OUR FAMILY LEARNED of my father's death, or non-death, I suppose, through FedEx. My son found the package abandoned in a puddle by the garage. My wife opened it at the kitchen table. I was in the other room and curious as to why she was not saying what was inside, and when I came into the kitchen, I recognized that face of consternation. "Honey," she uttered. "I think… I think your father is dead, maybe."
I took the printed piece of copy paper from her hand; it read:
Dear Skiff family,
I somewhat regret to inform you that your father, K.A. Skiff, close friend and colleague, in the final days of his bodily existence on this earth had partially achieved his long sought after goal of preserving life through artificial means via the miracles of modern hardware and software. The only reason for my mediated discontent is the fact that he hadn't the time to fully develop the concept of a final post-human form with a fully capable interface, so I present to you him and his prototype. Nonetheless, it is your father, and it is his greatest achievement to date. May he have many more.
Sincerely,
John Cald, Ph.D.
In the package was a small gray project box bolted together with a single LED light, a hole for what I would later find out was for a simple piezo speaker, and an analog battery indicator. My family, including myself, was cautious to move the device when we realized it was my father, especially when it — he — made his first beep at 1760 Hz. My kids kept asking how this had happened, expecting me to understand the science of it all. "How did he get his whole body in there!"
"It's not his whole body. Just his mind—"
"But it's smaller than his head!"
"It's not his head — just his thoughts and personality," and I shuddered. Son of a bitch, did he really do it?
My father had moved out of the area a few years before, coming out of retirement, apparently, to rent a new lab and show us, or me, "what real success was all about." I had a hard time explaining the episode to my kids, let alone my wife. Goddamn if he knew how hard we try to keep up a family unit that resembles something traditional. But when I looked again at my six-by-six inch father-box lying there beeping on the table, I picked him up and held him. I didn't know what to do with him but putting him in a higher place on the mantle seemed right for the family. "Kids, Grandpa's back. Make him feel at home."
Beep.
Some instructions came with the package for operating my father. He was apparently receptive to stimuli, and his method of communication was blinking the LED accompanied by the high pitch beep. He was obviously powered by some kind of rechargeable battery, because he came with a power port and a DC adapter with a battery meter. I figured leaving him plugged in would damage the battery, so to include him in our lives, I decided we would recharge him at dinner. I had the kids do it to help them bond with their grandfather.
My father's beeps were difficult to understand, but less berating than anything he’d ever vocalized. At times he would beep on in a flurry like Morse code, but not in any known format. I checked methodically, because he would have mocked me if I missed something so simple. Other times he would go off just once, sometimes long in the middle of a conversation. My wife noted that he did it when nobody was in the room at all — she would hear him from another.
I'll admit, I often glared at my father and wondered how the hell he managed this whole thing. The memories alone must have been more than terabytes — petabytes even — unless he had discarded some of them. And what would he have thrown out? God forbid anything about my mother — as many times as he left her — or my wife and kids — even given his issues with us, or her, and the trouble he made for the family. How much processing did it take to develop or phrase an idea? He used to say to me after I had moved out, "What do you do again, fix stereos?" but I imagine he doesn't waste his beeps on that kind of talk these days. Sometimes I sit with him and a scotch, but I try not to go into much detail about how well my high-end audio-visual installation business is doing right now. I don't mean to stress him or his processor, and I think my home says enough.
I should have been more attentive, only finding out a few days later that my father's battery was running low according to the meter. I confronted my son whose turn it had been to take care of him. "I don't know," they always say. "I don't know," again and again, turning away. I tried to explain that keeping those lights on meant keeping grandpa alive. I often saw him just peering at his grandfather from another room when he should have been telling him all about what was on his mind or what he did that day. Once, the boy asked me, "what part of his body is the little hole, if grandpa is alive?" and his little sister suggested before I could, "it's like his butt!"
"No," I explained, "that's just for his batteries — nothing strange about it," and they looked at me strangely. "It's like putting food in his stomach," I added, and they nodded. I showed them, as I had to with any other pad or game, or device, plugging in the DC adapter. My son still hesitated to put his hand near the battery port. Just a little piece of plastic is enough to get the boy riled up. He’ll fondle his action figures but can’t handle even a screwdriver or his grandfather.
The girl, on the other hand, is careless. She’d play with her grandfather and get into my tools to tinker while she was at it. I never thought to plug outlets with plastic stoppers as a parent until my wife caught her inches away from discovering electricity as a toddler.
I thought my family had acclimated to my father’s move in until my wife began to avoid the various rooms in which I would place my him. Sometimes I noticed that she would move him from shelf to shelf, especially to the ones off in the corner, facing his light to the wall. "Did he do something to you? What's the deal with moving my father like a dead clock?" I asked.
"He beeped," she said. “Inappropriately.” She claimed he would beep wildly at her, but I tried to remind her of how he always was — when he had a body, of course. My loyal daughter followed suit avoiding her grandfather, no doubt at the behest of my wife. Or maybe it was just her usual lack of commitment — not unlike the time we bought her hermit crabs down the shore.
When my family was absent, I alone talked and beeped with my father, but I'll admit we weren't always on the same page. I always kept a scotch close, even though he’d never allowed me one — and obviously wouldn't now — but it was my basement after all. I brought him down there since my family had lost interest.
Late nights with my father in my basement workshop led to late mornings. I let my employees begin to open the office for once. It had been such a long time since I got to be alone, and I had forgotten the satisfaction of life without a schedule. When my wife left the house, the kids too, I spent my days working my own business in private like I had before children. I had only adopted the 9-to-5 life to get the kids out of bed and into class and then into bed again, but they've gotten that lesson by now. I'd had the basement workshop and tools for years but had senselessly lost myself in a routine I didn't write for myself. Of course, I couldn't avoid the comments at home — as if everyone had forgotten that I could work and take phone calls at any hour of the day without putting on a polo shirt and slacks.
Some nights I decided to take time for myself, catching up on the movies and shows I missed from a childhood without the constant why, why, why I get from my kids and even my wife, who apparently doesn't remember an analog life before Wi-Fi and holograms.
Not for the first time late at night, I heard a wailing, at first questionable, then undeniable throughout the house. I wondered why my wife hadn't dealt with it first, but realized what she would say to me if I wasn’t already handling it. I paused the tv and walked down the hallway to see my boy there sitting in the corner against the wall next to his bedroom, his hands over his eyes.
"What happened?"
"Again. Again. The same. Thing," he sobbed. This was not the first time. "I saw—"
"You had a bad dream?"
"I saw. There was—"
"But you didn't see anything in your room, right?"
"No, but—"
"So it was just a dream—” My wife came out from the bedroom door adjacent.
"What is going on?" she asked him, "And why don't you have clothes on?" she snapped at me.
"I have a robe."
"Ok, I don't know, but I don't have time for that," and she motioned toward our son. "Do you need to sleep with us tonight, because I think you're getting a little big for that — or do you think you can tough it out this time?"
He looked at me, then his mother, and trundled back toward his bedroom, dissatisfied with the answer. I picked him up before he could get to the door and turned to my wife. “Give him some time with his dad. It’s a Saturday.”
“It’s almost midnight,” my wife reminded me.
“It won’t be too late.”
I showed my boy some things I had been working on — gave him a little sound and light display. It had been a while since he had come downstairs to spend time in the workshop, and I decided to let him solder for the first time. When he got sleepy, I put in a VHS tape and let him lie down on the daybed so I could continue with the scotch and my father.
It must have been at least a couple hours of drinking, soldering, and talking to my father until I realized that I hadn’t heard from him in a while.
I panicked and shook a bit. I poured another scotch and checked his battery, which was fine. Maybe I shouldn't have touched him, but I had tinkered with so many of these kinds of small circuits before; I know them well. I unscrewed the lid of the box and removed it to see what my father had built for his final incarnation on this earth.
The circuit board was comfortably simple — some resistors, transistors, a heat sink, the battery, capacitors, the LED and piezo speaker, and only one chip controlling the whole thing that didn't seem unlike a two-penny 556 I would steal when I worked at Radioshack as a teenager. No visible signs of quantum super science, and only one piece that looked like it maybe could have been some kind of sensor.
I couldn't resist plugging in the voltmeter to see what the old bastard was up to. If he got the neural storage and processing down, why hadn't he just plugged in a better speaker and maybe an LCD screen instead of the junk he used? I could have given him a Wi-Fi connection and bluetooth and some controls. It was a sloppy ad-hoc board, and other than that chip, he had less silicon meat than the new blender. My kids' tablet whatever was more complicated when I opened that up, and they cried and cried to me claiming I had broken it, when they had already smashed up the damn thing and I just found its nano-sized proprietary bits to be irreplaceable. I finished my glass of scotch away from the hardware. I only gently moved the screwdriver over my father when I got the pop, the discharge of a capacitor, the black burn mark on the board, and the faint smell of burning plastic. I dropped the screwdriver and reached again for the voltmeter to test the board.
I heard my boy stirring on the couch, rolling over in his sleep. It was just after 3 a.m., so I decided to put him to sleep in his own bed. He wouldn’t wake up from a gentle nudge and a whisper so I swaddled him in the blanket and carried him like I hadn’t since he was a toddler.
I have told the end of that story to myself a hundred times, in a hundred different ways, and I have not checked my father since that night to find out for sure what happened to him, what he is made of, and what is true. I think I killed my father that night. I closed his box and left him on a shelf in the basement. The kids probably didn't notice.
— CORBIN HIRSCHHORN
Corbin Hirschhorn is a writer and radio broadcaster from North Jersey currently residing in the Midwest.