> “bringing his lover back from the dead without his consent or awareness isn’t exactly, uh, ethical”

Sorry — how, exactly, would you get someone’s consent to bring them back from the dead? They’re dead, they can’t consent to anything!

I mean yes, you could try to get their consent before they die, if you had some reason to think they might be dying soon… but Al’s death was completely unexpected.

I think it makes complete sense she is a child.

1. While she has a computer brain, she still needs to learn from experience as well and has lived a relatively short time.

2. She is a new lifeform and is complex enough to be a bit unpredictable in regards to choices and personality. A child’s smallness (and portability) is super useful in these situations. Every parent knows this when their child has moments like meltdowns and needing to be held.

3. An adult body would require more materials to build. That is $$$–especially when it is clear there are refinements to be made (like the joints).

4. Seeing an exact adult Al copy when it is obvious Sulla will never be him would probably be super depressing. I get the gist Brendan (and Sulla) chose her first body to look like child Al as remembrance and monument but never a replacement

Thanks!

While I can see your point about a widow and a child, this really doesn’t feel like the same situation. Of course the widow sees the child as a child and not as their late husband – because it’s a child, and an entirely new person, with only the genetics of the parent.

Al and Brendan did not create a life form together. Brendan used a copy of Al’s brain to re-make him from childhood. Now he’s going to raise “Al” but it of course won’t end up being Al, since he’ll be raised completely differently from the original. Even if he respects that this is a child and not his late lover, it still seems pretty unethical and mad-scientisty to me.

I was going to say something similar to this – except I think it’s more like those cases of women who have babies using their dead husband’s sperm – I mean when the man has died and they extract the sperm, and get pregnant with it.*
It’s like Al and Brendan made a baby, but it was kind of non-consensual on Al’s part.
Also, I wonder why Brendan made Sulla as a child, and not a fully grown Al? Of course it was clear that she had a child-like brain and needed to learn, and I wonder why that was too? Why were parts of Al’s development missing, when some complex skills were intact?
*pretty sure I read that in the Daily Mail once.

It’s the staircase railing. Sulla’s blocking it in the second-to-last panel.
UPDATE 5/1: I’ve tweaked the page to add more staircase infrastructure in both panels.

Yes, but he seems to accept and respect she is a different person–and is a child. It doesn’t seem much different to me than a woman losing her boyfriend or husband and finding out after his death that she is pregnant. Having a baby after losing the love of your life can be lonely and triggering (especially when you see elements of their dad in them), but many widows still see those babies as their chidren–not their late loves.