The voice you lost

Plenty of people keep a dead parent's voicemail long after they've changed phones, and play it on bad days. It says the same few words every time. Now imagine it could answer. The most famous version of this story is a warning. Orpheus sings his way into the underworld and wins back his dead wife, Eurydice, on one condition: he must not look back at her until they reach the light. He looks, and loses her a second time. Freud, in an essay written in 1915, described mourning as slow and painful work. Grief, he thought, must work its way through everything that ties us to the dead before the mind is free to love the living again. A voice that answers back might keep that work from ever finishing. Or it might give it somewhere gentler to happen. After her close friend Roman Mazurenko was killed by a car in Moscow in late 2015, Eugenia Kuyda fed thousands of his text messages into a chatbot so that she and his friends could talk with him again. Some of them found it a comfort; others found it disturbing. The project grew into the companion app Replika. Back in 2013, an episode of Black Mirror called Be Right Back had imagined where the idea leads: a grieving woman upgrades her dead partner from a chatbot to a voice on the phone to a synthetic body, and in the end can neither live with him nor let him go, so she keeps him in the attic. Think of someone you have lost. If their voice could answer you tonight, would talking to it be a way of grieving, or a way of not having to?