timothy scribbled it on the Post It pad. Ho said, ‘Feel free to talk to her as long as you like. You can reach me in the morning.' Ho hung up.

Timothy wandered upstairs with the Post It clenched in his hand. He walked into the library. This had been her room: her oak bookshelves, her books – literary fiction he could never make it through – even her desk and red velvet divan, from her old New York apartment. On the desk sat her computer. He seldom used it. He sat down in front of it, reached under the desk and turned it on. After a moment the machine booted, and the whirr of the hard disk stopped.

Timothy followed Ho's instructions. He navigated to a command line and typed:

telnet 33.141.61.254

The cursor sat perfectly still for a moment. Then, words appeared on the screen:

Please don't throw the computer off the desk tonight
.

Timothy leaned back in his chair, thought about it. He was unsure what to type. Should he give in? Could this … this
program
possibly be her? Was it even a program? Was it perhaps Ho, sitting in his lab, chuckling as he typed?

A new line appeared on the screen:

Now is a really bad time to be technology-phobic, Gimpy
.

Then:

(
You're not going to go crazy if I call you that, are you?
)

Timothy closed his eyes. The wine and Scotch were doing their job. He felt nothing, except dizziness. This thing in front of him, this text purporting to be Katherine, meant nothing to him. Of course he wanted it to be her. But he refused to believe it, with any certainty. His wife was dead. And he was drunk.

He typed:
I'm having a hard time believing this
.

She responded:
I know. It must seem crazy. But it is amazing, Timothy. It is me. I am pure thought. That's what I feel. I think about typing, and I make the words appear
.

Timothy rubbed his chin. Could it be his wife, in a computer? It seemed impossible.

And yet.

And yet. How many technologies had he seen arise, in his short life, that – when they first appeared – seemed like magic? Could Dr. Ho have done something as amazing as this? Storing a human mind in a computer? It sounded crazy when he thought about it like that, but then again, what technology
didn't
sound crazy when it was developed? Didn't the MRI sound crazy – the idea that you can see inside the human body without cutting it open? And didn't it sound crazy to think that you could create a computer that could beat a human at chess? And didn't it sound crazy when people started freezing their sperm and eggs in test tubes so that they could make babies whenever they chose, in a laboratory, like a Betty Crocker mix?

Now we accept those developments as commonplace, Timothy thought. But when they first appeared, they sounded outlandish.

And how outlandish is it, really, to record a human brain? The way Dr. Ho described it made sense. The brain is just a bunch of software. And we can copy software.

And if there was any place in the world where such a technology could arise, this would be the place. And this is exactly how it would happen: a lone scientist and entrepreneur, laughed at by the medical establishment, but supported by a deep-pocketed Silicon Valley venture capitalist. How different was this from, say, Genentech, which pioneered gene splicing – putting a goat gene in an E. Coli bacteria – right down the street?

And even if this thing in front of him was only a pale simulation of his wife, a kind of artificial intelligence parlor trick, did it matter? It certainly seemed like her. The thing on the screen responded the same way his wife would have. Wasn't that good enough? After all, Timothy was glad to be talking to her again. He was not prepared to turn off the computer and walk away.

He wrote:

Why did you kill yourself
?

He immediately regretted it. It felt like an accusation. There was a long pause, as if his words had somehow hurt her. Then her response appeared.

I don't remember. I mean, I did think about it. When I learned about my illness, I made plans to do it. But that woman who killed herself – it wasn't me. I'm the backup. I made a copy of myself the day before we went to Big Sur. Remember when I said I was going to have lunch with Ann? I went to Dr. Ho's. And that's the last thing I remember
.

Timothy tried to grasp this.

Then she wrote:

How was Big Sur? Did you score? (With me!) Did we have great sex
?

Timothy laughed. Now he felt it for the first time: an unimaginable happiness. A furtive joy, deep in his gut. Like a child with a secret – a young boy with a crush who has just been kissed for the first time – or a job-seeker being offered more money than he even imagined asking for – he felt surprised and ecstatic. Could it possibly be her?

He knew what he had to type next. He almost didn't want to do it, because he was afraid that she would fail his test, that his happiness would be snuffed out like a candle taper, and he would never feel like this again, for the remainder of his years. But of course he had to know, to be sure. And so, very slowly – almost longingly – to avoid reaching the conclusion too quickly, he typed:

Answer one question for me
.

She said:
Anything you want
.

What were we going to name it? The baby. The last time we tried
?

The cursor sat there, hanging in the empty black space of the screen. It did not move.

Timothy's heart dropped, because he understood what the pause meant. It had all been a trick. Ho did not know the name of their baby, the child that he and Katherine had almost had, so many years ago. Ho was good: before her death he had asked her
many questions, gotten a lot of the details right, even picked up her mannerisms and speech patterns. The glib ‘Did you score? (With me!)' was a perfect Katherine imitation: insouciant, self-deprecating, hurt. It was a good trick. But it was only a trick.

Then the cursor sped across the screen and a new line appeared:

Connor. (I forgive you for bringing it up, Timothy.)

Timothy looked at the screen. His hands shook. Then, something he didn't expect: he started to cry. First it was just a tear, falling from his eye onto the desk, like the condensate from his glass of Scotch. But within seconds, it came, all at once, and his body shuddered and he rubbed his eyes and he wailed. His wife was there, talking to him. He had not lost her, after all. He had another chance.

‘Katherine …' he said aloud, reaching his fingers to the screen.

His tears blurred his vision, and so at first he did not see what she wrote next. It was just a smudge of shimmering text. He wiped his eyes and then read the screen. She wrote:

I miss you, Gimpy. You need to talk to Dr. Ho. He'll explain everything. I want to see you again. I want to come out
.

28

Dr. Ho agreed to see Timothy the next day, at noon. He insisted on meeting in a public place. Apparently his last encounter with Timothy had made him think twice about meeting the volatile Mr. Van Bender alone in a deserted office park.

They met at the Stanford Shopping Center, an outdoor mall adjoining the university. Ho was waiting for him at the food court, an atrium near the coffee and sandwich shops. He sat at a mesh wire table, with two paper cups of coffee in front of him.

Timothy approached. Under Ho's left eye was a purple bruise the size of an eight ball.

‘That's quite a shiner,' Timothy said. He took a seat across from Ho.

‘You're not going to punch me today, are you, Mr. Van Bender?'

‘I suppose that depends.'

‘On what?'

‘On whether you're going to share that coffee.'

Ho slid a cup across the table to Timothy. ‘So,' Ho said. ‘I take it you spoke to your wife.'

Timothy regarded him skeptically. ‘If you're lying to me, what you are doing is the lowest thing any man has ever done.'

‘I'm not lying to you.' Ho took a sip of coffee, snapped the plastic lid back on the cup. ‘I'm not asking you for any money, Mr. Van Bender. I've already received my payment for the backup procedure. I want absolutely nothing more from you: no money, no time, no attention.' He paused. ‘I am only trying to do what is right. I'm trying to keep the promise I made to your wife.'

‘Which was what?'

Ho shrugged. ‘This isn't science fiction, Mr. Van Bender.
There's no magic wand I can wave. I can't bring back the dead. Your wife's body is … dead. Even if she hadn't …' He thought about how to say it, delicately. ‘Even if she hadn't ended her own life, she would have died shortly because of her illness. That's the problem with the backup technique. All I am doing is keeping your wife in a kind of non-corporeal stasis. But she is not truly human, not alive in any meaningful sense, as she is currently constituted.'

Ho continued. ‘Someday, when we have perfected human cloning – and I believe it is only a matter of time – well then, you can imagine the possibilities. Backing up one's mind, and storing it along with a tissue sample for safe keeping. And then, should an accident occur, or an illness, one would simply restore the mind, re-copy it into a perfectly blank clone, back into one's own body, as it were. There would be no such thing as accidental death, or sudden illness. Imagine it.'

‘That would be pretty nifty.'

‘That's my vision for my company. To be the company that solves a huge market need: death. Obviously it opens up a whole can of worms. Moral and ethical dilemmas. But we could work through those. There would be no stopping the technology. Who doesn't want to live forever?'

Ho looked at Timothy, as if waiting for an answer. None came.

‘Which brings us to your wife,' Ho said. ‘You have a difficult choice to make now, Mr. Van Bender. I do not envy you.'

‘What kind of choice?'

‘Backing up your wife was only half of the plan. Your wife wanted to come back to you, to be with you …
physically
.'

‘Fine. How do we do it?'

Ho shook his head, as if to say: Mr. Van Bender is not a very smart man.

‘Tell me,' Timothy said.

‘As I said, this is not science fiction. There is no way to cure her cancer, or to bring back her dead body.'

‘So?'

Dr. Ho leaned over the table as if to impart a very dark secret.
‘I can restore your wife. But I need a …' His voice trailed off.

‘A what?'

‘A vessel,' Ho said. ‘Another person. I can simply overwrite your wife on top of someone else's hardware, as it were.'

‘Overwrite—' Timothy stopped and thought about it. ‘What happens to the other person?'

Ho shrugged.

‘You kill them?'

‘No, no,' Ho said quickly, looking around the food court, to see if anyone was listening. An obese woman walked by with two fat grade-school children. Ho waited for them to pass. ‘It's not like that. Their body stays alive. And their mind – well, I can simply perform a backup on that person too, so that when it is scientifically possible, we could theoretically bring that person back, without harm.'

‘You've got to be kidding.'

Ho shook his head. He was not kidding.

‘So you want to bring Katherine back in someone else's body?'

Ho stared at Timothy without speaking.

Timothy asked: ‘Whose?'

Ho raised his index finger. ‘That,' he said, ‘is up to you. But please allow me to make some suggestions. The person should be young, in outwardly good health. It would be an irony of O'Henry-esque proportion to go through this entire procedure and then learn that the person you chose had some sort of terminal cancer. Of course the person should be a woman; I don't think you want to live in your house with a bearded two-hundred-pound truck driver. It should be someone you find physically appealing – in the same way that you found your wife physically appealing. And finally, if I may make one more recommendation—'