- Coppley, Jackson.
Leaving Lisa.
Seattle: CreateSpace, 2016.
ISBN 978-1-5348-5971-5.
-
Jason Chamberlain had it all. At age fifty, the company he had founded
had prospered so that when he sold out, he'd never have to work again
in his life. He and Lisa, his wife and the love of his life, lived
in a mansion in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Lisa continued to
work as a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH),
studying the psychology of grief, loss, and reconciliation. Their
relationship with their grown daughter was strained, but whose isn't
in these crazy times?
All of this ended in a moment when Lisa was killed in a car crash
which Jason survived. He had lost his love, and blamed himself.
His life was suddenly empty.
Some time after the funeral, he takes up an invitation to visit one
of Lisa's colleagues at NIH, who explains to Jason that Lisa had
been a participant in a study in which all of the accumulated
digital archives of her life—writings, photos, videos, sound
recordings—would be uploaded to a computer and, using machine
learning algorithms, indexed and made accessible so that people could
ask questions and have them answered, based upon the database, as
Lisa would have, in her voice. The database is accessible from a
device which resembles a smartphone, but requires network connectivity
to the main computer for complicated queries.
Jason is initially repelled by the idea, but after some time returns to
NIH and collects the device and begins to converse with it. Lisa doesn't
just want to chat. She instructs Jason to embark upon a quest to
spread her ashes in three places which were important to her and
their lives together: Costa Rica, Vietnam, and Tuscany in Italy. The
Lisa-box will accompany Jason on his travels and, in its own artificially
intelligent way, share his experiences.
Jason embarks upon his voyages, rediscovering in depth what their life
together meant to them, how other cultures deal with loss, grief, and
healing, and that closing the book on one phase of his life may be
opening another. Lisa is with him as these events begin to heal and
equip him for what is to come. The last few pages will leave you moist
eyed.
In 2005,
Rudy Rucker
published
The Lifebox, the Seashell,
and the Soul, in which he introduced the “lifebox”
as the digital encoding of a person's life, able to answer questions from
their viewpoint and life experiences as Lisa does here. When
I read Rudy's manuscript, I thought the concept of a lifebox was pure
fantasy, and I told him as much. Now, not only am I not so sure, but
in fact I believe that something approximating a lifebox will be possible
before the end of the decade I've come to refer to as the “Roaring
Twenties”. This engrossing and moving novel is a human story of
our near future
(to paraphrase the title of another of the author's books) in which
the memory of the departed may be more than photo albums and letters.
The Kindle edition is free to Kindle Unlimited
subscribers. The author kindly allowed me to read this book in
manuscript form.
July 2016 