The King in the Cowboy Hat

“I am going to cry your pardon, then, because I’m obviously not good at getting across what I was trying to. Whatever the case is, if this design pleases you? I don’t think you’ll find anything to complain about being in a body that looks like that.” Yet another reminder that he should just stick with his stronger points, he supposed. He was good at dealing with his problems, with his calling, and women… well, women, even other artificial ones, weren’t part of that calling that he was good at.

Thankfully, she gave him something to think about there. Dying… what was it like? That question brought hundreds of memories, experiences that had been unlocked in his mind after they’d been supposedly sealed away forever, sliding back into the forefront of his consciousness. “Pain… I’m going to skip over the obvious bits about it being unpleasant and distracting and debilitating at times, because obviously there’s no real way for me to describe it to you in a way that’ll make sense to you. You don’t have the reference yet, although I’m sorry to say that you will. The worst part… The worst part is that moment of realization that you could fail, that you’re not unbeatable, not unkillable. You could succumb to the very real physical limitations we all have, that your body might decide that it was time for it to stop working. And when you die… Well, sometimes it’s too fast to know it. Other times… I think the worst thing about it is regret. You have time to think of all the things you won’t ever do, or won’t do again. There’s not much of a more desperate feeling than that.”

@kel

He might be out of practice but Friday had never been IN practice, as was clearly evidenced by her basically digital flailing when Gwen attempted to flirt with her. Or at least she was fairly certain it had been flirting.

Virgil was flirting...right? Certainty was approaching 99% based on respondes, but it still seemed...odd to her.

„It is me. Or at least how i have always been visualized so..that rather is as closer to ‚who i am‘ as I am likely to achieve with out involving Mr. Stark.“ Although...humm. Friday shunted some of her processing power to that task.

Dying,,,well Friday was aware that it wasn‘t exactly the easiest conversation but considering what she was planning, it seemed a necessary one. She listed carefully a mote of confusion drifting across their connection; „Even when you know it is not the end? Or..“ Friday cocked her head at him, „Virgil, how have you been healing the damage done since leaving your home dimension?“

She said that it was her, and that was really all that Virgil needed to hear. “If you say so, then let it be so,” he said. “You have a fine look there. I don’t think that anyone could find any fault in it.” He decided to leave it at that, lest he manage to stumble over his words again and confuse the issue even more.

“Well, all of the times that I died were before I knew that it wasn’t the end,” he pointed out. “Since then, well… the fear of it’s real. My body can be rebuilt, yes, but if I get shot in the head, there’s a very real chance that I’d be unrecoverable, unable to be fixed or put into a new body and reawakened. I’ll have a backup of myself stored to be put into a fresh mind, yes, but would that be me? Or would it just be a copy of myself that thinks it’s me?” he shrugged, not having an answer for that. “No real way to be sure, I suppose. And even if it’s just a matter of my body being destroyed… if I ‘die’ somewhere alone or without anyone knowing how to recover me, then I may never be restarted anyway. I might as well be dead in that case.”

He smiled a bit as he remembered his long journey through Mid-World. “Well… badly, for a good while. The body will heal itself from smaller injuries, just like a born-human would. You can treat wounds just like you would a human’s, and it’ll re-seal itself with time just like a human’s wounds will scar over, only it won’t leave a mark. There are ways to treat them more quickly, of course, but I didn’t have access to that for a good long while. By the time I made it back to my world, well, my body was serviceable, but in some serious need of maintenance. Once I merged with my newer self there, I’ve been in a better position to keep it better maintained, but having access to a real rendering machine for fresh bodies? Well… this will make things quite a bit easier.”