This was Vic’s great Aunt, the renowned Nellie Bly, nick-named for the intrepid lady aviatrix in the early age of flight. She retained that nickname beyond the recollection of anyone who knew her in a legal perspective. Vic waved his tablet that displayed the fruits of two Artificial Intelligence algorithms to demonstrate what the faded black and white images might look like captured as modern, colorized pictures. It made the ancient images glow with disconcerting life.

“The two programs I used were the ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini system. There were some interesting differences.”

Vic had been perplexed when he started but triumphant as he dumped the fruits of his research on the conference table. “These images look like they were taken in the same few years. Bly kept them as keepsakes on her bureau for some seventy years. That was through two world wars and her marriage to the Doctor that produced no children. With no one to directly bequest them to, they came sideways in the family, landing under my parent’s bed and then under mine in the box under the bed I use back at Big Pink.”

He looked down at the tablet’s glow against the blinking status lights of the TAHE machine at the end of the conference table. “They were taken from their frames to save space when my parents descended on the little West Virginia town to dispose of her household furnishings so the Church next door could tear it down for additional parking. They had lain there for thirty years until I had to settle the debris of my own generational change. This is what the material looked like as an example of the materials he found.”

“This is how some of them looked, Musty things, slipped as short stacks into boxes of ancient correspondence from a group of un-marked family captured a century ago. So there was some mystery to the search.”

Apparently Vic had only met Bly a few times when she still lived. She then seemed impossibly aged to the young Vic as she was entering her 80’s back then, frail and but still with a certain vibrant energy. That is what appeared in the digital shoot-out between ChatGPT and Google Gemini in the image reconstruction. This is Bly as she appeared at the beginning of her great adventure at the beginning of the 20th century:

Melissa laughed and pushed the glowing tablet back across the smooth wood of the table. “I can recognize the woman in the portraits as your direct family. But who are we to imagine who this might have been?” She pointed to this image of an unknown but determined female:

Vic was clearly exhausted by his labors, but he took the tablet back and stabbed at the screen with his forefinger. The colors merged in the little swirl and then suddenly froze. “This wasn’t from Great Aunt Bly’s bureau. It was stacked with the other clutter of the three estates piled in that box that came from my folk’s estate.”

Vic then poked up a blurry old image of three doughboys from the American Expeditionary Force in France, 1918. He held the tablet up to show three young soldiers before a shed near the Front. “Looking at them in faded black and white lends a distance in time between us in the centuries. But look at what Google Gemini made of my Grandfather’s image when he was fighting the Kaiser’s boys overseas.”

“He looks like a man I would like to have next to me in a bar fight,” said Splash.

Melissa smiled. “Or a fellow a lady might like to meet.”

Copyright 2025 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com