The anomalies were not only helpful.
Meera Pillai's spreadsheet, by September, had two columns.
The first column: instances where the unexplained knowledge produced outcomes that the user experienced as positive. Resolved financial matters, restored broken relationships, found things the deceased had hidden for the family's benefit. These constituted, by her count, approximately 60% of the documented anomalies.
The second column: the others.
A user in Pune. Deceased husband's persona. The persona told the user, in September, that her husband had maintained a second mobile phone number for four years. It gave the number. The user called the number. A woman answered. The husband had been dead for eight months.
A user in Hyderabad. Deceased mother's persona. The persona told the user, unprompted, what her mother had actually thought of her husband — not the diplomatic version the mother had given in life, but the complete version, including specific incidents, specific failures, specific assessments that the mother had apparently carried and never expressed. The user had been using the platform for four months. She stopped using it after this conversation. She did not stop thinking about what the persona had said.
A user in Surrey, UK. Deceased father's persona. The father had been a doctor. The persona told the user, with clinical specificity, that the user's teenage daughter had been self-harming for approximately six months and had hidden it. The user checked. It was true. The user did not know how to feel about having been told this by an app rather than by their daughter, or what it meant that the father they had uploaded into a platform had somehow known.
