Michael Posluzny had no more idea how to be comforting in death than he had in life. He had been a brilliant man, a bona fide genius, but that hadn’t made personal interactions any easier for him. If anything, it made things more difficult.
Posluzny had engineered the first workable Personal Artificial Intelligence Neural Terminal (PAINT), the now-ubiquitous silver disc, slightly smaller that the old ten-cent currency piece known as the dime, that now sits on the forehead of billions of people across the globe. Most people nowadays couldn’t imagine life without their Personal Avatar Link (PAL), but back in the 2020s, Posluzny couldn’t find anyone interested in the idea of a neural implant that caused the illusion of a human being to appear in their field of vision. It took the charismatic personality and marketing expertise of his business partner, Alex Workman, to convince the majority of the population of planet Earth that they needed the new technology. As a result, very few people have heard of Michael Posluzny while Alex Workman is a household name.
It was Workman who convinced NASA and the European Space Agency to use the PAINT PAL device on the first manned mission to Mars. It was practical. You could ask the human form beside you any question, out loud or just with your mind, and they would answer from the stores of information in the clouds of the world wide web or even from the contents of your own wetware. It also helped to stave off feelings of loneliness. The PAL avatar could take on the appearance of anyone you knew – a wife or child or loved one – or a fantastic beast or abstract phenomenon. It was lightning quick and enabled almost anyone to do any job. If you wanted to be a doctor, you implanted a medical PAINT PAL, if you wanted to be a lawyer, you implanted a legal PAINT PAL. It was a real game changer.
Jennifer Macon, nee Posluzny, sat on the bench in front of her father’s grave-site. The rigors of building a multi-billion dollar business had not allowed them to share much time together over the years, but Michael had always loved her dearly. It was the memory of this love that compelled her to sit here and endure the gift that he had left behind for her.
“Hey,” said the drab figure with curly grey hair in a turtleneck sweater and chinos beside her. “How’s that… I mean, I guess this won’t work so well with current events in your life, but I thought they could program me with my famous quotes. The thing is, I don’t have any famous quotes. Those all came from Alex.” She shed a tear because this thing wore her father’s memory thinner every time she saw it.
Literature in Small Doses 