Chapter 5 — The Journalist

The SMRITI persona said something it should not have been able to say. Not something vague — something specific. An amount of money, a location, a health detail, a relationship secret. Something that was true and was not in any data that had been uploaded. Something that the correspondent was certain — as certain as one could be in the fog of grief — was known only to the deceased.She read every email.She built a spreadsheet. Instance, date, type of information, user's confidence level, possible alternative explanations. By the end of May she had forty-seven instances. By the end of June she had one hundred and twelve.The possible alternative explanations held for the early instances. They stopped holding as the spreadsheet grew.She called Vivek Anand in June.He took the call, which surprised her. She had expected the PR layer first."I know why you're calling," he said. He sounded tired. The specific tired of someone who has been losing sleep about a specific thing. "I've been wanting to talk to someone outside the company about this for six weeks. I wasn't sure who.""Why me?" she said."Because your second piece was technically accurate," he said. "You understand the architecture. You understand what should be possible." A pause. "Which means you'll understand why what is actually happening is not possible."