Pick your Poison

When Martha loses Ash, it is extremely sudden and she doesn’t know what to do. But she has friends and family who are there for her, and they help her through the funeral and she is able to resist the temptation offered to ‘help with the pain’. She then goes home and finds out she is pregnant, just another source of pain piled on someone already suffering. Pushed to the edge, she calls her sister for help but receives no answer. So she turns to the earlier offered help, saying, “I only came here to say one thing,” which sounds awfully similar to a new drug user’s, “I’ll only do it once.”

               And it doesn’t go as planned. She continues ‘taking it’ or talking to the AI, but soon it isn’t enough. She gives up even more for an upgrade—the ability to talk to Ash instead of simply emailing. Now that she can talk with him, she doesn’t want to stop. She begins withdrawing from normal life, ignoring phone calls and staying in her house, anything to increase her time with him. Her life begins to circle around him, having to let him experience anything she does, like the baby’s heartbeat, even if it causes inconvenience. She cuts out all the non-essential parts of her life, like friends and social interaction. And when she is deprived of him, due to dropping her phone, she freaks out. She goes from happy to stressed in a heartbeat, only calming down again when she gets him back.

               Then it escalates again. She needs a higher dosage and she gets it by ordering a body for the AI to inhabit. It freaks her out and she doubts her decision for a moment, but the thought that it will help pushes her forward. She activates the body, becoming nervous when her contact is cut off for the time it takes for the process to complete, but it ultimately scared by what she sees. She pushes the fear aside, determined to let this help her get over the pain, and jumps right in. It works for a short time, but then reality breaks in. She realizes that what she is doing is unhealthy and tries to break out of it. In an effort to remove him, her drug, from her life, she tells him to jump. Even though she couldn’t carry through with that path, she does regain her independence and rejoins the world.

On a completely unrelated tangent, anyone think this guy would be perfect for committing a crime? This dude has no fingerprints, can superficially change his appearance at least a little, and is technically dead. And could be trained to do it pretty easily. Just me?