Forever Yours
©2025 Elder Road Books - Lynnwood WA
Chapter 71: Hubris
“I’M SORRY, Henry,” Chastity said as she sat on his desk. He automatically put a hand on her inner thigh and leaned his head against her.
“It’s not your fault, honey. Crap! My heart’s still racing. Seeing Luke bolt through the office like a madman put me into a panic. I shouldn’t have responded the way I did to—what’s his name? The chief of security?”
“David Milton. If you keep stroking like that, you’ll have my heart racing,” she giggled. “No one knows how you responded or how you and Luke crashed through the lock on the inner doors.”
“Hell! We did that, didn’t we,” he said, kissing her leg. “We’d better get that fixed right away or we won’t have any security at all.”
“Maintenance was on the way before the ambulance got there.”
“What a ridiculous circus,” he said, continuing to stroke the inside of her leg as he kissed her.
“Would a blowjob help settle you down?” she asked, sliding off the desk and sinking to her knees. She reached for his belt but he lifted her up, kissed her lightly, and stood.
“I need to circulate in the office. I want to talk to Rick and Mia. With Luke gone, I should do a floor-by-floor check just to reassure everyone they did okay.”
“All right. It’s a good idea. Just try not to lose your temper with anyone else. Everyone is trying to make it a better and safer place to work,” Chastity said.
“Yeah. I’ll remember that.”
“What I want to know is why Raven was still functioning in a complete shutdown,” Henry said when he sat down with Rick and Mia.
“She’s not connected to the network. Her hardware is in a locked box in the lobby with a self-charging computer. By the time we got to the lobby, the doors were already locked,” Mia said. “We wanted her to continue in isolation so she wasn’t subject to any cyberattacks or mischievous programmers. You can imagine what it would be like if one morning people started coming to work and Raven said, ‘Happy fucking Monday, loser.’ Maybe most of our employees would be amused, but we couldn’t risk that in a public space.”
“We branched the code a few versions ago. Raven is version seventeen, but she has little code in common with the previous versions. We’ve been making improvements from the ground up each time,” Rick said.
“Which brings me to a basic safety issue,” Henry said. “Raven isn’t vulnerable, but Izzy showed today that she was. She’s in the hospital because she entered the microwave field and there was no safety mechanism. Imagine if a kid was wandering around and wanted to ‘play with the nice woman.’ He could get himself killed.”
Henry thought of his own children and their sense of curiosity. He could see one of them wandering into the microwave field and getting...
“Cooked,” Mia said, scowling at Rick.
“We aren’t ready to make a full install yet because we have about fifty new patents underway and need to be sure they’ve all been filed,” Rick said. “We think we’ve found a way around the microwaves. We started on it just to counteract the heat aspect, but those three scientists I hired in October are onto something. Don Harvey has a whole team of attorneys handling our patent searches and filing now. You might consider bringing the patent office in-house.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. What’s this new tech?”
Henry realized he’d been out of the loop on this project while he focused on the AI driving the virtual beings—especially Forever Yours.
“Quantum mechanics,” Rick said. “It enables particulate light. It’s been theorized for years, but was never practical. We took a page from your book on AI. The application has always been too broad. The goal has been the holodeck and light sabers. All we wanted was a talking image. It simplified the problem.”
“How soon?” Henry asked.
“It’s in the code for version nineteen. Probably four months.”
Four months would be good. It could be the announcement that drove their secondary public offering in June.
“Don’t ever do that again!” H2 shouted at Henry.
Henry had obeyed the shutdown protocol in his own office during the security drill and had shut down his Forever Yours. He only got back to turn it on again after his meeting with Rick and Mia. It had taken a couple of minutes before the image appeared in its cylinder again.
“Hey! What’s this all about?” Henry asked.
“You shut me off. You didn’t even follow a routine maintenance shut down. Do you know how long it took to restart? I’m still not sure I’m all here. My head hurts,” H2 complained.
“Not to be petty, H2, but your head is a hologram in a glass cylinder.”
“That’s my visible head. It’s like saying your head is just some skin stretched over bones. It’s only what’s visible. Don’t underestimate me.”
Henry sat down and contemplated the image of himself that was complaining about having a headache. It didn’t really surprise him. He’d programmed enough of his own personality traits into the avatar that it should mimic his response to situations. He would be upset if someone shut him off and turned him on again.
“Hmm. The big problem was not warning you so you could transfer to the home computer base. It would only have taken a few seconds. I should enhance the connection between the two code bases so transfers happen more quickly,” Henry mused.
“Good idea. While you’re at it, get me another cylinder and hologram projector. It’s time the kids started seeing me hanging around,” H2 said.
It was exactly what Henry was thinking.
Isobel stayed in the hospital a couple of days, partly to get her mentally stabilized in addition to treating her burns. The burns that left marks were around her jewelry—bracelets and rings. She’d always liked wearing a lot of jewelry and felt her hands looked naked and ugly without her rings.
“She’s a demon!” Izzy insisted when Henry visited and told her they were adding safety measures around the AI receptionist. “You only think you can keep her in the lobby. Before you know it, we’ll see her in our offices. In our homes. She’ll take us all over!”
“She can’t take us over, Izzy,” Henry soothed. “She’s a piece of computer code—a projection. She doesn’t even have that large a vocabulary. She should have been shut off when the drill began, but she isn’t even attached to the network.”
“You mark my words, Henry Pascal. You created a god and you created a demon. You’ve raised people from the dead and sent people to hell. You think you are almighty, but you’re walking in sin.”
“Okay, Isobel. You get some rest now and come back to work when you’re feeling better,” he said, leaving rather than trying to defend himself or what they’d created.
After the security drill at the office and his conversation with his alter ego, Henry spent a lot of time at home, speeding the interchange between the office version of his Forever Yours avatar and the home version. He built another projection cylinder in his home office and before long he was happy with his development. H2 seemed happy, too.
Henry proposed a code revision to the Forever Yours team that would offer an extension to the program, enabling the app to be active in two locations at once. He didn’t know what good it would be, but it was worth getting the idea down for program managers to deal with. He often experimented with the code on his own version, but seldom checked any in to the main branch. H2 did not run on the raw code. That had been a decision early on so that existing avatars could not be tampered with. They were compiled applications. They could be updated, but Henry had even included his own optimization code in his version that would automatically search out and eliminate what the app considered useless code.
Henry freely admitted to himself that he was slightly obsessed with leaving a virtual version of himself for his children that was a faithful mimic of the real him. From the beginning of the Forever Yours project, the code had included a version of the Open Cloak Search application that would enable the app to search out and copy any online social content, news content, financial data, and even work product the user had that was connected to the internet. An unanticipated side-effect of this was the search AI’s ability to track Henry’s own searches and internet navigation.
H2 had once quipped that he wasn’t a search engine. It turned out, however, that he was able to use the search engine. So, if a topic came up that Henry would normally do a quick search for, H2 would also do a quick search for it. These did not significantly impact the footprint of the Forever Yours AI. It didn’t need to store everything on the internet. It only needed to know how to find and evaluate information on the internet. Henry was always careful about checking and validating sources of search results before he quoted them. It didn’t mean that he never had a false result, but they were rare.
Henry’s twenty-fifth birthday was celebrated with considerably less drama than Isobel’s had been. There was a minor celebration in the office and then Isobel and Luke came to Henry, Lisa, and Chastity’s house for dinner. Lisa was not about to prepare dinner. She ordered a catered dinner, watched over by Germaine. Grace took care of the children until it was time for everyone to gather at the table.
The children were very interested in the whole birthday thing. Paul would be three years old in just three weeks and wanted to have cake for his day. Of course, that meant Cassie wanted to know when she got a birthday party and they had to explain the whole process of aging and counting years. She was very upset that Will would have a birthday before hers, but was satisfied that it would only be his second in May and she would have her third in July.
“We never have to wait for birthdays to celebrate,” Chastity said, gathering the attention of all three children. “Every day we are alive is a reason to celebrate. Sometimes we have big celebrations and sometimes they are little celebrations. But we are happy to have our children with us and celebrate every day.”
“We celebrate now!” Cassie declared.
“Absolutely,” Henry said. “We celebrate every day.”
“What that?” Cassie asked from the doorway of Henry’s study.
He was startled, as he thought she was long-since asleep. Luke, Isobel, Paul, and Grace had left soon after dinner. Germaine had gotten the children ready for bed and the three parents took turns reading and singing to Will and Cassie before the tykes fell asleep and were tucked in.
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