Season 3, Episode 19: Making Peace

I was beginning to consider a life without Amber, and what that might look like. I didn't really like it, I decided.

We were getting a new body and head for Caroline in a few weeks, so to an extent there was an answer. But while I liked Caroline as Amber's kid sister, I couldn't really see her as a replacement for Amber.

Amber was irreplaceable.

And I scolded myself for anthropomorphizing her. At the end of the day she was a very high-tech machine, but a machine all the same.

But while that was factually true, I still saw a soul in there. And I was grieving. It had been more than a week without her and I felt like I was drowning. I was going through the motions of life, mostly because just sitting at home alone was utterly unbearable, and grieving with glitchy Caroline was even worse, so I was going to lunch with friends, playing golf, I'd taken a day off and gone fishing off Grand Isle, I'd test-driven a bunch of new cars without finding anything I wanted to buy...

Nothing gave me joy.

It struck me that this was the first real loss of a loved one I'd felt. Yes, I'd lost my grandparents, but all four of them died in their 90's and by the time they'd gone it was peaceful, with lots of time to say goodbye, and it was just... not painless, but manageable. I knew it was their time; for three of them it was past their time and they barely recognized any of us.

But this? The experience of this? Not getting to say goodbye and she was just gone, taken by Cole's human-trafficker friends and carted off somewhere she'd never be found? This was like losing a loved one in a car crash or to a murder.

Maybe worse, because in this case I knew Amber was still out there. Unless they'd recoded her. Then she really would be gone.

Except for the backup personality file sitting on Keegan's servers. If I could get her back I could restore her.

Or maybe put her personality, her digital soul into the new Caroline when it showed up.

I dismissed that idea as soon as I had it. It seemed unethical, though I wasn't sure why.

I was at the dive down the street from the house eating lunch at the bar, thinking about all of this, when the email came. At first, I thought it must be spam; it came from Amber's email account. You know how the spammers will spoof your email address in order to fool you into opening their idiotic emails? That's what I figured this was.

Except the subject line said "I'm Still ALIVE! Details Inside!"