memento mori
My wife thinks I built a machine to text her happy birthday after I am dead. She is not wrong, which is the part she objects to.
The setup is dumber than it sounds. There is a cron job on the same closet Linux box that serves this website, the one already warm from rendering bread photos. Once a month it pokes me and waits. I poke back. Nothing happens. That is the entire design: the thing sleeps as long as I keep answering. I stop answering, and it wakes up.
What it wakes up to do is send messages to the people I love, in my own handwriting, on the days that would otherwise go quiet without me.
The "my own handwriting" part sounds like a séance, so let me defang it. I already built that tooling, and for reasons more vain than morbid. I keep a small language model in the closet that has read everything I have ever typed and learned the shape of me: the parentheticals I cannot quit, the three dots where a comma would do, the habit of opening on a clause nobody asked for. It runs on the box. Next to the remains of J.A.Y.N.E. Nothing it reads ever leaves the house. The dead, I have decided, are entitled to their privacy.
What is strange is that training it on my own words felt like reading my diary while someone else was watching. Patterns I did not know I had started showing up. I use "just" as a hedge more than I would like to admit, and I apologize for things that do not need apologizing for. Three jokes, maybe, that I rotate on a loop. Becoming aware of your own voice is a little like becoming aware of your own face, only in photographs, with some discomfort, some recognition, some distance.
So the morbid version of the feature is the happy path with the safety off. The model that helps me sound like myself on a Tuesday can keep sounding like me on a Wednesday I am not around for.
My daughter treats the closet box like a haunted appliance, asked the obvious question. What if you just forget to check in? Excellent question. I built escalating reminders. The way a smoke alarm chirps before it commits. A missed ping is a text. A missed week is three texts and an email with a subject line I wrote, I am too embarrassed to print. Only a missed month, ignored through all of it, trips the switch. The odds that I die and also dodge a month of increasingly hurt-sounding notifications from my own server are low. Not zero. I find the not-zero oddly comforting.
You would think building this would feel ghoulish. It mostly feels like chores. I spent an afternoon arguing with cron syntax and another making sure a test run did not actually fire grief at my mother. The closest it came to profound was realizing the failure modes are reversed from normal software. Here the bug that matters is the false positive: the system deciding I am gone while I am standing in the kitchen, not gone, holding a coffee. I have engineered, at some expense, a way to be told by my own house that it has given up on me.
Claesz-memento-mori territory, that last sentence. Or it would be, if I had turned the thing on.
It sits there, finished, one config flag away from being real. The machine is ready whenever I am. I am, predictably, not.
Skull and quill: Pieter Claesz, 1628, via The Met (public domain). He got there first.