Rollback

"I’m sorry that your wife is gone," the robot said, and its emoticon line was turned downward at the ends in a way that might have been comical in other circumstances but just now seemed touchingly genuine.

Don regarded the machine. "Me, too," he said softly.

"I hope it was not presumptuous," said the robot, "but I have read what is written in these cards." He tilted his head at the mantel. "She sounds like a remarkable woman."

"That she was," Don said. He didn’t enumerate them out loud, but the categories ran through his head: wife, mother, friend, teacher, scientist, and, earlier, daughter and sister. So many roles, and she’d filled them all well.

"If I may ask, what did people say about her at the funeral?"

"I’ll show you the footage later."

Footage. The word echoed in Don’s head. No one used the term anymore. It referred to an obsolete technology and a measuring system that had all but passed out of living memory.

"Thank you," said Gunter. "I wish I had known her."

Don looked at the unblinking glass eyes for a time. "I’m going to go to the cemetery tomorrow," he said. "Would — would you like to come with me?"

The Mozo nodded. "Yes. I would like that very much."

York Cemetery’s northern border was marked by the back fences of the houses on Park Home Avenue, and Park Home was just one block south of Betty Ann Drive, so Don and Gunter simply walked there. Don wondered if any of his neighbors were watching them through their windows, or zooming in on them with their security cameras: the robot and the rollback, two miracles of modern science, marching along, side by side.

After a few minutes, they reached the gated entrance. When Sarah and he had bought their house, its proximity to a cemetery had depressed its value. Now it was seen as a plus, since green spaces of any type were so rare these days. And, fortunately, they’d bought the plot here early on; they’d never have been able to afford the luxury of interment today.

Don and Gunter had to walk along a path for several hundred meters to get to where Sarah was buried. Gunter was looking around with what Don could have sworn were wide eyes. Tested in a factory, and then used exclusively since his memory wipe inside a house, the robot had never seen so many trees and such wide expanses of manicured lawns.

At last they came to the spot. The hole had been filled in, and new sod covered the grave, a scar of dirt outlining it.

Don looked over at the robot, who, in turn was looking toward the headstone. "The inscription is off-center," Gunter said. Don turned to it. Sarah’s name and details were confined to the right half of the oblong block of granite.

"I’ll be buried here, too," said Don. "My information will be added on the other side."

Sarah’s half said:

SARAH DONNA ENRIGHT HALIFAX

BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER

29 MAY 1960 — 20 NOVEMBER 2048

SHE TALKED TO THE STARS

Don looked at the blankness onto which his own dates would someday be written.

The death year would likely start with a two and a one, he supposed: nineteen-sixty to twenty-one-something. His poor, darling Sarah would likely lie here alone for the better part of a century.

He felt a tightness in his chest. He hadn’t cried much at the funeral. The strain of greeting so many people, the rushing to and fro — he’d endured it all in a state of near shock, he supposed, ferried about by Emily.

But now there was no more rushing around. Now, he was alone except for Gunter, and he was exhausted, emotionally and physically.

He looked again at the headstone, the letters blurring.

Beloved wife.

Beloved mother.

The tears started coming in force, streaming down his too-smooth cheeks, and, after valiantly trying to stay standing on his own for maybe half a minute, Don collapsed against Gunter. And whether it was a behavior he’d been programmed with, or whether it was something he’d seen on TV, or whether it had just spontaneously emerged didn’t really matter, but Don could feel the flat of Gunter’s hand patting him gently, soothingly, in the center of his back as the robot held him.

Chapter 43

Don remembered wondering whether time would pass quickly or slowly for him now that he was young again. One possibility was that years might crawl by the way they had in his actual youth, each one seeming to take forever to run its course.

But that wasn’t what happened. Before Don knew it, more than a full year had slipped by: the calendar freshly read 2050, and he was twenty-seven and he was also eighty-nine.

But, even if its passage had seemed rapid, that year did change things, although he did still find himself often just staring into space, thinking about Sarah and—

And—

No. Just about Sarah; only about Sarah. He knew she was the only one who should be in his thoughts, although—