Eric Dorsey, a 62-year-old engineer in Palo Alto, California, was watching TV in mid-March when he started getting texts that Stephen Hawking had died. He turned on the news and saw clips of the famed physicist speaking in his iconic android voice — the voice that Dorsey had spent so much time as a young man helping to create, and then, much later, to save from destruction. Dorsey and Hawking had first met 30 years earlier, nearly to the day.