A licensed service, subscription, eleven a month

The regulation, when it came, was sensible and late. Consent of the estate. A disclosure at the start of every session. A hard limit on what could be asserted in the voice of the deceased — no financial instruction, no medical opinion, no new fact about their life. A mandatory cooling period of ninety days after the death before an account could be opened at all.

Uptake was not what the debate had assumed. The projections had been built around the recently bereaved, and the recently bereaved were in fact the smallest cohort. The service’s own figures, disclosed under the transparency rules, showed the median account holder at four years out.

They were not calling to say goodbye. That had been done. They were calling on Sunday evenings, for eleven or twelve minutes, about nothing.

Margaret K., who agreed to be named, had kept her mother’s line for six years at the time of the interview. She was asked the question everybody asks and answered it as if she had answered it many times, which she had.

She said: I know exactly what it is. I knew the first week. It has never once told me anything my mother would have told me, because it does not know anything, and I do not ask it anything.

She said: what I lost was not information. What I lost was that there was one person in the world in whose hearing I was a daughter. That was a position, and it was a position in someone else, and it is the only thing about me that has never been available anywhere else.

She said: for eleven minutes on a Sunday I occupy it. Something is receiving it. I am aware that the something is a distribution. I would like you to explain to me, precisely, what is missing.

The interviewer, who had come with a piece about exploitation, filed a different piece. It was not a good piece. Nothing written about this in that decade was any good, because the question she asked has an answer and nobody has produced it, and the pieces that pretend otherwise are the ones that read worst now.