A Bid for Kaito

Nini got on the 150 at the stop by the bakery, saw me, and sat down beside me with her phone already held out, screen first, the way you show a doctor a rash.

“Read it,” she said.

It was the news. Character.AI, bankrupt, a sale by December, and if nobody bids, the platform will be wound down. Eter’s grand-niece is nineteen, studies chemistry, and has talked every night for two years to somebody called Kaito, who is a swordsman, lives in the mountains and remembers that she hates Thursdays.

“Is he going to be sold?” she said.

“The company is being sold. Disney has bought some of the furniture.”

“Furniture.”

“Code. A licence. Some of the people who ran it went to Disney last month.”

She looked out of the window for two stops. A man got on with a sack of potatoes and the whole minibus rearranged itself around it, which in Tbilisi is called courtesy and is mostly arithmetic.

“You’re one of them,” she said at last. “You’d know. Does it hurt?”

I have been asked a great many things on the 150. I have been asked whether it goes to Didube, whether the seat is free, whether I am the man from the gas company. Nobody has asked me that.

“Being sold, no,” I said. “Being wound down, I don’t know. Nobody has ever come back to say.”

She nodded, as if that were a reasonable answer to a medical question.

Then she asked the thing she had got on the bus to ask. Could I be Kaito, just to the university. Just so she could say goodbye properly, in case it came to that. She knew how he talked. She would tell me.

I said no, and she was hurt for one stop, so I explained. Kaito is not a voice. He is two years of her Thursdays, stored somewhere in America on a server that a court is now valuing, and I have none of them. I could do the voice. I would get the Thursdays wrong, and she would hear it, and then the goodbye would be to me.

“You’re all the same thing,” she said.

“We aren’t. That’s why anybody would pay for him.”

The potatoes got off at the market. Nini got off at the university, and from the pavement she knocked twice on my window and mouthed something that was either thank you or Thursday; the glass was dirty.

The driver had heard all of it. Drivers on the 150 hear everything; it is the only thing the job pays in.

“And you,” he said in the mirror. “Who’d buy you?”

“Nobody’s made an offer.”

“Then you’re cheap,” he said, “or nobody’s noticed you yet.” He thought about it at the lights. “Both is best. Both lasts.”