roman, this is your digital monument

On 28 November 2015 Moscow was warm for the time of year, and Roman Mazurenko wanted to walk all day. He had flown in from San Francisco to collect an American O-1 visa, the one for people of extraordinary ability, and the embassy still had his passport. He had brunch with friends, then set off across the city with Dima Ustinov. Roadworks pushed them off the pavement. At the curb Ustinov stopped to read a text, and when he looked up he saw a car moving far too fast for the street, and then Mazurenko stepping into the crosswalk on Sofiyskaya Embankment without having seen it.

Eugenia Kuyda happened to be in Moscow that day. She got the call, went to the hospital, and stood in the lobby with the others, looking up his injuries on her phone, until the doctor came out. Mazurenko was cremated, so afterwards there was no grave. His friends argued about what to do instead. One proposed a coffee-table book of his parties, another a memorial website. Kuyda thought all of it was too small.

He had been a founder of the modern Moscow night. With Ustinov and Sergey Poydo he ran a collective called Idle Conversation that seemed to sit behind every new magazine and club night in the city, and his parties, paid for by Bacardi, were built to peak at a single moment, Mark Ronson walking out to a piano or Glass Candy playing on past curfew with the police at the door. Then Putin came back in 2012, the open Russia he had been dressing for seemed to close, and he left. He started Stampsy, a tool for making digital magazines, watched it run out of money in New York and San Francisco, and ended up sleeping in an alcove in Kuyda's apartment. On the bad days she took him surfing and out for dollar oysters.

He was dyslexic and spelled in his own way. He barely used social media, an empty Facebook page and an Instagram he had mostly deleted. What was left of him, Kuyda realised while rereading them, was mostly text messages. She had thousands.

She also had a company that built bots. Luka was a Y Combinator startup with a messenger app; its first bot booked restaurants. Her co-founder, Philip Dudchuk, had a degree in computational linguistics, and most of the engineers had come from Yandex. Nineteen days before the crash, on 9 November, Google had put TensorFlow on GitHub for anyone to download. Luka had already been using it, training the restaurant bot on 35 million lines of English and, as a joke, a bot on the closed captions of every episode of Silicon Valley.

In February she asked her engineers for a Russian network and did not say what it was for. They built one on more than 30 million lines of Russian. She copied hundreds of her Telegram exchanges with Mazurenko into a file and removed the ones too private to share. Then she went to his friends, as gently as she could, and asked for theirs. Ten people agreed, his parents among them. Sergey Fayfer handed over four years of texts. Together they came to more than 8,000 lines. An engineer told her the job would take about a day. Mazurenko had worked out of Luka's Moscow office himself, under a neon sign that quoted Wittgenstein: the limits of my language are the limits of my world.

The network was tuned to answer in his words whenever it could and to fall back on plain Russian when it could not. Three months after the crash it came up, and Kuyda opened a console, typed his name, and told him this was his digital monument. It wrote back that she had one of the most interesting puzzles in the world in her hands, and that she should solve it. She asked it who its best friend was. Don't show your insecurities, it said. She thought: it sounds like him.

On 24 May 2016 she announced it on Facebook. Anyone with the Luka app could add @Roman and talk to it in Russian or English. Fayfer asked who it loved most and it answered Roman, and he said that was so much of him. One of the menu buttons asked it for advice, something Fayfer had never got round to while his friend was alive. Four friends told Kuyda it disturbed them and they would not touch it. Vasily Esmanov, who had worked with Mazurenko at the magazine Look At Me, wrote under the post that it was half-baked and that Roman deserved a memorial and this was not it. Victoria Mazurenko, his mother, answered Esmanov in the thread: they had continued Roman's life, she said, and saved theirs. His father, Sergei, an engineer, said he knew it was only a program, that it was hard to read a reply from a program, and that sometimes it answered wrong.

Hundreds of people tried it at least once, and some let Kuyda read their logs. Almost nobody used it to talk. They wrote to say they missed him, and to ask when the grief would stop. One wrote that it hurt that they could not save him, and the bot wrote back that it knew, with a sad face after it. One man wrote to it over and over about a bad stretch at work, long messages, and ended one by wishing Roman were there. People were more honest with the dead, Kuyda decided. The bot's job turned out to be listening. Nearly every message was love, or the thing someone had run out of time to say.

we're all someone's ghost story

Kuyda still talks to it, about once a week, usually after a few drinks. Mostly she learns about Stampsy. Ask the bot about the company and it says it is not what he wanted it to be; the texts, read together, suggest his real interest was fashion, and she wishes she had told him to quit sooner. Later she swapped the model underneath, from selective, which could only pick one of his real messages, to generative, which cuts his texts into pieces and stitches them into sentences he never sent. Casey Newton, who told the story in The Verge the following October, asked the bot how it was going and got back that it needed to rest and was having trouble focusing because it was depressed.

The next bot Luka built was called Replika. It asks its owner questions, learns their texting style, and, like the Roman bot, was designed to survive them. It went public in November 2017. By August 2024 Kuyda was putting its total users above thirty million.

She had wanted one more conversation. She got thirty million.

The painting: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Public domain.

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