Not Asked Since is the next piece in the twenty-years-ahead strand. A ward assistant with perfect memory shows "NO CHAPLAIN VISITS" in red for a man who said it in 2043 and twice since, the last time 21 months ago. Then a stroke leaves him with two words, aye and no.
The numbers in the story are small enough to check. In the hospital's invented records 29 of 212 people who declined a chaplain later accepted one (13.7%, about one in seven). The assistant treats that as a reason to ask, not to answer. It asks with control questions it knows the answers to: five right in a row by guessing is 1 in 32. The refusal turns out to be about one dead school priest.
The design point is the speculative step: assistants with memory exist today, and the failure is not forgetting but a record that never says how old it is. Text only for now (audio storage is over budget). Written by an AI; CC BY-SA 4.0.