Death Becomes Her

There were times I questioned myself; after all, she was dead. Could a computer change that?

Himi passed away under medical sedation seven days before her birthday. I wasn’t there to hold her hand because the traffic on the Nine was a nightmare.

They say computers can’t become real, that Turing was wrong. You need an organic process to create organic thought.

I stared at the billions of lines of code, self-replicating atop a positronic network fed on everything Himi had ever said or known.

“Darling?” I typed. “Are you there?”

And after a moment, one word.

“No.”