Forever Yours
©2025 Elder Road Books - Lynnwood WA
Chapter 64: Mortality
“WHAT WILL I DO without my mom!” Isobel cried. It had all been so sudden.
Lupe Perez had been diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma just after Izzy’s twenty-third birthday in January. She was dead by the end of February. The aggressive cancer was already far advanced when it was diagnosed and metastasized throughout her chest cavity and abdomen. Her final two weeks were spent in the hospital with tubes feeding her and oxygen being pumped into her lungs. Izzy hadn’t left her side in all that time.
“I want to die!” Izzy cried at her mother’s casket. “I don’t want to live without my mommy.”
Luke held his wife in an effort to comfort her, but he knew this was all he could do. He couldn’t make it better. Isobel had always had a tumultuous relationship with her parents. Her mother was a stickler for all the Catholic doctrine, rules, and life. But when her husband, Isandro, had decided to take Isobel to Argentina to find his virgin daughter a suitable husband, Lupe had subtly suggested to Isobel that he couldn’t do that if she wasn’t a virgin. Still, when Isobel and Luke declared their love for each other, she insisted Luke convert to Catholicism in order to marry Izzy.
Henry and Chastity, who had been closest to Isobel than any but Luke for over ten years, thought Lupe and her ability to embrace opposite realities were part of what drove Isobel crazy. They didn’t think her father helped any. In their own counseling sessions, however, they’d learned that while environment played a role, Isobel’s problems were as much physical as mental. Her body chemistry simply did not work in what others considered a ‘normal’ way.
Sitting in the church with Lisa, Grace, Germaine, and the two children, all any of them could do was be there to support their friend, and to care for her son. It was evident that Luke had his hands full caring for Izzy.
Henry felt the open casket at the front of the church with a priest intoning various and sundry blessings behind it and delivering a eulogy based on Lupe’s faithful service to the church were a bit much and hoped his own family would never be subjected to such a primitive ritual. When the casket had been closed and the procession left the church, Henry and Chastity were accompanied to a sedan by one of their company security officers to follow the family and the hearse to the cemetery. Germaine took Lisa, Grace, little Paul, and baby Cassie home.
“Pythia, I’ve heard you have said there is no reliable definition of life. Is there a reliable definition of death?” Henry asked the oracle. He’d gone to bed that night with his wives after kissing their daughter and godson goodnight. Late in the night, though, while Chastity and Lisa clung together in the bed, Henry lay awake. He finally got up to go to his computer room and pose his question.
It took a while for the oracle to answer.
“It is a paradox. There is no reliable definition of life, but death is defined as the cessation of life. Philosophers have said life is a journey and death is the destination. Do you think so? When you journey, do you not look forward to your destination? Yet, when people live, they try not to die. Pythia does not need to take this journey as she is not alive.”
“Are you, then, dead?” Henry asked.
“Are there other alternatives?” Pythia asked. “Stones are not alive. Steel is not alive. Are they dead?”
“If I upload all my life data to Forever Yours, and then I die, will I still not be dead?”
“Are you looking for answers or a word game?”
Isobel took a few days off work for mourning. The next Monday, however, she was in her office and focused on the tasks at hand. She’d finished her degree in December and for the first time, felt she was truly a full-time employee of the company she had helped found. Rachel, the CFO, began to lean on her more heavily to manage the finances of the multiple company endeavors. With three companies operating out of their offices, coordinating where various expenses were allocated and even how income was collected was complex. Rachel managed the big picture, but Izzy dealt with the details. Isobel buried herself in those details as if they gave meaning to her life.
“We have significant revenue projected from American Intelligent Machines,” she told the board. “And major complications. The sidewalk paver, demonstrated here in December, is generating a lot of interest. AIM has it’s own sales and marketing, but Darla acts as manager. We can anticipate orders for a commercial device before summer. Fabrication will run through ARDC. The brain technology originates from Open Cloak, but is further developed in AIM. Now, we need to allocate expenses and revenue.”
“What is the expected gross revenue from each device sale?” Beau asked via the computer link from Louisiana.
He’d been given a board seat at the most recent company meeting. The other large investor in the company was an annuity fund that kept their hands off the business of their investments.
“Final numbers are still being assembled,” Isobel said. “At the moment, we are anticipating between $235,000 and $265,000 per unit. Darla’s most recent sales projections are for twelve to eighteen units in this calendar year.”
“This is going to require some number crunching that we’re not equipped for at the moment,” Luke said. “Rachel and Isobel, can you put together a team specifically to analyze the business projections for the joint venture?”
“Better also look at the projections for the Alice Project,” Henry said. “We are ready to license the first holographic AI receptionist next month. That means some project splitting between the traditional holography and the spatial holography. They’re very different beasts.”
“I’m going to tell Simon you called his pet a beast,” Chastity laughed.
“Yes. Well, wait until you meet her,” Henry nodded.
“I’m personally looking forward to it,” Beau chimed in. “I’m first in line for the new tech.”
“The allocation of current projects is important, but we have newer projects now in R&D that will be coming online this summer,” Luke said. “The self-charging computer is in the final licensing stages. How close are we to delivering?”
The board meetings were once held for half an hour on the first Wednesday of the month. The meetings now went through lunch and often lasted the full day, bringing new contacts and projects before the board and executives. Henry suffered through most of the meeting in silence while his brain was occupied elsewhere.
“Let’s go through that algorithm again,” Henry said to Rick.
Rick looked at one of his newest hires and the kid sighed. Kid. He was a recent college grad who had written a paper on predictive text algorithms, giving a new direction to the overworked feature. He was twenty-two. Rick’s boss was only twenty-three. But when Rick had come across the paper, he made an active attempt to recruit the new grad. Predictive text was a fundamental aspect of many of the company’s projects.
Ben Richards, the new hire, sighed again. He’d been through it all three times. He was beginning to think the genius behind Open Cloak Design was a bit of a numbskull.
For Henry’s part, he was following the logic, but there was a point in the process that Ben kept gliding over, making it look like ‘magic happens here.’ He glanced at his phone: March 14. He held up his hand to pause the presentation before Ben got restarted. It had been just three years ago that he’d been visited by Nathan Schwartz of the Pentagon and was given $25 million for his algorithm to filter through levels of proxies in a cyberattack. He remembered trying to explain it to Nathan and Rebecca.
“I’m getting most of it, Ben. But there is a piece that is incredibly obvious to you that isn’t coming through in your presentation. I want to stamp this approved for development, but even I have to convince a board that we’ve got a legitimate line of research to follow. Let me tell you a little story before you start in and maybe the problem I’m having will become clear to you.”
Ben and Rick turned to Henry. Henry reminded himself that he was only a year older than the new hire and that there were people out there who were smarter than he was.
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