[chromedragon]

It's been a while since I've had access to my terminal. I thought up the rudiments for a story set in a near-utopia, where a man recreates a lost loved one as a highly complex chat bot. He built this flatline-esque construct to give himself closure, but he ends up revisiting it over and over simply to relive the grief and pain of what happened. The story would hold a (likely uninspired) critique of the 'Ship of Theseus' thought experiment, proposing that regardless of the ship's originality the true ship is the ship that sails, that undergoes change - ergo, the man's perfect copy of his beloved is rooted in a single snapshot of their mind, making them a beached ship with no way forward. His dead loved one, while gone, was the only true version of themselves. His pain comes with the desire to cling to a duplicate of a ship that has already sailed.

It's a bit messy, needs some refinement and some reworking but the fundamentals are there.

As a bonus, this is a vest I've been working on. this is only a mockup, everything is subject to change.