Lucas didn’t know how to reply. It was a fact. He was still alive; she wasn’t.

“Ah, right,” Xun Guan said, “it must be hard looking at her face every day. It’s hard to accept that she’s gone when I’m sitting here with you, wearing my guilt as plain as day.”

Lucas’s mouth hung open. He had his suspicions earlier, but to hear it from her was still a shock.

“Fancy that,” she continued. “No reply from the great, decisive CEO. I know a dozen board members who wouldn’t believe it even if I told them.”

“But . . . why? Why her face? Why would you do that to me? To us?” Lucas finally asked. He didn’t know what to feel at the moment, how to act, how to react, and so curiosity began to lead his thoughts. Questions sprung up where he knew there should have been hurt.

Did she pick this moment to confess because she thinks I won’t leave? Does she think she has me trapped here, that I won’t storm out of a bathroom without any clothes?

“Punishment? You know, you may have loved her for a few years, but I loved her for a lifetime. You leaned on her for a minute, but for me, it was a stretch of time that spanned from the start of my existence. I didn’t know a day without her until that accident. When I went to make a character . . .” She trailed off for a second and touched her face. “I didn’t want to feel scarred and ugly . . . and when it asked me to think of how I wanted to look, she was all I could think about back then.”

Right. The character generator asks the player to imagine and picture the person they want to look like if they choose not to go with a facsimile of their own real-life looks. He hadn’t tried the other process, trying to look like someone else, but he knew the gist of it. You would picture that person, and then it’d let you slowly change the features by imagining the modifications or by telling the AI what you wanted to change until you were satisfied. “You could have made it at least a little different. You didn’t have to keep her looks,” Lucas said, his eyes narrowing as he focused on her.

“No, I couldn’t,” she replied, sighing. “I tried to. I tried to think about changing her nose, her cheeks, her lips, anything. But it was too much. In the end, I just decided to live with it. That’s okay, right? I told myself it was. I told myself that, as long as I had her face over mine, that every time I looked in the mirror, that every time I saw my reflection in a lake . . . at least then she’d be with me. I’d never forget an inch of her.”