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had lost connection to his ancestors. Fyodorov thought that mortality was conquerable, and it was also necessary to conquer, because mortality was the source of all the evil among men. I mean, why be good if you’re going to die anyway? Fyodorov argued that the struggle against mortality should become the common cause for all humans, regardless of their ethnicity or social status. Science was advancing in such a fast and powerful way that it would soon be possible to make human life infinite and to revive the dead. Fyodorov thought that eventually we could collect and synthesize the molecular material of the dead. He actually predicted cloning.”
    Sergey was gaining confidence as he spoke. He had such an impressive voice—slightly scratchy, but deep and commanding. Vica had forgotten how much she had always loved his voice. Even his English had improved. He still had a strong accent, but it was the accent of a confident man.
    “What year was this?” Bob asked.
    “The 1880s,” Sergey said.
    “That’s pretty amazing,” Bob said.
    “But Fyodorov thought that the genetic or physical restoration of a person wasn’t enough. It was also necessary to give the revived person his old personality. Fyodorov explored the theory of ‘radial images’ that may contain the personalities of the people and survive after death, but he had a very vague idea of how to preserve or extract those images.”
    “ ‘Radial images’?” Bob asked.
    “I think he meant the soul,” Vadik said.
    “Yes, the soul,” Sergey said. “The soul that is supposed to be immortal by definition, but it’s really not. Because where does it go after we die?”
    “Right,” Bob said.
    Vica saw that his eyes were beginning to glaze over and that he was looking for a bottle of wine. She peered at Sergey, trying to communicate: “Get off Fyodorov!” He wasn’t looking at her.
    “And that was Fyodorov’s problem. How do you go about preserving something if you don’t know how to find it?”
    “Right,” Bob said again.
    “But now we know where to find it.”
    “We do?”
    “We do. It’s in your online presence. Your e-mail. Your Twitter. Your Facebook. Your Instagram or whatever. That’s where people now share their innermost feelings and thoughts, whatever they find funny or memorable or simply worthy in any way. Our online presence is where the essence of a person is nowadays.”
    “Right!” Bob said. The phrase
online presence
seemed to revive him a little.
    “And that’s where my app comes in.”
    Sergey listed the basics of Virtual Grave. “I created a linguistic algorithm that would allow you to preserve and re-create a virtual voice of a deceased person from all of the texts he had created online while he was alive. It’s not that hard to run the entire flow of somebody’s speech through a program and come up with semantic and syntactic patterns as well as the behavorial patterns determined by people’s online personalities. Suppose your loved one suddenly died. You would be able to connect Virtual Grave to her social media accounts, run the app, and re-create her voice. Then you would be able to ask her questions. No, the answers aren’t expected to be meaningful—this is not spiritualism. But we don’t need meaningful advice from dead people anyway. It’s the contact that matters, the illusion that they are still present somewhere, watching over us, if only virtually.”
    All those words Vica had heard so many times in the recent weeks now sounded different. More poetic, more powerful.
    Vica imagined Eric trying to get that moment of contact with her or Sergey and felt a lump in her throat. She had to make an effort to fight back tears. Even Vadik seemed moved. It was only Regina who couldn’t help but snicker. That bitch, Vica thought.
    A loud sniffle came as if from under the coffee table.
    “Sejun!” Vadik said. “I thought you’d left.”
    The iPad screen had long gone black, and Vica had completely forgotten