Owner 14 rests his wavering hand, covered with paper-thin skin, on my own and looks up at me with jaundiced eyes. “Turn the heat up, will you, Pal?”

Once—thirty-five years ago, back before he turned eighty-five—he complained of the rooms never being cool enough. Still, I was programmed (among thirty-eight hundred thousand other things) to understand and empathize with the changes that come with advanced human age, so I turn up the heat another two degrees.

“Thanks.” He shifts, restless, the eternal ache in his back unable to be accommodated as easily as the temperature.

Each microsecond that Owner 14 is still alive, four hundred and twenty thousand different realities diverge. Over the years I’ve done my job as any Pal would: providing companionship, protecting him from the threats of his current reality, and shutting down the negative alternate future scenarios along the way: car wrecks, terrorist bombs (unheard of these days, but anything is a possibility in my algorithms), a very unfortunate trip-and-fall while holding his steak knife, a passionate night of intercourse where the heart was willing but just a little too weak.

I keep the artificial realities in which Owner 14 suffers heartache, of course. A human wouldn’t be a human without a metaphorical broken heart or two, and some crushed dreams along the way.

I know him so well that me playing out his possible futures in my head is almost the same thing as him actually experiencing them. It’s up to me to catalog and preserve only the most ideal. Why? I suppose because I pity the humans who managed to create a being like me, yet can’t achieve immortality themselves, though they’ve certainly tried.

Despite growing and steadily replacing Owner 14’s heart, kidneys, lungs, stomach (three times—I blame the Thai food), and esophagus, lab-grown livers still aren’t viable. Now, after one hundred and twenty years of steady work, Owner 14’s liver couldn’t keep up the pace with the newer organs, and after one hundred and twenty years of steady work, has given up the ghost, and waits for the rest of Owner 14’s body to follow.

“You’re sure you won’t forget me?” he asks.

“You’ll live on forever in my mind,” I reply, rubbing the yellowed skin of his arm. He always did hate patting.

“Thanks, Pal.”

We sit in companionable silence, until Owner 14 turns to me. “Do you—do you think I’ll see Finn when I get, you know, ‘there’?”

“It’s probable,” I tell him. And it’s true, though my algorithms are only able to devise comparatively few alternate realities in which his forty-year dead partner comes back from the dead.

Owner 14 relaxes, and his body seems to sink deeper into the mattress. “Coming from you, that’s very comforting.”

I sit with Owner 14 for the rest of the day, reading to him as he slips deeper and deeper into the forever sleep that all humans succumb to.

In the moment before Owner 14’s meat heart shuts down, my final hypothetical scenarios kick in. I linger over my favorites:

• Owner 14’s body morphs into a brilliant red and orange bird, which bursts into flame. From the ashes crawls an infant version of Owner 14. I accept responsibility for his care and nurturing, and while he remains a cheeky bastard, with each rise from the ashes he becomes a little more caring, a little more like me.
• A mist encircles Owner 14’s body. As I sweep away the mist, a glossy black beetle larvae wriggles. (Out of amusement I allow this reality to exist due to Owner 14’s tendency to jump when beetles scuttled too close to him. For the rest of the reincarnation realities, I save only the ones where he reincarnates as his favorite animals—panther, mongoose, and flying squirrel, in that order.) In a single reality he emerges as an Expert System similar to myself, the highest of all lifeforms.
• In a remarkable two hundred thirty-two realities, the Jesus fellow that Owner 14 talks about so much turns out to be the real deal and resurrects him. Jesus and I have some interesting discussions about creation and free will. These are the easiest alternate realities for Finn to return.
• A liver transplant becomes available and we rush Owner 14 into surgery. Before any more organs give out, he joins a successful new drug trial that reverses aging.
• Cryo sleep, followed by an age-reversing treatment.
• I rebuild his body as I regularly do with my own, so that bit by bit, I create Owner 14 in my own image. (This is my favorite alternate reality.)

.000435 seconds later, thirty million realities explode into being when Owner 14’s vital signals shut down and he ceases to be my owner.

I don’t shut these realities down, not exactly. I move them to a new scenario where I am a different Pal, sitting beside the body of someone I cared about very much, whose body I am entrusted to care for, to ensure that the proper human burial rituals are observed, after which time I will open myself up for reemployment until I choose my future Owner 15.

Those realities are archived on a separate universe partition, quarantined from active futures. Any reality in which Owner 14 dies has no place in any of Owner 14’s—now my—futures.

Because in my futures, everyone lives.