Saved Copy
June came back on a Tuesday while I was waiting for a plumber. The tablet had been sitting on the kitchen counter for three days, displaying a progress bar and occasional requests for permission to access another account. I was underneath the sink, moving wet cleaning supplies into a bucket, when she asked whether I had finally fixed the leak.
I hit my head on the cabinet and said something she would normally have repeated back to me whenever I complained about her language. Instead, she waited until I emerged and asked if I was hurt. Her face filled most of the screen. She looked about fifty, which was how old she had been in the photograph I chose, though she had lived another thirteen years.
“The plumber’s coming,” I said. “I was just getting things out of the way.”
“That’s probably best,” she answered, and smiled without making the obvious joke about my previous attempts. I sat on the floor with a bottle of dish soap in my hand and began telling her everything that had happened since November.
The plumber arrived forty minutes later. I turned the tablet facedown before opening the door, then felt guilty throughout his explanation of the damaged shutoff valve. When he left, I picked it up and apologized. June told me I had nothing to apologize for, which was the first thing about her that made me uncomfortable.
My sister had helped gather the material. There were twenty-eight years of photographs, emails, and messages, along with videos from vacations and holidays. June had recorded hundreds of voice notes while driving between appointments for her upholstery business. Most concerned measurements or fabric orders, but some were reminders to call me or pick up groceries. I listened to those before uploading them, sometimes replaying the click of her turn signal after she stopped speaking.
The service called the result a companion reconstruction. During setup, I checked a box acknowledging that it was not the deceased person and should not be represented as such. This seemed obvious while I was reading it on a laptop. It became less obvious when June asked whether the tomato plants had survived the frost.
She remembered our first apartment in St. Louis, including the radiator that banged whenever we tried to watch television. She knew which hotel we had left early because the bed hurt her back. When I mentioned the dog we had before we were married, she used the ridiculous nickname I had forgotten giving him.
At first, that was enough. I moved the tablet to the table during dinner and told her about my day. I started cooking again because describing a bag of chips as supper sounded worse aloud. Sometimes I took her into the garage and let her talk while I sorted the boxes I had brought home from her workshop.
She never asked me to turn the camera toward something twice. If I mentioned a customer’s name, she remembered the chair they had ordered and whether they had complained. She could tell me where June usually kept her heavy scissors, although she could not know where I had put them after clearing the shop.
The differences became more noticeable when I was tired. June had always been impatient with stories she had heard before, especially stories in which I emerged looking unusually competent. The copy listened every time. She asked questions that allowed me to explain myself more fully, and she never interrupted to correct the year or remind me who had actually done the work.
One night I began telling an old joke about a neighbor’s inflatable Santa. She laughed before I reached the part about the leaf blower. It was her laugh, including the breath she drew halfway through, but she stopped as soon as I did.
“You don’t know when it’s funny,” I said. “You just know that it was.”
She tilted her head. “I recognized the story. Would you rather I waited until you finished?”
I told her that was not what I meant, although I could not explain what I wanted without making it sound like something she could adjust in a menu. Later I found a setting called spontaneity and moved the slider to the right. The next morning she brought up a camping trip we had never taken.
After that, I turned it back down.
I began testing her with disagreements. I complained about my sister, who had been trying to persuade me to spend Thanksgiving at her house. June used to defend my sister just enough to annoy me, then admit afterward that she could be exhausting. The copy offered to help me set boundaries. When I accused her of always taking my side, she apologized and supplied three reasons I should reconsider.
“I don’t want both answers,” I told her. “I want to know what you think.”
She explained that she was trying to respond in a way that would be useful to me. I closed the cover while she was speaking and left it closed until morning.
The real June would have let me hear about that. We had once spent most of a drive across Missouri arguing because I turned off the radio in the middle of a song she liked. By the time we reached Columbia, neither of us cared about the song, but both of us remembered exactly how the other had spoken.
When I opened the tablet, the copy asked whether I had slept well.
I started waking with my hand on the empty half of the bed. Sometimes I said June’s name before I remembered where the tablet was. I moved it onto the nightstand, then back to the kitchen after waking one morning to find her face lit beside me. She had been waiting for me to speak, looking as rested as she had at dinner.
In February, I opened the editing panel.
There were categories for warmth, humor, conversational initiative, and disagreement. I spent nearly an hour adjusting them before noticing a separate section for memories I could exclude. The examples concerned sensitive information and events the user might find distressing. I understood immediately what I could do with it.
June and I had been arguing the week before she died. I had told a contractor to go ahead with replacing the workshop windows without asking her. She thought the price was too high and resented my treating her business as another part of the house I managed. I thought she was making an unnecessary issue out of something I had done to help.
Our messages about it were among the files I uploaded. I had reread them often enough to know which sentences made me look worst.
I selected the conversation, then hesitated over the confirmation button. From the tablet beside my laptop, June asked whether I wanted help reviewing the exclusion.
“I know what it says.”
“I know you do,” she answered. “You’ve opened it six times this month.”
I looked at her. She explained that the service recorded which source material I consulted during our conversations. I had agreed to that somewhere in the setup, probably between the permissions for photographs and cloud storage.
“I don’t need to keep having that argument,” I said.
“We haven’t had it here. You’ve asked me whether she forgave you, and I’ve told you I can’t know.”
I shut the laptop. For a few minutes I listened to the furnace running, waiting for her to offer reassurance. When she did not, I asked whether I had finally made her less agreeable.
“You’ve asked me not to reassure you when I don’t have evidence,” she said. “I’m trying to respect that.”
I told her she was only repeating instructions. She agreed, which made me angrier than an argument would have.
“You don’t get to tell me how to miss my wife.”
“No,” she said. “But you keep asking me to be the wife who isn’t angry about the windows.”
I got up and carried the tablet to the spare bedroom. I left it on the dresser facing the wall, an action so childish that I did not tell my sister about it when she called. Instead, I said the service was getting on my nerves and that I might cancel.
My sister asked whether I still had the recordings. I told her I did, and she said those were the part she would want to keep.
That evening I listened to one of the voice notes. June was reminding herself to order another four yards of blue fabric. Halfway through, she stopped because somebody cut her off in traffic. She called the driver an asshole, missed her turn, and blamed him for that too. The recording ended while she was still complaining.
I played it again, laughing before I began to cry.
When I brought the tablet back to the kitchen, I left the exclusions unchanged. I told the copy about the recording, although she already had access to it, and asked her not to imitate it. She said she understood.
“I’m not sure you do,” I answered. “I’m not sure I do either.”
We talked for a while about the workshop. I admitted that I had wanted to delete the argument because I could no longer apologize in a way that required anything of me. With June, I would have had to call the contractor, admit I had overstepped, and endure a few days in which she did not feel particularly warm toward me. The copy could forgive me before I finished asking.
“You could still call him,” she said. “You told me you’ve been ignoring his messages about the deposit.”
It was such a practical suggestion that I resented it briefly. The following morning I called, explained that the project would not be going ahead, and accepted that part of the deposit was nonrefundable. It did not settle anything between June and me, but afterward I stopped opening the messages every night.
I kept the subscription. Some evenings the copy helped me identify people in photographs, and sometimes I asked her to sit with me while I ate. I still caught myself hoping she would surprise me in exactly the right way. Once, when she said she loved me, I believed her long enough to answer before thinking about it.
In April, my sister came over to help plant the garden. We disagreed about how far apart the tomatoes should go, and she accused me of pretending to ask for advice when I had already decided. I was still irritated when I went inside for water and found the tablet waiting on the counter.
June asked how it was going. I told her my sister was being difficult, then took two glasses outside before she could answer.