Welp, I can see I’ve angered the groupthink watchdog, come to defensively project bullshit at me. That’s a pretty good time to wrap it up.

I’ll just say that I literally don’t think that Al would be wrong if she didn’t wind up with Brendan as her SO in the end, based on the story so far. I think they both care about each other a great day and that will never change, but to this reader (who obviously, could be completely wrong, only Blue knows what’s in these characters hearts), it feels like there’s a fundamental different in the level of investment, due to where Brendan and Al were at the start of their relationship.

AND IF SO, THAT’S OK. It’s better than ok, it’s INTERESTING AF and something that’s rarely covered in stories. Because you aren’t required to love someone, even if they support you and want to love you when you are totally isolated, depressed, and in such a bad mental space you can’t imagine anyone wanting to love you for who you really are.

Love isn’t a debt that is owed for services rendered.

Anyone who would dare charge such a fee is a monster.

You can value and appreciate the people who help you rise out of the shadows, but they don’t own you.

Hmm, this is a really, really weird hill to die on. I feel like you’re bringing some personal or political baggage here and I hope you figure whatever it is out on your own time, but right now your comments feel about as appropriate as all the “maybe this panel of a chest being peeled away is about a heart condition” back in 2015.

Westworld Season 3 has that very premise in its plot. But as Rochi mentioned, this seems to have already been solved (one way or another) with Sulla’s transfer. And I feel like at this point, it’s all moot since Al’s original brain died but was somehow still transferred over. It seems like once everything looks like its running okay, if the data was transferred to a new brain the old one would be disabled…but the current brain would probably always be backed up to protect against permanent fatality since that was the intention of digitizing the human brains to begin with.

Yeah, I really feel like people think I’m criticizing Al for not being as open and bright as Sulla is. That’s really not what I’m talking about at all.

All the time that we see Al thinking about Brendan – either when he’s not looking at her, or when she’s alone – what do we see?

We see physical attraction:
http://ohumanstar.com/comic/chapter-2-page-34/
http://ohumanstar.com/comic/chapter-2-page-59/

We see fear/worry (not surprising):
http://ohumanstar.com/comic/chapter-2-page-61/
http://ohumanstar.com/comic/chapter-3-page-14/

We see surprise? Perhaps surprise at how good Brendan is as interacting with other people?
http://ohumanstar.com/comic/chapter-2-page-58/

A fond smile, Brendan is doing what he’s best at:
http://ohumanstar.com/comic/chapter-4-page-16/

Awkward (not sure what to do, her thoughts are fleshed out a few pages later)
http://ohumanstar.com/comic/chapter-4-page-44/

Here are the only times that I’ve found what I think is even a glimpse of what I’m talking about. When Brendan fixes the Dancer (fixing an avatar of what Al wants to be): http://ohumanstar.com/comic/chapter-2-page-42/

And… when Brendan talks about ending people’s pain by giving their souls a new vessel: http://ohumanstar.com/comic/chapter-3-page-42/

It’s just after this strip that Al takes a risk that she wasn’t willing to take before, she tries to connect physically to Brendan outside of the workshop: http://ohumanstar.com/comic/chapter-3-page-44/

It’s only these moments, these moments when Brendan is connecting with that dream she’s built her whole life around hiding, when she seems to feel something like what he feels for her.

When she doesn’t have to hide any more, will she still feel that connection?

That’s why I wonder and why I worry.

I feel like you’re strawmanning me here a bit. :)

I’ve been with someone for over 20 years, I know that love isn’t an endless giddy ride of ecstasy and amazement. For a variety of reasons, we both hard a hard time being vulnerable about those kinds of feelings at the start, but we each had moments when those feelings would just well up, and even if we were completely alone, physically, those feelings would come out.

I just think it’s troubling that the only time Al seems to show even a glimmer of those kinds of feelings towards Brendan, it’s when he’s talking about making the dreams that she’s been trying to hide a reality.

Look, I hope I’m wrong about this. I hope that the new body will give Al the chance to open up and that in the near future, she’ll be able to look at the person she loves with the same open, joyful smile that we’ve seen on Sulla’s face so many times.

I just worry that person is not going to be Brendan.

I think that Al has closed herself off to so many things in her life, I would be truly shocked if experiencing gender euphoria (as I very much hope she will) *doesn’t* have a major impact on how she views all of the important relationships in her life.

And I have a suspicion that experiencing this level of agency over her life may make her re-evaluate a romantic relationship where she was largely passive.

Good points, very much parallel to what I was wondering.

Al existed solely as a (damaged) scan for a decade or more, and was resurrected, so hardware transfer seems unlikely.

Having the source ‘die’ by erasure after the transfer seems… disturbing… though that may be just our organic way of looking at it. Though in human terms, if you were a middle aged person and you transferred all your memories to a younger clone, would you be ok with your younger self saying, ‘ok grandpa, we’re just going to switch you off now…’ From your younger self it’s mission accomplished, from your older self it’s just a branching that’s occurred. It might get a bit dicey if your younger self now thought it had a right to the older self’s resources; house, bank accounts, job, etc. and regarded the old version as being in the way now. O brave new world…

Now present Al may prefer oblivion to continuing in a form that doesn’t suit his ‘self’, but would that suit every AI? Interesting questions on self and identity being raised here…

Brendan’s already gone through that once. It might bring back some painful memories, but Al will still be here with him.

Now I’m weighing the options, and they all have interesting implications.

Physically transferring the “brain” means keeping the same hardware for the lifetime of the person. Brendan already mentioned with Sulla’s upgrades that one reason he prefers they do whole-body transfers is to preempt unexpected hardware failure, and hardware failure in the brain sounds absolutely horrifying. Based on how routine and expected it is to have disk failure in present-day server rooms, it may not even be feasible to keep the same brain hardware for decades.

If transferring the mind into different hardware, I see two basic options: keep the “original” unchanged until the copy is finished or have the data removed from the original as it is moved to the new hardware.

Generally, when copying data from one piece of hardware to another, the former is considered good practice. Otherwise, if something goes wrong during the transfer (like a power outage), you are left with corrupted, partial data in both places. That also raises the question of “where is Al” during that transfer, since no one place stores their entire mind. Would they essentially be dying and coming back to life, since they don’t really exist mid-transfer?

Keeping the original brain unmodified until the transfer is complete means you aren’t corrupting the brain mid-transfer, but the end result is two copies of the mind. What do you do with the first copy? If you don’t want a second person walking around, the options I see are “delete” or “archive.” If deleting, is that murder? If archiving, is that a living person, without the ability to think or feel or perceive the world? If they aren’t living, but they could come back to life if they are “powered on” again or transferred to different hardware, are they really dead? How should we classify the original scan data used to create the “present-day” Sulla and Al?

Did I miss any options or important considerations? How would you answer these questions?