Forever Yours
©2025 Elder Road Books - Lynnwood WA
Chapter 25: The Birth of Pythia
HENRY AND LISA got back from their date about 10:00 that evening. She blocked him at the door to the row house and pulled out her own key. She didn’t unlock the door, though. She looked into his eyes.
“I really enjoyed our date, Henry, and I hope you’d like to do it again. I’d consider it appropriate if you wanted to kiss me goodnight,” she said. Henry started to move forward, but she held him back with her hand on his chest. “But not in the house. If you want to kiss me goodnight, you need to do it out here and then let me go home.”
“I think you have a reason for this?” Henry said, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah. I’ve been thinking a lot about it this evening,” she said. “If we go inside and kiss in the apartment, it jeopardizes the relationship we have in there. I’m not ready to make a transition yet. It would just be convenient to kiss at breakfast or to sit on the couch making out. I don’t want to kiss you because you happen to be there and we’ve done it before. If we kiss inside, it will mark the beginning of a new kind of relationship. I don’t think you’re ready to go there yet, either.”
“You’re right,” Henry agreed. “I told you we wouldn’t have sex because it was convenient and I agree that this would be another significant step that I wouldn’t want to do because it’s convenient. However, I would love to kiss my date goodnight at the door, if it is okay.”
“Yeah. It’s okay,” she said.
Henry pulled her to him and she put her hands on either side of his head as she raised her lips to his. The kiss was warm and their tongues even touched slightly before they pulled away from each other.
“Thanks for a lovely evening,” she said. She unlocked the door and stepped inside, closing it behind her.
Henry waited a moment and reached for the doorknob, finding it locked. He chuckled as he pulled out his key, unlocked the door, and went into the apartment. He stopped in the kitchen long enough to grab a seltzer from the fridge and then went to his own third floor suite.
Both Henry and Lisa were a little unsure of how their relationship might have changed after having one date, but their routines were more powerful than any particular attraction. Lisa had a web design to complete and Henry was deep in his work on the oracle. He really wanted to start working on his father’s Ask Dad, but he knew there weren’t yet enough data points to be able to train the AI. He could, however, start training the oracle.
Henry needed to ask questions through the simple interface Lisa had put together the previous day and test the oracle’s answers, correcting mistaken word definitions and syntax. He didn’t know how many questions he could come up with until he did a simple search with the new search engine. He entered “questions to ask” and was overwhelmed with results. The first search revealed mostly interview questions and questions designed to get to know another person. When he added a word, “questions to ask myself,” more useful suggestions were revealed. He also found “questions to ask an oracle,” and a surprising number of “questions to ask my father.”
He started compiling the list from the many websites he found.
“What makes life meaningful?”
“What do I need to focus on?”
“What am I not seeing about my current situation?”
“How can I ensure success?”
“What will help me find inner peace?”
“What do I need most right now?”
The answers coming back didn’t necessarily match up with the questions. He got some laughs.
“Knowing enough is enough will ensure you always have enough.”
“Be mindful of your caffeine and sugar intake.”
“Your current situation is not your destination.”
“Accept what cannot be controlled.”
“Rocket ass boosts horse tracks.”
Well, not every answer could even be associated with a question. Occasionally, the randomness of the response was too far off to be parsed by the system.
“I’m ordering some Thai food for dinner,” Lisa said, coming upstairs. “You want some?”
Henry looked up and realized it was six o’clock on Saturday evening. He wasn’t sure he’d even taken a bathroom break. Chastity was sitting on the corner of his desk facing him and he had a hand on her bare leg. He looked to Lisa.
“Yes. Um ... Just some noodle thing, you know,” he said.
“How about you, Chastity?” Lisa asked.
“No. I was just saying goodnight to Henry. I need to work on my taxes tonight. I’ll see you next week.”
Lisa left the office and went downstairs.
“Taxes?” Henry asked.
“You had income this year. You have to report it for taxes.”
“We haven’t had that much income, have we?”
“You probably haven’t made as much as I have, but you still have to report it.”
“How do you report your income from ... you know?”
“From escorting? I just list it as a sole proprietorship business engaged in entertainment. Nobody questions it.”
“Wow.”
“Now put away your toys and go have a nice dinner with Lisa,” Chastity said. She stood up, letting Henry’s hand fall away from her thigh and headed for the stairs down.
Lisa called Henry’s cell phone when dinner arrived and he went to the dining room where she had the Thai food served. He sat down and thanked her for taking care of dinner.
“Uh ... Lisa ... About Chas upstairs...”
She held up a hand to stop him.
“Not a topic for now. Let me just say that I accepted Chastity as a fact of life before I ever agreed to date you. No more discussion.”
“Okay.”
Henry certainly didn’t expect that kind of response from a girlfriend seeing him with his hand on another woman’s bare thigh. Did that mean Lisa wasn’t his girlfriend? Kaitlyn, certainly, would have gone ballistic. She didn’t even like Lisa living in the same row house or Chastity working with him in the office. That was just one more good reason to have broken up with her. But Lisa?
He didn’t mean to flaunt his relationship with Chastity, but he had to admit, Lisa had seen them in that position before. It wasn’t unusual for Chastity to perch on the corner of Henry’s desk as she gave him a report on the testing agreements, correspondence, or other business matters. It was just so natural for Henry to touch her while they talked. He’d done it without even considering who else was in the room.
“So, what progress did you make on the oracle?” Lisa asked.
“Limited testing. Did you know you can search the internet for questions to ask an oracle? I was running out of things to ask and then found hundreds of questions, both appropriate and inappropriate, at my fingertips.”
“What was the most interesting question?” Lisa asked.
“When I wake up tomorrow morning, how will I be different than I am today?”
“Oh. That’s a great question. I think though it would be more appropriate for some serious self-examination than an oracle,” she said. She handed Henry a spring roll.
“In fact, that’s probably where I found it. I got on a search quest and started changing the parameters. Instead of questions to ask an oracle, I entered ‘questions to ask myself.’ But that wasn’t all. I uncovered some good resources for Ask Dad.”
“Don’t tell me you found ‘questions to ask my father!’” Lisa laughed.
“In fact, I did. There are great things that I’m going to feed into Dad’s recordings.”
“Like?”
“There were a lot of real basic questions, like ‘What did you want to become when you were a child?’ ‘Describe your first pet.’ But there were also questions that might make even my dad ... think a little,” Henry said.
This was exactly the kind of conversation he loved having with Lisa.
“Examples?”
“Like, ‘How do you think your career affected your role as a father?’ ‘What was the craziest thing you did after forty?’ And my favorite, ‘What was a time in your life when you felt like giving up?’ Some cool stuff.”
“Okay. Here’s one for you? Do you think your mother feels left out because you are doing this project just with your dad?” she asked.
“Holy shit! I don’t know. You know the only reason I set it up like I did was to try to get a sample data wall to train an AI with. Mom’s so busy and her work as a nurse is so stressful,” Henry said.
“You might want to check in with her. I know that as much as I talk about what I found out about my mother, I’d want to compile her life as well.”
“We need a new name,” Henry said. “We can’t just keep calling it Ask Dad. Not if we’re going to open it up to others.”
They finished dinner and cleaned up the remains and the dishes. They were both thankful they had a dishwasher. It kept them from eating their meals off paper plates. There was a box of grocery store cookies on the counter and they each took a cookie and made a cup of tea, then sat in the living room to continue their discussion.