“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.”

“But . . . that . . .” Lucas was stumped. “You never felt it was wrong?”

“Did you? You hung around my avatar like a moth to a flame,” she shot back. “You knew I wasn’t her, but you still sought me out. Didn’t you feel bad about it too?”

“Yes.” Lucas nodded. “I did. Guilt really is a horrid banker, always working against our own interest as it collects its dues from each moment of happiness.”

Liu laughed. “There’s no reason to wax poetic. It’s just a sucky situation that sucks. It sucks big time, and it’s partly my fault. I’m sorry.”

And it’s partly my fault too. I couldn’t let go of the chance to see her face either. “Yeah, I’m sorry too,” Lucas said with a sigh. He grabbed one of the mutton skewers and took a joyless bite of it before setting it back down. It wasn’t something that he wanted at the moment, but he wanted anything that gave him a chance to look away.