Forever Yours
©2025 Elder Road Books - Lynnwood WA
Chapter 24: Oracular Sayings
“HEY, HENRY,” Lisa said Wednesday. “Happy birthday!”
“Oh, wow! I’m out of my teens. When can I retire?” Henry laughed.
“That’ll be the day. Do you think you’ll ever retire?” she asked.
“Well, it won’t be today. That statistics class is not what I was expecting. I need strong coffee this morning.”
“Oh, hey. Do you remember freshman orientation?”
“Wasn’t that like fifty years ago?”
“I’m sure. Did you get one of the department coffee mugs?” she asked.
“Didn’t we get a coffee mug from everyone? I think we’ve got twenty different mugs in the cupboard. Josh and Leonard don’t even bother to bring their own mugs over when they’re working. So, I’m sure I got one of the department mugs.”
“A brown one or a red one?”
“Um ... I’d have to say brown. I’m sure I’d remember more clearly if it was the red one. Why?”
“I just ran across a memory pic on my feed and saw the cup I was holding. It was red.” She looked at the brown mug in her hands. “I think I’ve been using your mug since I moved in.”
“Lisa! My mug? Really?” Henry asked, feigning alarm. “Does that mean we’re, like, married now?”
“Married?! You must be kidding!” Lisa shouted. “We haven’t even had sex yet!”
“I was joking!” Henry backpedaled.
“Of course. Um ... So was I. You know.”
They shared a look with each other like they’d just met, then Henry took another swallow of his coffee and they headed for the car to go to class.
Henry didn’t really have time to think about Lisa that day. They split when they got to campus and Lisa caught the bus home as Henry went to his parents’ house for birthday dinner. Chastity was waiting for him on the front steps.
“Happy birthday,” she said giving him a peck on the lips.
“Oh boy! Are you my birthday present?”
“I don’t think your parents would pay for me, so I’ll have to give myself to you,” she snarked. “So, what’s-her-name is out of the picture?”
“Kaitlyn is out of my life, if that is what you mean.”
“Okay. Let’s not mention her by name again. I never really liked her much and painting on a smile when she was around made me feel like a fake. I am who I am and you and I are both twenty years old now. Let’s just make the most of it,” she said.
“Why are you standing out here on the porch?” he asked.
“Your parents aren’t home yet. I was waiting for you,” Chastity said.
“Well, they never took my key away, so I guess I’m allowed to open up. I thought Mom said she was going to be home before I got here,” Henry said.
“She must have gotten held up at the hospital,” Chastity said. “She works so hard.”
“She does. Since she got Thanksgiving weekend off so she and Dad could go to Florida, she had to work every day through Christmas and New Year. When we actually get money ahead in the company and I’m earning a real salary, I’m going to buy Mom and Dad a cruise around the world or something.”
He opened the door and reached in to turn on the light.
“Surprise!” a group of people yelled as they were illuminated.
“What the...?” Henry jumped back.
“Your mother told me you’d never had a surprise party. So, we gathered up the gang,” Chastity said.
Luke and Isobel reached him right after his parents and congratulated him on leaving his teens. Luke’s parents, Paul and Marla, were there as were the Donovans from a few doors down. Then there were the guys from his study group, including the ones who were contracted to the company: Lisa, Josh, Simon, Leonard, and Dan. Professor Jacoby greeted him, along with Conrad and Arden, upper classmen who shared a couple of classes with him.
“I’m ... Wow! I mean, this isn’t a weekend and it’s not like it’s even a really important birthday,” Henry said. “Really, thank you all for surprising me on my birthday.”
“Every birthday is important, son,” Ryan said. “It’s something you made me realize recently. Every day is a reason to celebrate.”
“How’s that, Dad?”
“Filling out the questionnaires and recording stories for your project. It’s just made me feel especially mindful of the time we have together. Every opportunity we have to celebrate a life event, we should do it.”
“People, there’s a lot of food and soft drinks,” Sylvia called out. “We know everyone has to get back to homes and schedules, being a weeknight, but eat up while you’re celebrating.”
That broke the press on Henry as people traded places and got food as well as greeting Henry. The house was packed and eventually, Chastity brought Henry a plate of food so he could eat, too.
Isobel took the plate out of Henry’s hands and handed it to Luke. Then she smashed herself against him and gave him a kiss that silenced the party.
“Izzy! What the hell?” Henry asked.
“We drove five hours getting here and are getting back in the car to drive five hours back at 8:00. I want to get something out of the trip!” she said.
“Oh! Of course! Come here and let me kiss you again,” he laughed.
She pressed herself against him again and people ignored the display this time, even though Henry made himself at home by gripping Isobel’s abundant ass.
“Better make that all if I want to get back to Philly tonight. Alive,” Izzy laughed. She grabbed Henry’s plate from Luke and handed it back to him. Luke followed and shook his hand.
“Uh ... Sorry about that,” Henry said as he gripped his friend’s hand.
“Hell, if that was all I had to worry about, I’d be a very happy man,” Luke laughed. He lowered his voice. “The worst part is that I’ll have to act offended and jealous all the way back to Philly in order to convince Izzy I love her.”
Luke and Isobel’s departure at 8:00 was a signal for everyone to leave and by 8:30, the house was nearly empty. The Donovans were helping Henry’s parents clean up.
“Hey, Henry. Could you drop me off at the apartment on your way over to Chastity’s,” Lisa asked when she got next to them.
“I could drop Chastity off and just drive us back,” Henry said. “What makes you think I’m going to her house?” Chastity jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow.
“It’s where I’d be headed if I were you,” Lisa laughed.
“Want to come along?” Chastity asked.
“Oh ... uh ... Well ... Not this time. You know. Not yet,” Lisa sputtered.
“I’ll take you home, then,” Henry said. “This has been a crazy day. I need to say thank you to my parents.”
“What was all that about with Lisa?” Henry asked Chastity as they came down from their first orgasm.
“Can’t you tell?” Chastity asked. “She’s interested. She just doesn’t want to express too much interest too soon after your breakup, but she also doesn’t want to miss the chance before you hook up with someone else.”
“There’s no one else on my horizon but you. Why would she pretty much assume I was going home with you?” Henry felt incredibly stupid. He needed to take more initiative in his relationships. It seemed he was just too busy to treat them seriously.
“Didn’t you hear her? She said it’s what she would do. She knows we get together for sex once in a while.”
“And you invited her to join us.”
“Next time you invite her.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“So, you don’t really need a fancy interface for this thing, do you?” Lisa asked as she sat with Henry Friday morning in the office. They were looking at the diagram for his oracular sayings software.
“Nothing elaborate at the moment, but we need to decide how a person would interact with the program. Remember this is really a testbed for the Ask Dad program. It’s going to be months yet before my father’s database has grown to an extent that I can start training an AI on it. The oracle already has a database I scraped from the internet of almost a billion data points.”
“What else do you need to do with it?” she asked. “I mean besides have a text box where people can ask a question.”
“There are all kinds of possibilities for it. Right now, I’m trying to set up rules for things to ignore and acceptable words to use in response. This is actually a lot simpler than Ask Dad. We’re dealing only with text. No audio and no video. That will require another level of development and I hope I have someone else full time on it besides the two of us.”
“You consider me full time?”
“Well, not at the moment. You can’t work full time while you’re in school and we can’t afford to pay you until we get more revenue and/or investment,” Henry said.
“Okay. So, do you have a dictionary of forbidden words? We could have the interface just substitute an acceptable word when an unacceptable one is entered.”
“I’m compiling that, but you should have it soon. For now, let’s just have a text input and a text output. That will tell me more about how it needs to be trained than I currently have.”
“Okay. We’ll input a text string. What’s it supposed to be? Ask a question?”
“We should limit it to that at first. Linguistic analysis should enable the AI to respond to statements as well as full questions,” Henry said.
He watched Lisa construct a simple text box and link it to the AI. Then she created an answer box, reversing the connection and limiting both to 140 characters. They both laughed at the reference and vowed they would set their own logical limit later.
It still wasn’t an interface. It was just two text boxes in her dev app. She was quick and Henry saw a new code snippet he hadn’t thought of before. He quickly made a note of it. And then his eyes went back to Lisa.
They’d known each other for a year and a half now. She’d rented an apartment from him for six months. He’d gotten used to seeing her at the breakfast table or lounging in the living room. They often ate dinner together. He liked her.
There wasn’t much not to like. She was smart and witty, a good programmer, knowledgeable about AI and quick to grasp concepts as Henry rattled them off. And she was seriously cute, now that he thought about it. He remembered well the stunning girl he’d taken to a fall dance. She never flaunted her looks, but he knew she was really pretty. Sexy. He hadn’t really allowed that thought to cross his mind before.
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