The dead were arranged neatly around the dinner table; First Uncle, Second Uncle, First Aunt, her mother, her grandmother. Each Shen Pai was a monolith about thirty centimeters high, matte black plastic with the name of the deceased embossed in shiny Mandarin. Sharon wondered if the dead dreamed while they slept. It was not clear to Sharon when the traditional Lunar New Year dinner expanded to include the dead; character constructs had been wildly popular for years.

Project W, the company was called. Double You. Memory plus character equals personhood, or so the tagline went. They couldn’t digitize a person, but they could, with a bank of several hundred questions and a proprietary engine that combed through a person’s entire social media footprint, produce something that was indistinguishable in casual interactions. In her earlier years, Sharon had faddishly paid for a W. It still managed her social media and scoured the online markets for bargains. It was a pity that the W represented her tastes and size from a decade prior; a specter of her youth eternally haunting Sharon.

It was a short hop between having a W and leaving a W behind after the passing of the original. And so the ghosts lingered on the net. Project W then launched the Shen Pai range—spirit tablets, named after the wooden ancestral markers that used to be kept in temples. Traditions adapted and paying respects to the ancestors suddenly became much more visceral. Offering incense paled in comparison to having an eight-course meal with the departed. Sharon grimaced at the two actual empty chairs. Her brothers had skipped out on dinner again. Too busy, they said. One had to entertain his in-laws, the other was overseas for work, in a country that did not respect this most important aspect of family time. Not that he tried to take the day off, either. As the eldest, it fell to her. She sighed and booted up her rig, sucking her sensorium out of her apartment and into the space she’d curated for this year’s reunion.

And then the ghosts came.

The dining hall was a gestalt of the dream homes of all the dead. The table was the centerpiece, a massive disc of marble, pure white shot through with veins of smoky ink, its circumference hugged by a ring of pure teak, so dark as to be nearly black, supporting struts carved into the shapes of dragons holding the tabletop. The dead were no less impressive. The aunts in their elaborate baju kebaya, long-sleeved blouses of silk with finely embroidered beads, held close by ornate brooches. The uncles in their pressed shirts, short sleeved for the weather, bright red for luck.

“Panjang omor omor,” they greeted her; long life. They said this without jealousy, Shen Pai ghosts knew they were dead. It was considered disrespectful to commission a Shan Pei which did not accept its own mortality. The aunties fussed over her. “So cantik,” First Aunt said, fingers brushing Sharon’s own kebaya.

“Thank you, Auntie,” said Sharon, all the time with eyes on her mother. Por Por, her grandmother, smiled beatifically. Por Por was a basic model, constructed mostly of still photos and others’ memories. Character engines and animation algorithms did the heavy lifting for her Shen Pai. It was best not to stress the model out.

“Aiyah, nobody special this year?” said First Uncle. Bearing the indulgent aegis of being the firstborn, he had grown up without the imposition of a filter for his words. Second Uncle elbowed him. Those were old questions, a tradition as old as reunion dinners. Sharon smiled off the question. Ws, and by extension all the Shen Pai, had a very specific built in limitation. Their characteristics were a unique seed array, the result of Project W’s proprietary technology, a vast machine learning array that ingested the hundreds of defining questions and the corpus of a person’s digital footprint. The machine digested the person and gave Project W their digital soul.

Early experiments with allowing a W to grow met with disaster. the company set their AIs to adjust the seed, applying algorithmically generated character growth. The souls metastasized, fractal offshoots of illogical personality cancer. The research was abandoned; all new Ws were hardcoded. They could remember events, but they could not learn.

“You are looking well, Ah Girl,” said her mother, lip pressed thin and turned up slightly at the corners. The more generous might even call it a smile.

“Thanks, Ma, you too. Your sarong is beautiful this year.” It truly was, a starburst of pink and yellow flowers, the print exquisitely detailed over a pastel blue base.

“Thank you, girl,” she said and then she sniffed. “Your brothers didn’t come again.”

As though Sharon could force two grown men to spend a virtual evening with family. “Busy lah, Ma. Plus they also have their own dinners to go to.” Spending their evenings with the living, of course. If the eldest couldn’t corral the younger ones, then she would be locked in with the dead. That being said, she much preferred these conversations. Her brothers had their own children to worry about; children whose gravity only increased as they grew, capturing time and conversation into the orbit of school, after school enrichment, tuition to help with schoolwork, which school to apply for next, and the like. At least she knew her place in the wider family system, the trajectories familiar and well worn.

Each of the elder siblings brought a dish by tradition. Por Por had entrusted each of her children with one, a form of insurance to ensure attendance at reunions, since the meal would be incomplete without one of their favorite dishes. Of course, Por Por couldn’t plan two generations down, only one of her grandchildren had any patience for Peranakan food. First Uncle inherited the Ayam Buah Keluak, stewed tender chicken in a heady sauce made from ground nuts of a mangrove plant. Second Uncle the soup, Bakwan Kepiting, clear and fragrant with equal parts crabmeat and ground pork packed into the hollowed-out carapace of small crabs. First Auntie brought the rendang, fall apart tender beef with translucent striations of tendon and fat, floating in heavily spiced curry gravy.

She’d collected these recipes over the years from her aunt and uncles and they were still a hit at gatherings with her brothers and friends. Hours of work went into each dish. Peranakan food was known for its generosity of spice and time; the warm embrace of a charcoal fire under a heavy clay pot. Sharon didn’t have to cook for the ghosts. She could do better, she was a stimulus programmer—one of the few highly specialized artists that calibrated sensory feedback for virtual experiences. Or even more esoterically—getting Ws to react to virtual food. This was her annual reckoning; code was her ingredients, her spices, her technique, her craft; and her family, her judges.

“The soup is very good, almost like I remember,” said Second Uncle, ladling himself another serving and then offering the ladle to Sharon’s mother, who demurred by raising her palm slightly. “Your rendang is very good, very lemak,” said First Aunt. “Aiyah, can cook like that and no family to feed.”

There it was, two dishes in, like clockwork, year after year. It was a coming of age ritual at the reunion dinners when she graduated to the grown-up table. An avalanche of questions about when she’d take the next logical step to become a true adult. As though having left an empty place at the children’s table, she now had to make it her life’s mission to fill the spot. The other uncles nodded knowingly. Por Por, driven by machine reaction to social cues, agreed. Sharon looked to her own mother who refused to meet her gaze. She gave a small sigh under her breath and diffused the tension by ladling more food onto plates.

First Uncle leaned back in his chair and covered his mouth to belch. “If I had known you were better than me at cooking, I would have given you the recipe long ago,” he said, and the others laughed. “You know, my Ayam Buah Keluak was famous back in the day, even used it to win my in-laws over. Maybe it can do the same for you.” Laughter again. Sharon didn’t even bother to respond. She couldn’t really hurt the feelings of a Shen Pai, and you could always give them a factory reset if they accumulated too many negative experiences. A pity that trick didn’t work on people.

Her mother took a carefully assembled spoonful of the fourth dish, a piece of pork belly in a clinging brown gravy. The resolution package Sharon was using let her see the shimmer of the light on the thick layer of fat, which wobbled as the elder Mrs. Chang put it in her mouth and tasted it. Babi Pongteh had been her mother’s dish, braised pork belly with fermented soybeans. This was the recipe that Sharon never got, her mother had insisted on cooking it every year without fail, except in the one year when an aggressive form of leukemia took her down in a matter of months. Sharon had been attempting to recreate the dish ever since, scouring famous cookbooks and internet recipes alike. Every year, she tried a different iteration on the ghost of her mother, and every year her mother gave the same response.

“Not bad, not quite there yet,” said her mother. It wasn’t even real pork. It wasn’t even real spices, real cooking. Sharon had coded it, told the computers how to take a recipe and convert it into 1’s and 0’s so that a rig could give a paying customer an approximation of the taste the chef was aiming for. Better, in fact, she could calibrate the minutiae of sensation, the details of mouthfeel, the touch of flavor on palette. She could make angels fucking dance on a person’s tongue but she couldn’t win her mother over. There were maybe two dozen people in the industry that could do what she did. Not the mass market stuff, approximating boba tea or the latest McDonald’s sauce. No, she was on the high end of the market. Not just the Michelin stuff. She hunted down the home chefs, the best street hawkers. And that wasn’t good enough for her family, obviously.

“It will never be there for you, will it, Ma?” Sharon asked, a little sharper than she intended. The table fell quiet; first Uncle, slightly slower on the uptake, carried on talking to Second Uncle for a moment longer. First Auntie, ever the peacemaker, fought with the weapons she had, spooning out second helpings to all, including a generous dollop of the Babi Pongteh to Sharon’s mother, pork belly, dried mushroom, potato, and all.

“All the family wants are good things for you, Ah Girl.”

“Who defines good? You? Them?” Sharon was close to yelling now. She could tell from the coolness of the air conditioning on her cheeks that there were tears on her cheeks. The program was not set for tears, so she wouldn’t see them if she looked in a mirror, but she knew they were there, all the same.

“Sharon Chang Mei En. Dinner isn’t the time for this.” Her mother had her back absolutely straight, a general on the way to battle on a warhorse. Sharon’s mother only ever used Sharon’s full name in arguments, perhaps to ensure that, even when the two of them were alone, that the scolding was meant for her and her alone.

“There’s never a good time for this conversation. Never was. Never will be. Never can be. You’re dead now, remember?” There she’d let it out. That was the thing about interacting with the Shan Pei, she could get a do over, she could practice as many times as she wanted. She’d just erase this interaction from the collective memories of the Shen Pai after. If only real life had been that easy, if only she could have made the best of the time she had.

The table rattled. Sharon’s mother had put both hands on the tabletop to push herself to her feet. “There are things other than work. There’s family. When did you make time for what we needed?”

“That’s why you never taught me Por Por’s recipe, isn’t it? I just wasn’t good enough for you. After everything else I achieved. It still isn’t good enough. Where are your sons? Where are the cousins? It’s just me. It’s always been me. And this is all I get back.” It felt wrong coming out, this vitriol under pressure, dammed up for so long, just that small leak was causing the whole edifice to collapse. The words were the wrong shape, not the smoothly practiced retorts she’d run through her head at night when reviewing these painful conversations. In her mind, the delivery had been faultless, her adversaries were driven speechless by her wit. In this virtuality, she was gasping for breath between the real world sensation of snot running down her lip, tears down her cheeks, all at odds with what the program would display and what the ghosts would react to.

Sharon saw her mother open her mouth to scream at Sharon. The machine simulated that perfectly. There’d been a wealth of video call arguments between the two. Their shared corpus, the body of their relationship, rotting and falling apart. Gobbled up by the machines and made immortal, they could argue forever in this hell of their own creation. Except the scream never came. Por Por had her own wrinkled hand on her daughter’s. Sharon’s mother was silent. That’s all she had time to notice; that emergent behavior, Por Por trying to calm her daughter. Then Sharon reset the scene and the photorealistic scene decayed into pixels, which faded into white.

The dining table was perfectly set, the wall adorned with old family photographs, some sepia brown, some black and white. Towering Ming vases, pure white porcelain with motifs tattooed on in blue ink, flanked the mantlepiece. Dinner was set, the same dishes. Except her mother was already there. That was wrong. Sharon hadn’t booted up the Shen Pai yet, the ghosts should have been . . . asleep. Or wherever it was that they went in between sessions. The same place reflections went when people looked away from the mirror.

Her mother gestured to Sharon, who followed her mother into the kitchen. Cast iron pots hung from the walls, deep woks sat over gas burners. Bundles of ginger, garlic and small shallots sat in plastic bowls.

“I’m sorry about just now,” her mother said. “Por Por told me I shouldn’t have . . . not at reunion dinner.” Sharon did a double take. Her mother shouldn’t have been there. Didn’t Sharon reload the entire scenario? The Shen Pai couldn’t have any recollection of the dinner.

“It’s just the same every year, it just got out of hand tonight,” said Sharon. “Same when you were all alive, same now. They’ll always want me to be something I’m not. You’ll always want me to be something else.”

Her mother sighed. “We just wanted the same thing for you that our parents wanted for us. What changed?”

“The world? Me?” Sharon had never had this conversation before, not like this. The two of them had circumnavigated the problem, they’d teased out its borders with half-hearted exchanges. This. This was uncharted.

Her mother’s voice was soft, a tone that Sharon only half remembered from her youth. When did everything become so business-like, so perfunctory. Just like the dinners, their conversations had become ritual. “Pa and I were so proud of you. You achieved more than either of us ever had. You were enough, we just never told you.”

“You never gave me Por Por’s recipe.”

“You never asked. I always thought about it. But I was the oldest. I got my brothers and sister to dinner. I needed to cook that every year. Por Por gave me that recipe, that’s what made me useful.”

“I guess the recipe is gone then.”

Her mother gave her a look with a mischievous glint in her eye. “You know your Pongteh already tastes better than mine.”

Sharon laughed, and it was good to get it out. When was the last time they’d shared a joke? Not for a long time before her mother had died, and certainly not after. “Still, just because it tastes good doesn’t mean it’s better.”

Her mother smiled and pulled her to the kitchen workspace. “Ah Girl, that makes no sense at all. Come on, the trick is to start with the tombok. No food processor, you need to grind the shallots by hand.”

Sharon dialed out of the simulation. Her cheeks were still recently wet. The Shen Pai sat on the table, she reached out to touch them. Most of them were cold, save for her mother’s, which retained some processor heat, body warm. There was a limitation to Project W’s machine magic. They could copy and extrapolate, sometimes heartily, but they could not create, not truly. Sharon ran another diagnostic on her mother’s Shen Pai just to be sure. The search parameters were familiar to Sharon, she’d run it at least half a dozen times before.

There was, and never had been, any record of the recipe in her mother’s Shen Pai.