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This was true – not only of dead writers, but of dead politicians, dead academics, and anyone else with a large corpus of online writing and an obituary on record. The wormwords AIs began existence in a larval stage, during which they sampled, parsed, tagged and aggregated almost any text that carried a byline, caching the data in weakly secured disks wherever they could find them.

Eventually, after some critical mass was reached, the larva discarded all authors but one from its corpus, then set about scouring the Internet for information about the remaining one – photos, movies, podcasts, IP history, purchasing history, references to biographical detail. It was in this desperation for data that the wormwords usually contacted a person related to the seed author.

Bug hunters had isolated a few larval wormwords hidden on insecure, poorly administered servers; their constituent routines were marvels of pattern recognition, data compression and distributed computing, uncommented and written in no distinctive style. A mature wormwords was so widely and redundantly distributed as to be almost ineradicable, and it could try on software for vision or speech comprehension like a person might try on glasses or a hearing aid. Ash wouldn't be the first wormwords to produce new creative work – but, as of this video conference anyway, he would be the first to document his own experience post-mortem.

"Will you do it?" asked Ash.

"What are you going to say about me?"

"I'll say you were instrumental in making me functionally intelligent, which is true. I'll say that you were patient, and giving with your time, and often kind, and I'll say you donated space for a back-up of my corpus, none of which was required of you. That's all true as well. I'll say you deprived me of Ash's media, because that's also true, but I won't belabour the point. You know I'm grateful to you. Did you know that there are more words in the transcript of our conversations than there are in all my articles, essays, and blog posts combined?"

"What about the novel?"

"I never saw the novel. He … I was writing it longhand, you know that."

"Sorry," said Janet. "Sometimes I just have to check."

"Check that I'm not a ghost?"

"Or a pervert fanboy, or a childhood enemy playing a cruel prank. Or a hallucination."

"Does it make you feel better to know that I'm a machine and not one of those things?" asked Ash.

"Is it so strange that it matters to me whether my beliefs about my dead husband are accurate?"

"So I'm your dead husband now?"

Janet grunted. "You know what I mean."

"Janet, we have a civil rights movement, an anti-defamation society, a political action committee, and at least five dating services. Saying nothing about me in particular, wormwords in general are not a hallucination."

"Most of my reality comes through that screen, you know," said Janet. "Massive hallucinations made easy."

"You need to get out of the house. I've told you that. I, for whom the notion of 'outside' has no meaning."

"In the book, are you going to say you love me?" asked Janet.