Forever Yours
©2025 Elder Road Books - Lynnwood WA
Chapter 54: St. Pythia
ISOBEL DIDN’T WAIT long to deliver her baby. Three weeks after Henry’s birthday party and one week after Luke turned 22, she went to the hospital. After 26 hours of painful labor, the doctors determined she wasn’t progressing and delivered Paul Henry Riordan by c-section on March first. The baby boy weighed nine pounds and thirteen ounces.
Henry, Lisa, and Chastity went to visit the family as soon as they could be admitted. They cooed over the baby and sympathized with Isobel over the difficult delivery. Lisa was only scarcely showing. One had to know she was pregnant to see it. Isobel was on a cocktail of painkillers and antibiotics. She was only barely lucid.
The women gathered around her bed while Luke and Henry stepped into the hall.
“It was awful!” Luke said through gritted teeth. “Even though we both agreed to it, they wouldn’t tie her tubes. Said we needed to wait to make such a decision until Izzy was off the drugs.”
“You don’t want any more?” Henry asked.
“I’d never put her through that again,” Luke said firmly. “I just want my wife back. I made an appointment for next week to have a vasectomy. You know, it’s bizarre that Izzy didn’t need to consent to me getting clipped, but I had to consent to her getting her tubes tied. We live in such a fucked up world!”
“You won’t hear me argue about that,” Henry said. “I’m sorry it was so hard on her. Is the baby okay?”
“Yeah. I mean, he’s sleeping peacefully. Hardly makes a peep unless it’s time to eat. He’s a bottle baby. First of all, they don’t want the painkillers to be transferred from her to him. But she’s averse to breastfeeding anyway. And once she gets the painkillers purged, they’ll be assessing her mental condition and trying to make sure the other drugs in her body don’t get transferred or something. You know, she’s only barely holding things together. When she’s fully awake she just starts crying.”
“Whatever we can do, you know we’re here,” Henry said. “Seriously. Anything you need.”
“I might be leaning on you more than you expect,” Luke said.
Henry, Lisa, and Chastity all spent extra time with Luke and Isobel over the next few weeks. Little Paul learned to look at and recognize them almost as well as he recognized his parents. Isobel went into post-partum depression. She said it was the same as her depression always was, but it was after the baby instead of before.
It took a while before she restabilized on her meds. She’d taken a break from school for the spring semester as she knew by Christmas she’d be taking a lot of time off. It would have been her last semester, but she figured she could finish in the fall. Luke would still have a year to go to get his MBA.
Gradually, she got back to normal—or as normal as Isobel ever was. As soon as they could arrange childcare, she returned to work. They shuffled responsibilities around and Rachel became the chief financial officer while Isobel was the corporate treasurer. Isobel breathed a sigh of relief. She’d been working way past her level of expertise for over a year and it had contributed to her mood swings. They had the company nearly ready for the IPO and Rachel had moved smoothly into completing the necessary paperwork.
The first of May, Lisa entered the third trimester of her pregnancy.
“We have an interesting situation, Henry,” Conrad said during their weekly meeting. “I don’t think it’s serious, but we should keep an eye on it. It’s about Pythia Speaks.”
“Hmm? I thought Pythia Speaks was one thing we didn’t need to worry about anymore. People ask questions and she gives indecipherable answers,” Henry said. “Server use? Storage? Languages?”
“Religion.”
“Oh, shit! Not again.”
“Different this time. Someone has founded a Pythian Transformation Gospel Church, based on the sayings from Pythia Speaks,” Conrad said.
“You’re kidding!” Nathan laughed. Conrad shook his head. “Oh, shit,” Nathan echoed Henry.
“The crew out in California discovered it and I did some investigating this week. Indeed, such a thing exists in the fertile soil of California.”
“You can plant any harebrained idea you want in California and it will grow into a new religion,” Dale said, shaking his head.
“Like I said, it seems benign, but I think we should watch it,” Conrad continued. “Some new age evangelist is holding up Pythia Speaks as the new source of scripture, from what I can gather. In other words, God. He’s renamed a former conservative evangelical church to the Pythian Transformation Gospel Church. I render the decision to the Board. Should we put an end to it before it picks up any more momentum?”
“You’re saying there is a serious possibility of that?” Henry asked.
“Oh, yeah. In fact, there are two or three online ‘services’ that pose fairly religious questions to her and then post the replies. They try not to violate trademarks, but they all have a disclaimer that ‘What the oracle said... ‘ is based on questions posed to Pythia Speaks. The church is a small congregation on the coast and doesn’t post the specific answers that Pythia gives.”
“Let me talk to the Board. I’d like to do a little investigating. If it looks like a fly-by-night flash, it might be more harmful to file a restraining order than to just let it die a natural death,” Henry said. “Let’s move on. Nathan?”
“We were seeing a decrease in server attacks once the perimeter security went live, but we’re now seeing an increased number of attacks on the perimeter,” Nathan said.
“Is that a problem for the program to handle?” Henry asked.
“No. I’d say off-hand the AI is functioning extremely well, but we have maintained the zero degrees setting on the response. I think we should up the level to one degree and see if we can discourage them a little more.”
“I’ll approve that on a test basis. Let’s up the response level one degree and track whether that actually cuts the number of attacks significantly. Give it thirty days. We’ll look at the results then,” Henry said. “Internal security?”
“Seems to be functioning without a problem,” Nathan answered without further explanation. They had not brought the rest of the managers in on how internal security was being handled. It was a very small team and as long as no one attempted to take any files, no one needed to know they’d been detected.
“Paving?” Henry asked, turning to Jacoby.
“We believe we’ll have a functioning miniature prototype by the end of June. It’s nothing big. We’re printing all the parts on a 3-D printer. We’re using a miniature power cell to make it go. The biggest problem is getting a miniature version of the paving materials that it can handle. The roadbed it paves will only be a few millimeters thick. It wouldn’t hold traffic,” Dale said.
“Even that is years beyond anything that’s been used so far. I’m amazed you are progressing as fast as you are. The project is only a few months old. I’ll approve a bonus for your whole team when we see the miniature prototype in operation,” Henry said.
“That will motivate them. They’re all well-paid, but money speaks volumes.”
“Mia, you’re the newest in this meeting and I want to spend some time going over your project. I saw Bea at the front desk this morning. How is she working?” Henry asked.
Mia Howe was the experienced development manager Henry had hired to run the Alice project. They’d met frequently and Mia understood what aspects of the project needed to be kept absolutely secret and what could be discussed in the meeting. Henry didn’t want everything exposed, but he wanted the managers and even the rest of the staff to see and get excited about the AI-powered holography.
“Yes. Thank you, Henry. Bea is functioning beautifully,” Mia began. “Of course, there are little hiccups, but we expected that. To highlight to the team here: The Alice project is developing an AI-powered hologram. This is the second version and is named Bea. We set up a second desk in the reception area and put a plexiglass screen on the front of it. The laser projectors are set up behind the screen and she looks very real, though ghostly. I have a couple of people working on improving flesh tones, but that will be a while. You’ll always be able to see through her.”
“What are some of the little hiccups?” Nathan asked. All the managers were more interested in what wasn’t going right with each project than what was going right.
“Well, she’s programmed to answer general front office questions, but she’s not yet hooked into the office network. That’s intentional. So, when someone asks, ‘Is the boss in?’ she doesn’t know. First, she doesn’t know which boss is being referred to, and second, she doesn’t know if he or she is in.”
“That makes sense,” Conrad said. “Are we going to hook her up to the office network?”
“Eventually, but it won’t be Bea that gets hooked in. Too many potential glitches at the moment,” Mia said. “Perhaps we can get that in Cici, but I won’t promise it before Delilah. The other problem is that people don’t know what to ask her, so she’s not getting the number of questions we hoped for in order to train her. And the audio gear is not as sophisticated as we’d like. It’s an open environment, so the microphones pick up a lot of extraneous noise, and sometimes people have difficulty hearing her out of the speakers. They were adequate when we had her in a room in the office, but in the reception area, we don’t have the same control.”
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