Gaia Alari, a thirty-six-year-old artist, lives in Bergamo, Italy. In the past few years, her father, Gabriele, a seventy-seven-year-old doctor, has grown frail with age. Faced with her father’s mortality, Gaia started searching for a way to make losing him less painful.

Then Gaia learned about the booming digital-afterlife industry, which is worth billions of dollars. One of its offerings is called a death bot: an interactive replica of a loved one, created by feeding an A.I. memories, photos, and other information. The cost is akin to that of a Netflix subscription. The promise is that you never have to say goodbye.