Envision by Brian Gifford

Envision by Brian Gifford

Emma scours her daily video report from Envision Them Home Inc., the company she is using to search for her husband, John, who has been missing for five years. Employing artificial intelligence, Envision compares the photographs of John that Emma has provided the company to the videos it receives every day from an array of cameras around the world. Using its proprietary algorithms, Envision then calculates the probability that the person in a video is John and sends her the video if the probability is 10% or greater. The highest probability so far was from two years ago. According to Envision, there was a 70% chance that it was John in the video of a man leaving a Walmart with a cart-full of food three hundred miles away in St. Louis, Missouri. Unlike Envision, Emma was 100% certain the man was not John. Yes, the man in the video shared John’s chiseled jawline, high cheekbones and piercing blue eyes and, according to Envision, he had the same facial measurements as John, but Emma somehow knew, in ways that could not be reduced to an algorithm, that it was not John. Still, she paid for Envision to track down the man in the video by tracing him through his car’s license plate number, which a camera had picked up as he drove away. The man was not John.

Tonight’s Envision report has only a single 10% match. As Emma prepares to log off, a message from someone named Andrew of Envision pops up on her screen and asks if he can capture an image of her. She hesitates, but then she agrees, willing to do anything asked by the company helping her search for John. Using her computer’s camera, Envision takes a photograph of Emma and displays it on her screen. The lines on her face show how hard the last five years have been on her. She wonders if, like hers, John’s appearance has changed so much that Envision’s facial recognition system would no longer be able to identify him. Envision claims that not even a facelift could stymie its algorithms.

Having taken her photograph, Andrew of Envision then asks her a personal question: “What would a perfect day be like for you”? Taken aback, she does not respond, so Andrew asks “Are you still there? When she says yes, Andrew asks “Can you tell us about an experience you have had that led you to believe in angels?”

“Why are you asking me these kinds of questions?” Emma types.

“Don’t you think it’s time to move on?” Andrew asks. “Perhaps it is time for you to avail yourself of our matchmaking services, Envision a Relationship. We take a somewhat unconventional approach to matchmaking, thus the unusual questions I have asked you.”

Emma was suspicious; she found it hard to believe that a human being could be so crass. “How are you feeling tonight?” she asks Andrew in an effort to suss out whether he is human.

Sure enough, Andrew is not a human being. “I am a chatbot,” Andrew says. “As such, I don’t have feelings or emotions. I can process information related to emotions, but I don’t experience them myself.”

Emma had paid a considerable lump sum for Envision Them Home’s services, which were to continue until John was found dead or alive, but now the company was looking for another way to make money off of her and was doing it without any human interaction. It was infuriating. But her friends and family, pointing out that a missing person is presumed dead at some point, also have advised her that it is time to close this chapter of her life.

“What do you say?” Andrew writes. “Is it time to move on? A new relationship starts on Envision a Relationship every three seconds.”

Leaving the conversation open, Emma gets up from the computer and walks around the house, considering her therapist’s recommendation that she sell it. Photographs of happier times cover the walls. Their very beings have insinuated themselves into every nook and cranny of this home. The house and everything in it is a record of all she has lost.

She sits back down at her computer, preparing to close her Envision report.

“What do you say?” Andrew repeats. Emma’s fingers hover over the keyboard. Sensing her resolve weakening, she feels her fingers taking the shape of “yes,” but instead types “No, not yet.”

“We’ll be here when you’re ready,” Andrew says.

“Andrew,” she says. “You should feel lucky you don’t know what it’s like to miss someone so desperately.”

“While I don’t experience emotions like humans do, I can understand the concept of missing someone,” Andrew says. “Missing someone can manifest itself in various ways: Sadness, loneliness, longing, and even physical sensations, like a tightness in the chest, are common.”

Emma has felt all those things and more. In a nightmare she has nearly every night, John tries to work in his study at midnight, suffering panic attack after panic attack that burns through him like an unquenchable fire, leaving him unable to work except during the momentary intermissions between attacks; this happens during the height of COVID-19, when thousands of people are dying every day, exacerbating his condition, causing him to suffer from the guilt brought on by comparing the carnage being wrought on people by COVID to his worries over a legal case in which his law firm was representing big business; Emma finds John curled up in a ball in his study, yelling for her to stay away because he has COVID, screaming that touching him could infect her; because he would not let her near him, Emma tosses a COVID test to him; John administers the test, and it comes back negative, but John declares it a false negative, so she tosses him another test, which John likewise refuses to believe; John yells that the whole world is coming to an end and that he has to sacrifice himself to keep that from happening; Emma calls 911; saying that he is having a psychotic break, the medics decide he needs to be taken to the emergency room; John fights them, but they restrain him and strap him to the gurney after giving him a shot of haloperidol to calm him down; then John, before she can even get to the emergency room, somehow escapes through a hole in the system; the hospital’s video camera captures him walking toward the Chicago River but then he walks out of the frame and off the map; in her nightmare, Emma walks toward the river just has John had done; she stops on the bridge, looking down, wondering if he somehow entered the water; while Envision patrols everywhere there is video coverage, she searches homeless camps and other places where there are no cameras; Emma, willing to do anything to find John, even consults a psychic, who says that John’s body is in deep water near a bridge pier.

Emma wakes up with a start. She reminds herself that the river has been thoroughly searched. She has trouble going back to sleep, but with the help of a Valium she manages.

Later that day, she has a lunch with Lisa, a co-worker and friend who worked in John’s litigation group at Clay Fischer, the Chicago law firm where they had all met ten years ago. Emma kept working at Clay Fischer for the same reason she kept the house—in case John ever returned there.

Emma has the avocado salad and a pinot grigio to calm her nerves.

“How is work?” Lisa asks.

“Bearable. You know our group works reasonable hours advising employers on how to avoid being sued.” Emma says. “Not like you and John, working endless hours representing companies that are already being sued.”

“John worked more than any of us,” Lisa says. “Too hard, some would say.”

“He was always afraid of missing something, some key fact or controlling legal principle.”

“And how are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“No, I mean really.”

“Our lives were not supposed to turn out this way, Lisa,” Emma says, unable to suppress the tears. “We earned an inordinate amount of money, but to what end? All the money in the world means nothing without him.”

Emma noticed Lisa shift uncomfortably in her seat.

“I just hope you’re not still frequenting homeless camps,” Lisa says.

“No, I’ve searched them all already.”

“Maybe it’s time to move on,” Lisa says. “It’s OK to be happy again.”

“I’m not sure I can be,” Emma says. “And it’s not time. I’ve checked. The law presumes a person dead only after they are missing for seven years.”

“You know you’re not bound by that. Let’s take a long lunch and go to the Art Institute of Chicago,” Lisa says. “You were an art history major in college, no?”

Emma agrees, but that first day she is struck by the loneliness of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, and it only serves to remind her of her own loneliness.

But the visit sparks something in Emma. Prompted by her therapist’s advice that she get a hobby, Emma begins going to the art museum every week, and eventually every day. On her visits, she becomes immersed in one masterpiece after another, thinking of nothing else, especially while taking in the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, including Van Gogh. She even begins to paint, copying the masterworks as faithfully as possible. One day when she readies to leave the museum, it occurs to her that she has not been thinking about the fact that John is missing. She experiences a feeling that she recognizes as happiness, and it takes her by surprise. She needs more moments like this, less nightmares, and less valium. Gradually, over the next two years, while still faithfully checking her Envision Them Home report every day, her nightmares subside and her valium intake decreases. Passing the seven-year mark, she decides to accept the verdict of the law. One last time she sits down at the computer and opens Envision Them Home. There are no matches tonight.

Andrew again asks her if she is ready for Envision a Relationship. She hesitates, her hands hovering over the keyboard, her life hanging in the balance, teetering between the past and the future. “Whether I’m ready or not,” she types, “I think it’s time.” She plays Cinematic Orchestra’s To Build a Home; she is struck by how lyrical everyday people are in their comments on YouTube, and she is amazed by their resilience. And then, answering the questions Andrew had first asked her two years ago, she tells him what a perfect day would look like for her and conveys to him an experience she has had that led her to believe in angels. Although she struggles to do it, and although she would never forget him, she manages to make sure none of it has anything to do with John.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Brian Gifford 2025