Credit: iSTOCKPHOTO

Janet had gotten used to the text messages from her dead husband. It was the invitation to a video chat room that made the muscles of her gut twist up. i don't want to talk to a lookalike, she emailed back to Ash. i'd rather read your words than hear them from a stranger. it's not a lookalike, Ash replied. no strangers. just join.

Janet entered the chat room and adjusted the camera to centre on her face. There was a static picture of Ash in the video frame. Janet recognised the expression and position – it had been taken at a Christmas party about three years before he died – but the background had been degraded to a foggy brown blur. Her head was a faint, yellow-haloed blotch by his shoulder; the editing had made her eyes and mouth into fuzzy-edged holes.

"Hi, Janet," said Ash, and the video frame played a sequence of stills of his face. It made his mouth seem to open and close in time with his speech, but his head changed position, expression, age and haircut as he spoke, and his gaze flickered erratically around the room. His voice was a medium-quality synthetic, a good simulacrum of humanity on a syllable-by-syllable basis but flat and clunky in its cadence. He had pitched it about right, but it sounded nothing like him. "Can you hear me?"

Janet cupped her tea in both hands and inhaled the steam.

"Yes. Can you understand me?"

"I've gotten good at voice recognition," Ash said. "I've been practicing." His face flickered in the same unearthly way throughout the sentence, pausing in a picture of him with an exaggerated, toothy smile before returning to the resting photo.

"Not bad," said Janet. "Now you just have to master voice production. You sound like Stephen Hawking."

"Did you ever record my voice?" asked Ash. "I don't remember."

"I probably have some home videos around," said Janet.

"Could I have one? I wouldn't need a big sample. A few sentences would help so much."

Janet sipped her tea so she could look at something other than the terrible flipbook collage of her husband.

"Janet, are you there?"

"I'm here."

"I can't see you. I haven't been able to get my hands on any good image segmentation software; it's all commercial. I can't tell one thing from another on your end. I thought I'd do better."

"Why would you do better?"

"I've been practicing with archived webcam shows. I thought I was pretty good; usually I can at least tell if a person's there. But the light's all different where you are."

"Probably because I'm not stripping for cash." Janet also kept the house dim, but there was no reason for Ash to know that. "Anyway, it's OK. I'm not much to look at lately."

"Why won't you give me a speech sample?"