To See Her Again (Short Story)

I don't have her anymore. I lost her and I left her and I'll never get her back. I can still remember exactly what she looked like. Every curve, every crevice, every shadow, every shape, remains exactly as it was.

The fact that my visual memory is as vivid as vision now both does and does not make up for the fact that I can no longer actually see her, or anything else.

The money was too good to pass up. It was only logical to agree to the upload. Maybe for some people it isn't as tempting. For one thing, it's not as much of an advantage in some professions, but somebody worked out that an accountant is four times as efficient if he's in the net, and in some companies, the pay raise was almost proportional to that.

Ironically, it had to have been some other accountant who worked those numbers out.

If you take into account the reduced expenses, the pay raise was actually more than proportional. Electrical power is cheaper than food, which, with all the alternatives available, has almost become a specialty item these days. But I sort of enjoyed food. Solid state memory, of course, is far cheaper than housing, either to rent or to own. Bandwidth doesn't save you much over public transportation, until you take into account that bandwidth used for work purposes is free, but with the raise, a man can go wild on recreational bandwidth and still come out ahead. Many do.

I didn't sign on for the cheap recreational bandwidth, though. I signed as soon as they said I wouldn't want her anymore. They didn't lie to me. They just believed. Some of the same executives who made that claim also made the jump, and took the upload. They didn't know. If they had, I'm sure they would have stayed. The experts were fairly sure that the hormones and other physical involvement in that process, which weren't part of the upload, were integral parts of the desire, and that without them, it wouldn't have its hold.

I guess I didn't help myself by wanting to believe. It just wore on me, knowing I would only ever have the photograph. I thought this would be better. I was wrong. See, the computer can simulate those desires pretty well, and of course I remember the rest of it in aching detail. The problem is that I no longer have any physical recourse to reduce or forestall that desire. The computer doesn't have any mechanism built in to deal with it, because it wasn't supposed to be there. So it just builds and builds and builds up until...well, let's just say that if the accountants who calculated the salary adjustments had used me as a test case, salaries would have been docked for taking the upload.

Still, I would take a discount on my old salary and all the added expenses–all of it–back, to see her again, if only it could be done.