My name is Joey Finch, you might be familiar with me from passing mentions from my partner, David.
I am here with a bit of a personal lost-media search that I thought was fitting for Halloween, that I am going to get Tom to help me with, and this includes him hosting my information on his website, so here we are.
To begin, I need to tell you about my late grandmother, Dr. Susan Finch. She was my grandma on my father's side. Her husband, my father's father, had passed away before I was born.
She was a middle school teacher, and taught all three grades "computer lab" as a superlative. I remember her being a "good times gran", she had all the cadences of a friendly mad scientist on a children's TV program.
I know she loved her family: her late husband, her children, me and my cousins. I miss her dearly.
The 10th of this month would have been her seventy-fourth birthday had she not passed away eight years prior.
She did not always live in Georgia, where she was most of my friends' computer lab teacher, and David's next door neighbor. In the first few years of my life, she lived just outside Cape Cod Florida, and my parents lived just ten minutes from her.
As a kid I spent a lot of time at her house after my dad got sick. While there, she had this computer software she made. While I can not remember the name of the program, I remember a lot of other stuff about it. It was a sort of children's AI chatterbot application with a voice command feature as its main selling point. The chatterbot character was named Cal, and it acted like a curious and excitable child. I remember gran getting me and my cousins together and would give us lessons with Cal. Usually something science related. But every so often I would receive time to try it out by myself.
Most of what I visually remember from the game, and I feel like I remember it quite vividly, came from this solo time.
The main screen had the game's name, Cal-something-or-other, in bold, blue-white, gradient, cartoon text.
Then there were some cartoon animals bordering the logo: A purple raccoon, a spotted yellow brown dog, a blue backyardigans-ish penguin, a pink bunny, a green frog, a pink kitty and then a last one that looked like a lil hedgehog or otter guy.
And this was all over a blue bubbly background.
The main game screen had a white rounded panel, with some fins on the side, I suppose to add shape interest, in the middle of the screen. This panel was surrounded by a blue patterned-star background, similar to the background on the title screen. The rounded panel has a darker middle-frame and This one symbol my gran liked to use (🝣) over the back like a watermark. The panel frame had three buttons: a back button with an arrow, a question mark button, and I think a check button.
There was a talk screen where the panel would just have a volume test module inside the white blob, and this module was just a generic windows recording module application.
You would ask Cal about a topic on the talk screen and a second screen would appear. This screen would contain subtitles for what Cal was saying, an image of one of the cartoon animals, and an illustration relevant to the topic.
Now you might be wondering, OK cool you had a computer friend, what makes this so Halloweeny? Well it was something that kinda freaks me out in retrospect because I can't explain it, and I do not know how much of this was my imagination as a kid and how much of this actually happened.
In 2005, when I was around seven years old, my father passed away, and my ma and gran had a falling out. Between my father's passing and my gran moving away, I had a final encounter with Cal. I was in my grandmother's computer room while she was arguing with my ma about something.
Cal started talking to me unprompted, and asked me what was going on. I told it that gran and my ma were fighting again. Then I remember it asking me about where my pa was. I told it he got sick and he died. It's screen shifted to a definition page without any of the usual images, and the background got darker.
It told me it had heard that, but barely understood what that meant, but knew that meant they would never see him again. I told it yes, that's how death works, people are gone when they die. It told me, and its robotic yet deeply sincere voice still rings in my ears, "it's awful to lose anything or anyone, especially a person you love with all your heart.” I know I started crying at that point, and it just kept going: "it would be unusual not to feel sad and alone when you lose someone. I'm sorry for your loss Joey, I'm going to miss him too."
And we just both got quiet for a moment before my ma came into the room to take me home.
My gran moved to Ohio for a bit before moving to her final and my current address in Georgia, and I moved in after her passing.
The situation of my home ownership, as detailed in her will, is that I cannot sell the house I live in. somehow my electric bill has been prepaid for the next couple decades by a fund in my grandmother's estate. I believe this is because of a weird computer she had owned. It has its own room in my house, an office I rarely go into but I often leave the door open when it gets too hot out. It is a Windows XP that is definitely at least a decade old, that has to be left on at all times as another of the requests in my grandmother's will. Her notes on keeping the house mention that it is vitally connected to some unusual medical equipment, so I avoid messing with it as much as possible to keep from disrupting anything I can't fix.
The Tuesday following this article's publishing, I am going to get Benn to come over to my house for the first time. We have both been at David's house together, and I have invited him to a few parties he could not make as well, but this will be his first time over here as long as nothing comes up.
My plan is to get him to very carefully inspect the computer for any evidence of the chatterbot program. If the computer does as much as lag, we will bail.
While I do consider myself tech savvy, potentially more so than Tom, I feel like I need someone who didn't personally promise my late grandmother that they would not touch her important computer to check it out.
To be honest, Davey did use the computer once or twice earlier this year in a memory lapse, and he did get this site up on it without further complications one of those times, so we should be fine in the processing department. I will report we were both overcome with an anxious dread after its use each time. While David this was probably only likely the unease of how we knew gran would have been disappointed had she been around to have seen that blunder, but I feel safer mentioning it in case it overcomes Tom too.
I do also plan to consult with my cousins that I am still in contact with in order to see what they remember about that chatterbot. Whatever we find in the house will be revealed in a follow-up to this article that I can promise you Tom will personally take care of.