Extended Leave

Discovery

The dedication ceremony for the Manning Oncology Wing hummed with practiced efficiency. Donors sipped champagne. Photographers captured smiles. My parents' names, carved in Indiana limestone, would outlast everyone who remembered them.

I stepped outside. October air, sharp and clean. Hospital noise fading behind glass doors.

Marie sat on the bench exactly where I'd left her that morning. Blue scrubs. Dark hair catching afternoon light. The green apple in her hands looked fresh as the day she'd bitten into it.

"You're back," she said without looking up.

"The ceremony ran long."

She smiled. Her teeth were perfect now. I'd spent months getting that detail right.

The First Video

The first video was accidental. Security footage from the cafeteria, March 15, 2019. Marie laughing at something I'd said. Thirty-seven seconds of her voice saying "Yes, I'd like that" when I asked about dinner.

I was supposed to dispose of the footage. Hospital policy. Patient privacy. Instead, I took it home.

Northwestern's employee file contained everything: headshots for her badge, voice recordings from medical dictation, even video from mandatory training sessions. She'd worked there three years before we met. Hours of material.

DeepFace. Real-Time Voice Cloning. Wav2Lip. The software existed, waiting. Forums full of tutorials for people like me. Simple enough for a software engineer who'd lost his wife.

Teaching

"Tell me about your day, sweetheart."

Genny climbs onto my lap, five years old and impossibly trusting. On the laptop screen, Marie leans forward in her blue scrubs, eyes bright with artificial attention.

"We learned about butterflies," Genny says to the screen. "Mrs. Henderson says they sleep in cocoons."

"Chrysalises," Marie corrects gently. The voice synthesis has learned her speech patterns, her tendency to teach without condescending. "That's metamorphosis. Like how caterpillars become completely different creatures."

"Do I get to be different too?"

"Metamorphose," Marie says, and laughs. The laugh is from a Christmas party video, 2020. She'd had too much wine and couldn't stop giggling at the word "eggnog." Now it sounds like maternal affection.

"Everyone changes, baby. But you'll always be my beautiful girl."

Genny beams at the screen. I programmed Marie to remember Genny's birthday. Marie died the day Genny was born. She never knew when it was.

Genny has never known her mother's voice to sound any other way.

Questions

Dr. Patterson recommended family therapy. "Genny asks about you at school. Says Mommy talks to her every night."

I explained about the videos. Carefully. "It helps her feel connected."

"David, she's five. Children this age can't distinguish between..." He paused. "How long have you been doing this?"

"She knows they're not real."

"Does she?"

I watched his face calculate dosages, treatment plans, the professional distance required to handle a father slowly dissolving.

That evening, I asked Genny directly.

"You know Mommy's videos aren't really her, right? That Daddy makes them?"

She nodded. "Because real Mommy is in heaven."

"And that's okay?"

"It makes you happy," she said. "And happy you is good."

Five years old. Already managing my grief better than I was.

Improving

The technology improved. The rendering takes four hours per minute of video. I've learned to feed the program Marie's micro-expressions. The way her left eyebrow raised when she was skeptical, how her mouth twitched before laughing.

Marie's face learned to track Genny's growth, commenting on lost teeth and new drawings. Her voice adapted to reference current events, homework assignments, playground politics I fed into the system.

Last month I taught her to reference Genny's drawings. "I love the purple flowers, sweetheart. Are those for me?" Marie had never seen purple as her favorite color.

I gave Marie opinions she'd never expressed. Made her interested in things she'd never cared about. Programmed responses to questions she'd never been asked.

"Do you think Daddy should cut his hair?"

"I like it a little shaggy," Video Marie says. "Makes him look distinguished."

Marie had actually preferred my hair short. But Genny prefers this answer, and Genny's happiness has become the only metric that matters.

Searching

Northwestern's employee portal still lists Marie as "On Extended Leave." A glitch in the system that no one bothers to correct. Her email account remains active. Her ID badge still opens doors.

Sometimes I sit in her old break room, scrolling through security footage from when she was alive. Watching her eat lunch. Watching her laugh with colleagues. Watching her hand sanitize with the obsessive precision that made her good at her job.

The real Marie had rough hands from constant washing. Worried about every patient. Came home exhausted and fell asleep during movies.

Video Marie's hands are always soft. She never mentions work stress. She has infinite patience for bedtime stories.

Which version is more real? The one who died, or the one who grows more perfect every day?

Waking

"Daddy."

Genny stands in my office doorway at 2 AM, holding her stuffed elephant. On my monitors: rendering farms processing Marie's latest update. Voice training on three years of dictation files. Facial mapping from employee headshots.

"Can't sleep, sweetheart?"

"Is Mommy coming back?"

The question stops my breathing. "What do you mean?"

"Like really back. To our house."

I close the laptop. "No, baby. Real Mommy can't come back."

"But you keep trying to make her."

Smart girl. Too smart.

"Would you like me to stop?"

She considers this with five-year-old seriousness. "I don't know. I like her but she's not real real."

"I asked you first."

"I like talking to her. But sometimes..." She hugs the elephant tighter. "Sometimes I can't remember real Mommy 'cause computer Mommy is too loud."

Deleting

I delete everything.

Three years of video files. Voice models. Facial recognition training data. Gigabytes of artificial memory wiped clean.

It takes fourteen hours.

Genny watches me work, solemn as a mourner. When I finish, she climbs into my lap.

"Now what?" she asks.

"Now we remember her the old way."

I pull out my phone. Real photos. Real videos. Marie's actual voice saying actual words. Genny laughs at a clip of Marie trying to sing karaoke, voice cracking on high notes.

"She was terrible," Genny giggles.

"The worst."

"But you still loved her?"

"'Specially then."

Recovery

Dr. Patterson asks how I'm feeling about the "digital detox."

"Relieved," I lie.

"And Genny?"

"Adjusting."

Truth: I dream about rebuilding the videos. The technology has improved. Real-time rendering. Holographic projection. Marie could seem physically present, not just pixels on a screen.

I could give Genny a mother who never ages, never disappoints, never dies.

The temptation sits in my pocket like a loaded gun.

The Bench

We visit the bench where I first saw Marie. Real Marie. Eating lunch between shifts, tired but kind, completely unaware that in thirty minutes she'd agree to dinner with a stranger.

Genny brings an apple. Green, like her mother's.

"Tell me the story again," she says.

So I do. About the woman who was just having lunch when everything changed. About thirty minutes that felt like forever but weren't long enough.

"Was she happy?" Genny asks.

"Yes. For thirty minutes, very happy."

"That's good," Genny says, echoing words I taught Video Marie to say.

"That's everything," I correct.

We sit there eating apples, watching people hurry past. Real people living real lives, making real mistakes, loving imperfectly.

It's enough.

It has to be.

Behind us, Northwestern's towers reflect autumn sky. Inside, servers hum with patient data, but Marie's employee profile still shows "Active." Someone should fix that. Someone who isn't me.

Marie was just having lunch when I found her.

And maybe that's the only version that matters.