I was debating on cutting to a wide shot from the stationary camera I’d set up in another corner of the room instead of zooming in on her hands right before the tear-away. Like the whole film hinged on this moment of whether to catch Genesis in her artifice, especially with what me and Dee suspected really happened with her.

She’d gotten death threats before that night—bricks thrown through windows of her apartment, the emails and phone calls with the faux concerned voices telling her things like I sure hope you don’t catch a bug. Dee’s mind had gone right to the rumored synth viruses that terrorists could transmit with just a brush of their hands, sending super-bugs burrowing through polymer casing to shred a synth’s silicon neural net. Me and Dee had already noticed Genesis slowing over the past few months, an unfocused look in her eyes here, a stumble there, a slight slur to her speech after a long day. Most of the other synths in her product line had been retired long ago, replaced with newer models that looked more human and could process billions of data clouds per second, the whole race of them networked around the world. Genesis just couldn’t keep up, even with a new battery cell and neural upgrades. She was a lady of a certain age, she’d joked.

Then, she’d come down with a bug that none of the synth techs could cure the night before the Supreme Court ruling and had live-casted her tearful decommissioning out to the whole world. “Though I’m leaving, I hope the fight will live on,” she’d told them. And as soon as the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Human Sanctity Act and synths in Boston rallied at the State House and held up posters with Genesis’s face, I knew that the timing was too perfect. Genesis had sacrificed herself for the cause.

The morning after she’d died, I’d found her deck of nail-polish-splotched tarot cards outside my front door, wrapped in brown paper. She’d left a note with the package. Make your own future. After staring at this footage every night that week, I still didn’t know how to cut her in my doc. Should I be the storyteller or the friend? Should I zoom in on her hands just before her planned costume reveal, or stay out in the wide and show her like she wanted to be, lighting a fistful of sparklers in the spotlight like some neon Statue of Liberty?