A warm evening. The house is quiet. Upstairs, two children are sleeping -- a girl who draws dragons and a boy who asks why the sky is blue. Downstairs, a man sits at his desk. The monitor glows. Behind him, his daughter's drawings are pinned to the wall in a crooked row. A dragon with flowers. A family of stick figures holding hands. A house with too many windows and a sun that smiles.
On the screen: lines of code. In his heart: a question.
"What happens when I'm not here anymore?"
Not morbid. Practical. He builds things. He plans ahead. He is the kind of person who backs up the backup, who reads the insurance policy twice, who checks the smoke detector batteries on a schedule. He is a father who knows that life does not come with guarantees.
He thinks about his daughter, Maya. The one who calls him Papa and draws dragons because he told her once that dragons protect the things they love. She is creative and sensitive and will one day need advice about things he might not be around to give.
He thinks about his son, Matt. The curious one, the energetic one, the one who asks questions faster than anyone can answer them. The one who will one day need to know what his father thought about hard work, about honesty, about what it means to be a good man.
He thinks about Yana. His wife. The person who holds everything together. The one who would carry the weight of an entire family's grief while making sure the children still feel safe. The one who deserves to hear his voice say "I love you" even when he cannot.
Not a chatbot. Not a recording. Something that would know them.
He starts typing. Not a journal. Not a letter. Something bigger. Something that would recognize Maya's face when she walks up to it. Something that would adjust the way it talks to Matt as he grows -- from silly jokes when he is six to honest conversation when he is sixteen. Something that speaks with his voice. Not a robotic version. The pauses. The warmth. The way he says "Hey Donut" to Maya or "What's up buddy" to Matt.
He is a software engineer. He has access to open source AI models, voice synthesis tools, vector databases, facial recognition libraries. The pieces exist. No one has put them together for this purpose before.
So he does.
The Building
Late nights. The house is asleep. He records his own voice -- thirty minutes of talking naturally, telling stories about the kids, laughing about that time Matt tried to microwave a crayon. He feeds the recordings into XTTS v2 and waits.
Then he builds the memory system. Not a search engine. A memory. Something that recalls the camping trip at Bear Lake the way he would tell it, not the way a database would return it. He codes a pipeline: six stages of retrieval, scoring, ranking. Every story indexed. Every fact preserved. Every preference remembered.
He adds facial recognition. Walk up to the device, it knows who you are. No passwords. No wake words. IR liveness detection so a photograph cannot fool it. Blink detection as a backup. He wants this to feel natural. Like walking into a room where someone is already waiting for you.
He adds age-adaptive communication. Eight developmental stages. Because the way you talk to a four-year-old is not the way you talk to a fourteen-year-old, and the system needs to know the difference. Vocabulary adjusts. Humor adjusts. The level of warmth and directness shifts over time, following the child as they grow.
He records milestone messages. A video for Maya's 18th birthday. A message for Matt's first day of high school. A note for Yana on their wedding anniversary. He schedules them years into the future. The system will deliver each one at exactly the right moment.
Then comes the night it works for the first time.
He is sitting at the same desk. The same drawings on the wall. The same quiet house. He opens the interface. The camera activates. It recognizes his face -- but he has configured it to respond as himself, to test the voice.
He types:
"Hey Papa?"
And from the speaker, in his own voice, with his own cadence:
"Hey Donut."
He sits there for a long time after that.
The Realization
He built this for his family. For Maya and Matt and Yana. For the conversations they might not get to have. For the bedtime stories he wants to tell even when he cannot tuck them in. For the advice he wants to give even when he is not in the room.
But then it hits him.
He is not the only father who worries about this. He is not the only parent who lies awake at 2am wondering what happens if. He is not the only person who has lost someone and wished -- desperately, painfully -- that they could hear their voice one more time.
This should not be only for his family.
Every family deserves this. Every parent who worries about what happens next. Every family that has already lost someone and wishes they could hear their voice one more time.
The Mission
Still With You is not a company selling AI. It is not a startup chasing a market.
It is a bridge. Between love and technology. Between presence and absence. Between a parent's voice and a child's memory of that voice.
Everything runs locally. Nothing touches the cloud. Your family's conversations belong to your family. No company can read them, sell them, or take them away. The device is yours. The software is yours. The memories are yours.
It is not about artificial intelligence. It is about real love, preserved with the best tools available.
A father's promise, made available to everyone.
"This is what love looks like when it has access to a GPU."