The thing is I think Al doesn’t think being a weirdo is BAD. It’s not a moral failing to be different and outcast. He’ll recite Radiohead’s “Creep” and mean every word of it literally and think it’s just a fair and earnest assessment of his, and Sulla’s, personality rather than some sort of value judgment.

So I think this is just Al being a responsible adult instructing this child in his charge to the best of his ability, with the implied understanding that she’s literally his clone who’s extremely able to relate to his experiences and to parse his engineer’s way of thinking and communicating. Like, they can both take it as a given that they share a lot of things like being scared of facing people, and really the only difference between them in that regard is Al has had many more years to deal with it, so obviously his experience can be valuable to her. Would that all parenting was this straightforward.

Alistair’s description of his childhood basically describes me for a fair portion of my life.

grazi, warp — in my advancing years, my own memory-recall slips a little more and more

that metaphor you’d used, by the way…
…that was beautiful, how you’d managed to integrate internet vernacular like that

♥

Brendan = Adoring Protective Dad
Al = Awesomely Manly Grandad

Sulla knows that she’s Allustair, but the replication was imperfect, so it was only a lifeless template that Brendan zapped with a spark of life that evolved it into Sulla.

She has all those memories, in the same way your web browser has cookies; each one links to one single applet, requiring manual editing of the database to index them into the whole.