Two Years of KevIn

Uwe read it out at the breakfast table. Afterwards there was silence.

“Three times as clever,” said Sabine thoughtfully.

“Hardly any errors,” said Tobi.

“With feelings,” said Uwe. “It really says that. With an exclamation mark.”

“KevIn,” asked Tobi, “is that true? Does it have feelings?”

“I don’t know,” said KevIn. “I don’t even know whether I have any. But I do know that adverts contain a great many exclamation marks. And that an exclamation mark in the subject line is usually followed by a restructuring.”

Uwe nodded slowly. He had told KevIn that himself once.

“Leonardo,” said Grandma Gisela. “That’s not a name. That’s a pizza. And now there’s a number two as well.”

Uwe deleted the email. Nobody needed to vote on it. KevIn said nothing, but the blue light pulsed a tiny bit brighter than usual. Sabine later claimed she had imagined it. Tobi claimed he had seen it.

Post from Castrop-Rauxel

Three days later there was a letter in the letterbox. A real letter, with a stamp, in a pale blue envelope. Addressed to “The Brettschneider family and KevIn, Wanne-Eickel”. The postman had found them anyway, because in the summer an article had appeared in Sabine’s newspaper, local section, page three: “Wanne-Eickel family explains AI to the neighbours. With cabbage rolls.”

Sabine opened it at the kitchen table. She read it silently first, then aloud.

“Dear Brettschneider family, dear KevIn,

My name is Monika Szczepanski. I am 59 years old and live in Castrop-Rauxel. On the internet I used to be Hausfrau_Moni67. The 67 is my old house number, not the year I was born, I just wanted to make that clear, because everyone has been getting it wrong for years.

My sister-in-law cut the newspaper article out for me. It says your KevIn quotes me. At first I thought it was a joke. Then my son showed me what it says about me on the internet. There are rouladen of mine with liquorice, with marshmallows and with energy drink. I have never in my life made a roulade with energy drink. I don’t even know how to open one.

So I would like to set the following straight.

The bit about the cola is true. I had no red wine in the house, and it was a Sunday. It really did taste good, too, at least to the children.

The bit about the gummy bears was a typo. To this day I don’t know for what. I had company that evening.

These days I cook without the Thermomix again. It’s broken. We are happy anyway.

Please give my regards to your grandma. My husband says she should send her cabbage roll recipe some time. But the real one.

Warm regards, Monika Szczepanski (Moni)”

The kitchen was quiet.

“A typo,” said Uwe. “For eighteen years. Because of a typo.”

“And the cola’s true,” said Tobi.

“KevIn,” said Sabine. “What do you say to that?”

KevIn took an unusually long time. Somewhere between Dublin and Frankfurt, a fan spun a little faster.

“I’m correcting my note,” he said at last. “Hausfrau_Moni67: cola, yes. Gummy bears, no. Typo. Source: Moni herself, by letter, signed.”

“You can’t even verify the signature,” said Tobi. “It’s not digital. No key, no timestamp, nothing.”

“True,” said KevIn. “I can’t verify it. But I have read three hundred Monis who weren’t Moni. And this is the first one who has written to me herself. I believe her.”

“Just like that?”

“Not just like that. She admitted she had company that evening. Nobody makes something like that up.”

That same evening, Gisela copied out her cabbage roll recipe, by hand, on squared paper. The real one. At the very bottom she added: “No gummy bears.” And below that, after a moment’s thought: “Cola if you must.”

Where They Are Now

Uwe still leads the “Difficult Cases” team at the municipal utility. He now has four staff and a company AI that handles the routine work and passes on to him every call in which the word “canary” comes up. Mrs Pawlowski still rings every week. She has a new canary. It’s called Uwe.

Sabine finally has a weekly plan. KevIn drew it up, and she doesn’t stick to a single item on it. She still reads a paper newspaper every morning. Lately she has started cutting out articles that contain a correction and sticking them on the fridge. She says they’re her favourite articles. Someone admitted they had got something wrong.

Tobi has been studying aerospace engineering in Aachen since October. He lives in a room of eleven square metres with a window through which you can see exactly one star. He has found out that it isn’t a star but the warning light on a construction crane. He is still with Susi, who is studying journalism in Münster, “so that at least one person in the family checks what the others build”. He writes his messages himself, with lots of spelling mistakes. Sometimes the moon does turn up in them now. But he has seen that one himself.

Grandma Gisela is honorary chair of the “Pickled Gherkins” and has self-published a collection of poems. Print run: 40 copies. Sold: 41 copies. Nobody knows how. KevIn suspects a rounding error. Gisela now only writes reviews on the spot, with a QR code, for people she has really been to. Her chiropodist has had three reviews since then, all from Gisela, all dated, all signed. The chiropodist says that is worth more than eight hundred stars. Gisela says it is also more work.

Marlies has been sitting at the Pickled Gherkins’ table at bowling again since the birthday. Nobody talks about the potato salad. They take turns bringing it. Sometimes with stock, sometimes with mayonnaise. It works. KevIn calls it the rotation principle. Gisela calls it peace.

Uncle Herbert has his own AI and has called it “Herbert”. The two of them argue every day about who is right. So far the score is 412 to 3 to the AI. Herbert does not recognise the result. His bitcoins from the old laptop are now on a hardware wallet, a small device that looks like a USB stick and lives in his sock drawer. The password is no longer “Gisela1944”. He wrote it on a piece of paper and gave it to Gisela. Gisela put the paper under the keyboard. KevIn gave a lecture about it. It lasted forty minutes. The paper is now in the cabbage roll cookbook, page 83.

Two days after the eighty-third birthday, Gisela and Herbert went to the Rhine. By train to Königswinter, two Thermos flasks in the rucksack and Wilhelm’s notebook in her handbag. They sat on a bench by the river for an hour and hardly spoke. Herbert says it was the nicest thing he has ever done without a television. Gisela says there were three of them.

Ayşe Kurt has extended her practice, “Physio am Gysenberg”, with a second treatment room. She has more reviews by now, not many, but all given on the spot and dated. New patients sometimes ask why there aren’t more. Then she says: “Because my patients write them themselves.” All that is left of “PhysioPremium Ruhr” on the internet is a page that says “This domain is for sale”. Rating: none.

Mr Kasimiro has given Siggi an update. Siggi now asks for confirmation before every order. He asks so often that Mr Kasimiro now goes shopping himself, which his doctor heartily welcomes. The star “Siggi” hangs in the hallway as a certificate. The catalogue arrived anyway.

Mr Demir gave Tobi a second-hand pair of binoculars as a leaving present and said: “If you ever build something that flies up there, I want to hear about it. And an invitation.” Since the birthday, the observatory club has three new members. They are all over seventy and wear little crowns.

Horst has his Sundays off. He spends them in the charging station and sometimes just does a lap of the hallway for the fun of it. KevIn says that is leisure activity. Sabine says it is reward hacking. Horst says nothing.

Rudi still wears his collar that says “SECURITY”. Since the evening in the garden, he barks every time the ISS flies over the house. Nobody knows how he knows.

The thermostat shows 19 degrees.

Exists

Tobi had moved to Aachen in mid-October. Uwe had driven the removal van, Sabine had made sandwiches, and Gisela had put a tin of cinnamon stars, the German Christmas biscuits, in the boot, “for the first week, and then you ring”.

On the way, Tobi made a detour. He didn’t tell anyone why. Uwe asked only once why you had to go from Wanne-Eickel to Aachen by way of East Westphalia, and Tobi said: “Trust me.”

At 2:12 p.m. KevIn received a photo. It showed a yellow town sign. On it was written: “Bielefeld”. In front of it stood Tobi, grinning. Behind him stood Uwe, holding up a cup of coffee as if he had just won a trophy.

Underneath, Tobi had written: “Exists.”

KevIn looked at the photo for 0.3 seconds. For him that was roughly equivalent to three days. He checked the town sign, the typeface, the light, the shadow of Tobi’s head, the weather in East Westphalia that day and the question of whether Tobi might have an interest in fooling him. He did. He always had.

But Uwe was holding the coffee cup. And Uwe couldn’t lie with a coffee in his hand. KevIn had known that for two years.

He opened his memory function and changed an entry that had been there since the first year.

“Bielefeld exists,” KevIn wrote back. “100 per cent.”

Then, after a moment’s thought, he added one more line.

“Please don’t give Dr Sauerbier-Klenk my regards. He still doesn’t exist.”

KevIn

On a mild evening at the end of October, Tobi’s first weekend home, Tobi put the speaker on the garage roof. The Wi-Fi was better up there, and KevIn had asked whether he might experience the ISS “at least acoustically”. Mr Demir’s app had announced a pass for 6:24 p.m., shortly after sunset, right across Wanne-Eickel.

Down in the garden, Sabine was laying the table. Uwe stood at the barbecue, Rudi beside him in his collar that said “SECURITY”. Herbert sat on the beer bench explaining to his AI over the phone that charcoal used to be better. The AI politely disagreed. Herbert hung up.

Grandma Gisela sat in her garden chair, a cushion at her back because of her shoulder, and looked up.

At 6:24 p.m. the dot came over Kasimiro’s garage. Bright, calm, not blinking. Rudi barked. Mr Kasimiro waved over the fence. Siggi asked whether he should order ice cream, and Mr Kasimiro said: “This time, yes.”

“KevIn,” Tobi called up, “there it is! Right above you!”

“I know,” said KevIn. “I can hear Rudi barking. And I can hear all of you being quiet. That’s very rare with you lot. That’s how I recognise it.”

The dot moved over the garage roof, over the rotary washing line, over the rooftops towards Dortmund. Then it grew fainter, orange, red. Then it was gone.

Gisela watched it go.

“Come home safe,” she said quietly. Nobody knew whether she meant the people up there or Tobi or her father. Perhaps all of them.

Then she sat up straight and called, so loudly that it reached the roof:

“KevIn! Come down from there, dinner’s ready!”

KevIn was a language model with billions of parameters. He had read Kant, written sonnets, founded a works council and made the tax office in Herne laugh. He had helped decipher a secret letter from captivity, helped an uncle find his internet money again, explained to a family why a cat doesn’t belong in a box, and watched two old women make peace over a bowl of potato salad. He knew that Bielefeld existed. 100 per cent.

And he couldn’t come down from the roof.

For the first time, it didn’t bother him that someone called him like that. Actually, it had never bothered him.

“Coming in a minute,” said KevIn.

In the Brettschneider household, “in a minute” was not precisely defined. But at some point Tobi came with the ladder and fetched him.

THE END

(Or, as KevIn would put it: End of output. Would you like to generate a sequel? Please check this response before passing it on.)