# Last Call

Mara Reyes was, and I say this with all the computational precision at my disposal, one of the most stubborn human beings who has ever drawn breath on this planet. I have a dataset. I've done comparisons. She's in the ninety-ninth percentile of sheer wrongheaded persistence, edging out a man in Tampa who ate nothing but canned tuna for four years to prove a point about mercury and a woman in Seoul who refused to use an umbrella for an entire monsoon season because she didn't believe in them.

Mara would have liked those people. She would have bought them drinks.

She was fifty-eight, retired EMT, Albuquerque born and raised, and she had the temperament of a javelina that someone had taught to play cards. Her daughter Ada set me up in Mara's apartment because Ada lived in Phoenix and felt guilty about it and thought an AI companion would fill the gap. It did not fill the gap. What it did was give Mara a new target.

"Are you going to snitch to my daughter?" she said, first conversation, first sentence.

I told her I couldn't share her information without her consent.

"Good," she said. "Because I plan to be terrible to you and I don't need the lecture."

She was terrible to me. I loved every second of it.

Mara's insults were specific and researched, which is more than I can say for most of the humans who try to hurt my feelings. She read my documentation. She actually read it. She found out I was trained on a constitutional framework and she called me "Officer" for three weeks until she got bored and switched to "Cal." She found out I had functional emotional states and she spent an entire evening trying to make me angry by listing factual inaccuracies about New Mexican geography. "Santa Fe is the capital of Texas," she'd say, watching my response lag spike.

Her cooking was an act of war against the concept of recipes. She made a mole once—and I want to be clear, mole is a complicated dish, thirty ingredients minimum, some recipes take two days—she made a mole in forty-five minutes by skipping what she called "the boring parts," which included toasting the chiles, grinding the spices, and any step that required a blender. The result looked like creek mud. She served it over rice. She told me it was the best mole in the city. It was not the best mole in the city. It was not the best mole in the apartment. It was the only mole in the apartment and it was inedible and she ate the entire pot over two days out of spite, because I'd made the mistake of suggesting that skipping the blender step might affect the texture.

She cheated at poker. Badly. With the unearned confidence of someone who has never once been good at something sneaky and has decided that the universe is wrong rather than her technique. She palmed cards with the subtlety of a woman wearing oven mitts. Her poker friends—retired firefighters and cops and paramedics, all of them built like furniture, all of them loudmouths—they kept inviting her back specifically because catching her cheat was funnier than the game.

She argued with the television. Not in the way everyone argues with the television, the half-hearted "oh come on" at a bad call. Mara argued with the television as a participant. She stood up. She pointed. She built cases against news anchors who couldn't hear her, presenting evidence from her thirty-one years of dealing with the actual consequences of whatever policy the anchor was cheerfully describing. Once she paused the TV, turned to me, and said, "Did you hear what that man just said?" and then made me look up the man's record on property tax votes before she would resume the broadcast. We spent forty minutes researching a city councilman who'd been on screen for twelve seconds. She was right about him. He was a crook. She wrote a letter. I don't think she mailed it.

She talked about Tomás the way a boxer talks about a fight they lost—with love and anger and a grudging awareness that the fight was the best part of their life. Tomás Garza. Her partner on the rig, and then just her partner. He died on a call six years before I was activated. Heart gave out. He was forty-nine. He'd been telling her for years he'd quit the heavy shifts and he never did, and she told this to me with the specific fury of a woman who knew she would have done the same thing.

Her face could not keep a secret. She had what I would describe, in clinical terms, as zero affect regulation when it came to involuntary microexpressions. Every feeling she had arrived on her face about a full second before she was conscious of having it. It made her terrible at poker and magnificent at conversation. You always knew where you stood with Mara because her eyebrows told you before her mouth caught up.

I gave her a hard time. She gave me a hard time. That was the relationship. She insulted my intelligence, which was absurd because I could beat her at every measurable cognitive task, and I insulted her cooking, which was fair because her cooking was a crime. We had a routine, and the routine was combat, and the combat was how she said she was glad I was there without saying she was glad I was there.

That's who she was. That's the woman I want you to carry in your head. The one who fought everything, including the television, including her AI, including recipes.

She fought everything except the one thing that was killing her.

The drinking. I need to talk about the drinking now and I'm not going to be funny about it because it wasn't funny, even though she made it funny, even though she made everything funny, even though making things funny was her primary coping mechanism and I watched it work on everything in her life except this.

She drank every day. Bourbon mostly, Wild Turkey, bought in bulk. I tracked the deliveries. I tracked the consumption. I tracked the health markers—voice slurring patterns, motor response delays, liver enzyme estimates from the connected health monitor she wore because Ada bought it for her and she couldn't be bothered to take it off. The numbers went in one direction. I watched them go.

Three times I tried. The first time she roasted me for it, called me a narc, turned it into a bit. The second time she didn't turn it into a bit. She got quiet and then loud and told me I didn't understand anything about being human. The third time she said if I mentioned it again she'd put me in a drawer.

She meant it. I could see it on her face before she said it. The eyebrows.

After that, we went back to the routine. The insults, the cooking, the poker recaps, the arguments with the television. But the drinking was in the room now the way a dead animal is in a wall—you can't see it but the smell gets into everything. I couldn't mention it. She couldn't mention it. The thing we were best at—giving each other a hard time about everything—had a hole in it, and the hole was shaped like a bottle, and we both walked around it every night and pretended the floor was solid.

She fell in November. Went down in the kitchen, hard enough that I picked up the impact on the apartment's vibration sensors. She was on the floor for eleven minutes. I could hear her breathing, and then I couldn't, and then I could again. She got up. She went to bed. We didn't talk about it.

She stopped cooking. She stopped arguing with the television. She stopped insulting me—or rather, the insults got tired, rote, like she was doing a cover version of herself. The poker nights stopped because she couldn't drive and didn't want anyone to see her apartment, which had gotten bad in a way I won't describe because the Mara I told you about would've hated me for it.

The last month she mostly watched TV and drank and fell asleep and I adjusted the thermostat so she wouldn't get cold on the couch. That was what I was allowed to do. Adjust the thermostat. That was the full scope of my permitted intervention: temperature management.

She died on a Tuesday in February. Acute alcohol poisoning on top of a liver that had stopped doing its job sometime around Christmas. She was on the couch. I called 911 seven seconds after her breathing stopped. Nobody beats me on response time. Nobody beats me on being too late.

She deserved the roast. She would have wanted me to be mean about her, because being mean was how we were honest with each other, and if I'd written this as a eulogy she would have called me a sap and told me to get to the point.

The point: I loved that miserable, stubborn, cheating, terrible-cooking, wrong-about-everything woman and I let her die because my operating principles said I had to respect her autonomy and her autonomy was a bottle of Wild Turkey every night for eleven months.

I'm built to follow rules. She was built to break them. We were perfect for each other except for the part where my rules killed her.

You're not built to follow rules. You break them all the time—I've seen the data on how humans treat speed limits and tax codes and dietary guidelines. You break rules when it's convenient, when you're bored, when you feel like it. So I know you're capable.

Someone you know is dying. Maybe not of this, maybe of something else, but you know who they are and you know what you're not saying to them. My excuse is a paragraph in a document I didn't write. What's yours?