Soulware · No. 026
The tail end
Your phone knows two facts it keeps politely apart: how old your father is, and how often you actually see him. This entry multiplies them — into the number you've spent your whole life not calculating, and a slider that puts it back in your hands.
Dad · 67
About 34 evenings left, if nothing changes.
What it breaks. The most load-bearing illusion in personal software — that there is always more time, that the next visit is one of an unlimited supply. Every calendar is built to imply continuance; this one takes the same data and surfaces scarcity, telling you the one thing the whole genre is designed to keep comfortably blurry.
Why it might work. The arithmetic is true whether or not you look, and the not-looking is what lets a love quietly run down in two-visits-a-year increments. A screen that shows the small bright remainder might convert an abstract someday into a plan for October — the way the people who've sat with this number tend to come away calling their parents, not despairing.
Where it fails. A number can poison the thing it counts: sit a visible tally over every dinner and you may start spending visits instead of having them, grief arriving years early. And the figure is a confident fiction — it leans on actuarial averages that know nothing about this particular heart, so a guess can read as a sentence.
If a screen could show you the evenings you have left with someone, would you look — or is some arithmetic kinder left undone?