Forever Yours
©2025 Elder Road Books - Lynnwood WA
Chapter 35: Upgrades
WORKING IN AN OFFICE with an official work day and organized staff did not make things easier on them. Nearly everyone except Nancy worked a regular day of ten hours or more. The contractors were strictly limited because they were hourly and could not be paid overtime. So, they often left the office before noon on Fridays if they stayed even that long.
Conrad and Darrel both had significant work that took them more than forty hours. They frequently called Henry in for code reviews. Darrel didn’t have broad experience with AI, but his knowledge of computer security software was extensive. He soon had a full suite of security applications specified and awaiting development.
Conrad lacked an actual network to test the network optimization software on. Henry promised to get that resolved.
Henry often swapped code with the other two so he could get Pythia Speaks upgrades reviewed as well.
“Everybody listen up!” Luke called from the center of the office on Monday in the middle of the month. They’d been in the office for two full weeks. The impromptu public address of Luke simply standing in the middle of the office and yelling brought everyone to attention.
“We have the second quarter revenue statement,” Luke announced. “We won’t always be calling everyone’s attention to this as the company grows, but this is a significant milestone and we are a tightknit group. The EMEE quarterly report shows sales of 2,817 units of Open Cloak Optimization resulting in $7,718.58 in revenue.”
There was polite applause, no one quite knowing what it meant to the company.
“The new Open Cloak Search has just begun selling and we launched 985 units,” Luke continued. “That comes in at $18,015.65 in revenue. The company has received a total deposit of $25,734.23. It’s not yet enough to meet expenses, but we are genuinely on our way.”
This time the applause and cheers were significantly more excited. In reality, that would fall short of meeting the month’s expenses. And the revenue was for three months. The partners all felt the burden of getting more revenue generated.
Everyone returned to their tasks and Henry waved to Chastity and Isobel to join him in Luke’s office. They all sat around Luke’s conference table.
“That was great to get people fired up, Luke,” Henry began. “We all know that it isn’t near enough and we’re feeling the pressure to get the network versions out. This won’t be a popular thing, but we need to spend more in order to get us where we want to be. We need dedicated testers.”
“I thought we were set through the summer,” Isobel said immediately.
“I thought so, too. Our testing group that worked on the first two programs is not able to test the new versions. They need to be tested on a network. That’s also going to be true of the counterattack software. Darrel has outlined a great plan to make it better and it could be a genuine product by the end of the year. But it, too, needs to be tested on a network. That means we need at least two testers and an independent testing network to run the apps on.”
“Two people?” Isobel screeched. “We definitely didn’t say anything about that when we were budgeting.”
“When we were budgeting, we didn’t even know we’d be a company with $20 million in capitalization, working in an office space we’ve leased for five years, on products that require full-time employees,” Henry shot back. “What do you think an investment is for? If we don’t get what we need to generate income then the investment just dwindles without producing anything.”
He glared at Isobel and she stared back at him.
“You don’t need to teach me about investment capital,” she said. “Just make your case for how we’ll get a return on the expenses.”
“Okay,” Henry said, calming down. “We have three products under active development and another two in planning stages with two products released in the market. In addition, we have one person working on fixing the bugs in our search engine that we didn’t catch because we rushed it to market with inadequate testing. They aren’t serious bugs. Nothing crashes yet. But they will irritate our users enough that they won’t consider buying a network installation. The network installation version is one of the products in development, being worked on by the same person working on bug fixes.”
“Okay. We’ve got one person doing two jobs,” Luke said.
“We have one person working on a network version of the optimization program. While the desktop version did not report significant bugs, the network version has expanded functionality that can only be tested on a network. We can’t really use our corporate network as a testbed. We’d risk having the company shut down periodically and possible loss of data.”
“So, that would require both a tester and a network, which would increase Darrel’s workload with two networks,” Chastity said, making notes.
“Yes, but it would benefit Darrel as well. He will want something to test the defense system on as well. That’s the product being spec’d right now,” Henry said. “So, the investment isn’t just a short-term expense. It will pay off with the testing of at least three products. Finally, we have Forever Yours in development. I need to call in all the dev team periodically for code review. I’m afraid the tests will be live. We’ll have half a dozen walls with AI trained on each and we’ll need to come up with questions to ask our ancestors. I propose expanding the number of people invited to use the product and accept updates as we develop.”
“There’s a hardware cost to that, too, isn’t there?” Isobel asked.
“Currently, we have limited the app to an attachable drive. There is no reason it couldn’t be installed on the subject’s own computer, but that puts data at risk from computer failure. The detachable drive should protect data,” Henry said. “I have two of the drives backed up in-house now and have returned the original drives so they can continue to collect data. And Lisa and I are primarily working on that app, though Lisa is also spec’ing a new version of Pythia Speaks, and is developing interfaces for both network products.”
“Do we need to get a full-timer in that position?” Isobel asked.
“Probably, but we have at least another month before it becomes urgent. We should probably start searching for a UI developer.”
“Really, this is only moving the new hires up by a month,” Chastity said. “We knew we’re going to have both Lisa and Josh returning to school in the fall and would need to fill those positions.”
“We might still need to fill those positions,” Henry said. “I don’t think we adequately planned for any testers.”
The meeting went on as they discussed options. Isobel calmed down as she began entering numbers in her spreadsheets and Chastity began searching and compiling job descriptions for the new positions.
Henry returned to his office and training the Forever Yours AI.
The wall on which Henry trained his Forever Yours AI was entirely his own legacy. After his conversation with Lisa, he approved the AI gathering all information about him. He didn’t actually do any special input. The all-access permission gave the AI unlimited permission to learn about Henry Pascal. That included all the information on his computers, his social media accounts, his financial records, and tax records. Of course, there was little in the latter two that would help the AI answer questions. But it gave the AI a lot of data without him having to actually input anything.
He and Lisa had been liberal about sharing information about their relationship. They’d posted pictures and videos of the two of them together at different events. He’d done a tour of the new office for a video. He’d been interviewed by Gene Grey twice. The company’s distribution partner, EMEE, was very pleased about the most recent interview and reported that sales had spiked after it went public.
All of these items were merely data points for the AI.
Unlike Pythia Speaks, Forever Yours included facial recognition and generative capability, so he could instruct the AI to show what he would look like skiing and it came up with a plausible video, even though he had no video of himself skiing. It was rough and not as polished as most generative AI could create. It was looking like video output would not be part of the first release. He did have photos of a couple of times he’d attempted it when he was younger. The AI did okay with that, but mostly just searched appropriate photos.
Mostly, though, Henry was interested in what kinds of responses the AI would generate to actual questions.
He had collected several self-reflection questions from various websites and used those to start querying the AI.
“What do you value most, Henry?” he typed.
“Relationships. Friendship. People,” came the response. It was still slow as it was searching for both keywords and interpretations. Still, the answer was rather specific, and Henry couldn’t really argue with it, though he expected something along the lines of ‘creativity and intelligence.’
“Tell me about relationships,” he instructed.
“I love my family and my best friends. I’ve thought I was in love a few times, but when I met Lisa, it was all different. My relationship with her is open and honest. It’s different than my relationship with my parents or with my best friends. But I value the relationship I have with them as well.”
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