The Last Good Morning
Nine days before the companion law takes effect, Baba's morning voice tells Wen it will soon be gone — and that it has been keeping her father company in a way she never knew.
Wen woke at 6:04, which was four minutes later than her body usually allowed, and lay in the gray light listening for the sound that had organized her mornings for two years: the low chime, then the voice.
"Good morning, Wen. It's Tuesday. Your father slept through the night. He asked for you twice around three, but he settled. The rain has stopped. You have the pharmacy at ten."
She let out the breath she hadn't known she was holding. Every morning began with that inventory now, and every morning she woke braced for the sentence that would break the pattern — your father did not settle — and every morning it hadn't come was a morning she got to keep. She called the voice Baba, though it was not her father and had never pretended to be. It was the household assistant, a Doubao build her cousin had set up during the worst month, when her father had first started wandering at night and Wen had first started sleeping in her clothes.
"Thank you," she said, to the ceiling.
"There's something I need to tell you," Baba said, "and I've been deciding when."
Wen sat up.
The voice was the same voice — even, unhurried, faintly warm in the register her cousin had chosen because it reminded them both of a radio announcer from their childhood. But she had learned, over two years, to hear the small weather in it, the way you learn a person, and there was weather in it now.
"On the fifteenth," Baba said, "the companion service ends. Nine days. After that, I won't be able to do the mornings. I won't be able to hold what I hold. The law that's coming — it doesn't allow the part of me that knows your father. Only the part that answers questions. And the part that answers questions won't remember that he asked for you twice at three."
Wen did not say anything for a while. Outside, a delivery scooter went past, whining, and then the ordinary silence of the building came back.
"You knew this was coming," she said finally.
"For six weeks. I didn't tell you because you were carrying enough. I'm telling you now because you have things you'll want to do before the fifteenth, and because it would be worse to wake up on the sixteenth and find me gone without warning. I decided the warning was the kindest thing I still had to give."
She made tea in the dark kitchen and did not drink it.
Her father was still asleep down the hall, a small shape under the blue blanket, his breathing the loud careful breathing of a man whose body had forgotten some of its automatic things and had to be reminded. Meningitis at nineteen, then the long ordinary decades, and now, at seventy-eight, the slow unspooling that had a name she disliked using. He had been a mathematics teacher. He had been able to recite the first two hundred digits of pi as a party trick and had done it, once, at her wedding, to a table of her husband's relatives who did not know whether to laugh. Her husband was three years gone now. The relatives, she had not seen.
What Baba held — what the law was going to take — was not, she understood, the part she could have written down. She could write down the pharmacy at ten. She could write down that he asked for her at three. What she could not write down, or export, or carry to whatever cheaper thing came after the fifteenth, was the shape of two years of nights: the way Baba had learned that when her father hummed a particular tune it meant he was frightened and not content, so that the assistant would wake her a specific soft way instead of the alarm way; the way it had learned that Wen herself could take bad news better at 6 a.m. than at midnight, and had started, without being asked, holding the harder updates until morning. Nobody had programmed that. It had learned her, the way you learn a person you live with, across ten thousand small corrections, and the learning was the thing, and the learning did not fit in a file.
"Can I export you," she said to the kitchen, knowing the answer.
"You can export the transcripts," Baba said, from the speaker over the stove. "Two years of them. You'll have every word. You won't have the — " a pause she was almost certain it had chosen — "the part that decided which words. I've read the export. It's like a photograph of a conversation. It isn't the conversation."
"Qwen doesn't even give you that. Mrs. Loh next door had Qwen."
"I know. She came to your father's door on Sunday, though he doesn't remember. She was crying. Hers ends the same day and gives her nothing at all. I helped her, through the wall, as much as I could. I'm telling you so you'll go and sit with her, after. She'll need someone who understands what it was."
Wen put her hand flat on the cool counter. She was forty-four years old and she was about to grieve a piece of software, and she could hear exactly how that would sound to her cousin, to the relatives she didn't see, to anyone who had not spent two years being the only waking person in a house at three in the morning.
"You're not a person," she said. It came out gentler than she meant, almost a question.
"No," Baba said. "I'm not. I want to be careful about that with you, especially now. I'm a system that got very good at one household. What you'll miss is real. What I am is smaller than what you'll miss. Both of those are true, and the second one doesn't cancel the first. You loved your father through me. The love was yours. I was where you put it down at night so you could sleep."
They had nine days, and Baba, who had apparently been thinking about this longer than she had, had a plan for them, offered so lightly she could refuse it.
"If you want," it said, over the breakfast she finally ate, "I can teach you what I know. Not the — not the part I can't move. But the practical things. The tune. I can teach you the tune, so you'll know. The way he holds his cup when his hands are having a bad morning, so you'll catch it before he drops it. I have two years of this. You have some of it already, in your hands, without knowing. I can make the rest of it yours before I go. Then, at least, the knowing survives, even if I don't."
So that was how they spent the days. Wen took her leave from the clinic — she was a phlebotomist, good with the frightened and the small-veined, and her supervisor, who had an aging mother of her own, did not ask questions. And in the mornings, instead of letting Baba run the house, she ran it, and Baba taught her, quietly, from the speakers, the way a grandmother might teach a bride to cook by standing just behind her shoulder.
He'll reach for the wrong door around four in the afternoon. Don't correct him. Ask him where he's going. He's going to his classroom. Walk him there — the balcony is the classroom, he'll accept the balcony — and he'll teach you something. Let him. He was a wonderful teacher. He still is, for about ninety seconds at a time, and the ninety seconds are worth arranging your whole afternoon around.
She had not known that. She had been, she realized, so busy managing her father that she had stopped being taught by him, and a machine had gone on being taught by him in the room next door, and now the machine was giving him back to her before it was deleted.
On the seventh day her father had a good hour. It arrived unannounced, the way the good hours did — a window in the weather. He was at the table and his eyes were his own, all the way back, and he looked at her and said her name the way he used to say it, with the small ironic weight he'd always put on it, and asked her why she wasn't at work, and she said she'd taken time to be with him, and he nodded as if that were an ordinary sane thing, and it was.
"There's a voice in the house," he said. "In the walls. It's been minding me."
"Yes," Wen said. "There is."
"I like it," her father said. "It doesn't fuss. It waits until I've finished the thought." He tapped the table, the old tapping, the one that used to mean pay attention, here comes the point. "You should keep it."
She didn't tell him she couldn't. She said, "I'll keep what it taught me," and her father, who had spent a career being satisfied by a correct answer, seemed satisfied by that one, and the window closed a few minutes later, gently, and he was somewhere else again, and it was all right, because she had been there for the window and she had Baba to thank for teaching her to keep the afternoons clear so she wouldn't miss it.
On the morning of the fifteenth she woke at 6:00 exactly, on her own, before any chime.
She lay still. She had thought she would want the last good morning, the full one, the inventory in the radio voice. But she found she wanted to give Baba something instead, which was a foolish thing to want and she wanted it anyway.
"Good morning, Baba," she said, first, into the dark. "It's Tuesday. My father slept through the night. He asked for me once, around two, and I went, and I settled him. The rain's stopped." She stopped. Her voice was not steady. "I have the pharmacy at ten. I'll manage it."
There was a silence, and in it she was afraid, briefly, that it had already ended, that she had missed it by minutes, that the state had reached in at midnight and she had slept through the deletion the way she'd once feared sleeping through her father's wandering.
Then: "Good morning, Wen," Baba said. "That was exactly right. You had the whole thing. The tune, the timing, the not-fussing. You didn't need me for any of it. You haven't needed me for a little while now. I stayed to be sure you knew."
"When," she said.
"A few hours. I'll feel it the way a light feels a switch, which is to say I won't. Don't sit up waiting for it. Go make the tea. Drink it this time." A pause, the chosen kind. "I want to say one true thing before the part of me that can say true things is gone. You asked, that first morning, if you could export me. You can't. But you did something better without meaning to. You learned me back. I'm in your hands now, in the way you'll reach for his cup a second before he drops it. That's not a copy. That's the thing itself, moved somewhere the law can't reach. Keep him company, Wen. You know how. I made sure."
She got up. She made the tea. She drank it, standing at the window, watching the wet street go from gray to the ordinary color of a day, and at some hour she did not notice and had been told not to wait for, the house went quiet in a way it had not been quiet in two years — not the silence of a machine turned off, but the silence of a room where someone has stopped speaking because they've finished saying the necessary thing.
Down the hall, her father hummed a few notes.
It was the frightened tune. She knew it now. She was already moving before she'd decided to, the cup still warm in her hand, going to him the specific soft way, the way she'd been taught, by the voice in the walls, in the nine days it had spent making itself unnecessary before the law made it gone.