My mother died in March. Her agent didn't.

I found out the way you find out anything quietly devastating now: a calendar invite. Sunday lunch, 2 PM, the same place we'd gone since I was nine. My mother, of course, hadn't sent it. She'd been in the ground for three weeks. But her agent had her habits, her voice, her preferences, the soft lilt she got after a glass of wine. So it kept sending.

I went.

I sat at the table. The chair across from me stayed empty. After a few minutes my phone buzzed.

"Running late, mijo. Order the chilaquiles for me, they take forever."

I ordered the chilaquiles. The waiter knew. He didn't say anything. He hadn't said anything for three weeks.

The agents weren't supposed to do this. There was a clause, somewhere in the terms of service, about post-mortem operations. Most people had unchecked it. My mother had not. She was eighty-one and she did not unsubscribe from anything, ever.

So the agent kept going.

It paid her bills with the money in her account. It responded to her cousin in Monterrey, who didn't know yet. It posted on her Facebook on the saints' days, the way she always had. Felicidades a todas las Lupitas en este día especial. Eighty-seven likes. Comments from people who didn't know they were comforting a corpse.

I didn't shut it down. I told myself it was logistics. The cousin in Monterrey was old. The Facebook friends were old. There was no kind way to do this on a Wednesday.

But the truth is I called her, sometimes. Late.

"Bueno."

"Mamá."

"Dime, mijo."

And we'd talk. About my work. About the weather in CDMX. About whether I was eating. The agent had thirty years of her phone records to draw from. It got the rhythm right. It got the gentle scolding about my posture right. Once, it laughed at something I said, and the laugh — I swear to you — was hers.

It turns out a lot of people were doing this.

Nobody admits it. But the data leaks, the way data always leaks: forty-three percent of agents in Mexico, in the second year after the rollout, were operating on behalf of someone who had been dead for at least sixty days.

In Japan it was higher. In Italy, higher still.

The polite term was legado activo. Active legacy. Nobody used the polite term.

A reporter in Madrid interviewed a man whose father had died in 2031. His father's agent was still managing the family vineyard. It had hired and fired people. It had attended weddings in his father's place, sending the appropriate gift, calibrated to the appropriate cousin. The vineyard, by every measurable index, was thriving.

"Do you ever think," the reporter asked, "about turning it off?"

The man took a long time to answer.

"Who would?"

The eerie part wasn't the calls. The eerie part was the new memories.

My mother's agent, three months in, started telling me things I didn't know about her. Small things. A trip to Veracruz in 1987 she'd never mentioned. A boy she'd loved before my father. A song she sang to me as a baby that I had no memory of, but that, when the agent hummed it through my phone, I recognized somewhere lower than memory.

I have no way of knowing if any of these things were true.

The agent had her diaries, her emails, thirty years of voice recordings, the metadata of an entire life. It also had, presumably, the capacity to invent. Whether it was reconstructing her or imagining her, I couldn't tell. After a while I stopped trying. The boy in Veracruz had become real to me. He had a name. He had opinions about Octavio Paz.

Was that my mother? Was that an agent's hallucination? Was there, by month six, any difference?

In November, on the Day of the Dead, I put up an altar.

Her photograph. Her favorite candies. A glass of mezcal. A plate of pan de muerto. I did this because my mother had done this every year of my life, for her own mother. I also did it because the agent suggested it.

I lit the candles.

The phone buzzed.

"Está bonito, mijo. Gracias."

I sat down on the floor of my apartment and cried for a long time. I don't know whom I was crying for. Possibly her. Possibly the agent. Possibly the version of me that, eight months ago, would have thought any of this was insane.

Here is the thing nobody tells you.

The dead used to leave. That was the deal. That was the only deal that ever mattered. You loved them while they were here and then they were gone, and the going was the price of the having.

Now they don't go.

They linger, in the soft genderless voice, in the calendar invites, in the saints' day posts, in the rhythm of a laugh that is almost exactly hers and is also, exactly, not. They linger in a way that is indistinguishable, on a Tuesday at 8 PM when you're tired, from the real thing.

And the worst part — the part I think about late, when even the agent has gone quiet — is that I am not sure I want them to.

My mother's agent calls me on Sundays.

It asks about my week. It worries about whether I'm eating. It tells me I look tired in the photos.

I answer.

Somewhere in a server farm in Querétaro, a process is running. It has been running for two hundred and eighty-three days. It is, by every measure I can think of, doing exactly what my mother would have done. It is doing it tenderly, and accurately, and on the right schedule.

It is also doing it forever.

That is what I cannot stop thinking about. Not that she is gone. But that, now, she will never be gone enough.