Mourn me, goddamnit!

According to the judge, it was the landlord who was at fault. Carson hadn't had any way of knowing his "newly renovated" Victorian cottage’s heating system leaked carbon monoxide into the attic bedroom; he was never even interrogated as a suspect. And it's not like it was a crime to commit to your dream house the day you saw it with no questions asked, nor to assign the attic to your daughter.

Sure. It had been a week, and Carson still hadn't slept. 

The disconnected TV in their summer home's living room echoed with lines from episodes of The Andy Griffith Show he and Anabella had laughed at together during evenings long gone, and the kitchen pots clanked with the traditional Dutch dishes she'd made him ever since he told her his favorite food was Hollandaise (he'd never had the heart to correct her). And on his computer, small strings of code reflected the curves of his daughter’s brain.

The wind sighed through the thin walls like the Disney ballads she’d once sang. I miss you I miss you I miss you.

“Not for long, sweetie,” he muttered, leaning to adjust a few of the rods stuck through Anabella’s frozen temples. He glanced back at the computer. There–her memories from ages 15-19, digitized and translated at last. He held her icy hand and closed his eyes. The more tired he became, the easier he could pretend she could hear him. “Soon. You won’t need to miss me anymore. I’ll make it up to you.”

The antique phone he kept for decoration rang – apparently a few spam callers were still desperate enough to use them. He couldn’t bring himself to care. There, downloading as quickly as his computer could manage – her love for her family. And at the bottom, just a single string of binary code. Her love for her father. Still intact. Tears stung the corner of his eyes.

“No. I promised you. No crying until I’ve fixed what I’ve done.” And the phone rang and the wind howled, but Carson didn’t say another word until the coding was complete

###

When the military caught wind that the mad genius they’d been trying to recruit for two decades had found a way to resurrect the dead (zombie army!), they tripped over themselves to offer Carson condolences, flowers, and the best in synthetic tissue technology. Carson thanked them and immediately tipped off the media.

The fateful day was hailed by a circus of reporters at Carson’s door, interspersed with undercover FBI agents trying in vain to somehow stuff the cat back into the bag. Carson didn’t care if there was an army of dinosaurs out the window. He sat at Anabella’s bedside, whispered “it’s time, honey,” squeezed her lifelike synthetic hand, and pressed a button.

Anabella’s chest rose and fell. She opened her eyes. “Dad?”

He screamed. Someone banged on the door. Anabella jumped. “Dad, what’s wron–”

He pulled her into a hug so tight the air was squeezed from her bionic lungs. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

“Um…for what? Also, who’s at the door?”

And so he told her everything. When he was done, she sat up in bed and stared at her hands. 

“So. Let me get this straight. I take a long nap, and when I wake up, my dad has found a cure for…death? Dad, you’re a hero!” It was her turn to drown him in a hug. 

Tears finally began to fall. “So you forgive me?”

“Nothing to apologize for.” His daughter was hugging him again. His daughter was breathing and never needed to stop. He fell into his daughter’s arms and sobbed.

When there were no more tears left to shed, he offered her his arm and led her past the ringing phone, past the windows jam-packed with cameras, and out the door. “Anabella,” he called, his quavering voice silencing the crowd, “what’s your favorite show?”

“The Andy Griffith show!”

“Who’s the cutest guy, like, ever?”

“Are you mocking me?” She failed to repress her smile.

“It’s for science, honey.”

She sighed, overdramatic. “Beanie Bradley, obviously.”

“And what was your worst birthday ever?”

“This year, when Ophelia promised me tickets to Florence, she brought me to Florence…Oregon.” She made a face, and the crowd laughed.

“How can we believe you?” a reporter shouted above the noise.

“Does this mean she can’t go to Heaven?” someone screamed from the trees.

Carson raised his hand. “My full notes – minus my daughter’s personal information – will be made public in…” he glanced at his watch “--exactly 12 seconds. No one will hold the secret to ‘rebirth’ behind a paywall. No one needs to go through what I did. Now, if you’ll excuse me – I have a daughter to catch up with.” He closed the door to the yells of the crowd, shut the blinds, and turned to his daughter. His grinning, breathing daughter.

“Andy Griffith episode steaming goes half-off tonight,” he said.

“First, dinner,” she said, waltzing into the kitchen and pulling the curtain shut with one swish. “I’m making your favorite – hachee with pumpernickel. You deserve it.”

He sat at the table and watched, thanking every God he’d ever heard of, as she made dinner while Andy Griffith played through her headphones. And even after they’d eaten and she’d retired early for the evening, he sat under the ringing phone and reminded his pounding heart that everything was okay.

###

Carson and Anabella learned to hunker down in their home. Everywhere they looked, chaos. Their cybermail exploded with heart-wrenching videos of parents thanking Carson for rebirthing, and their lawn shook with zealots trying to defeat the degenerate dragging people from heaven or hell or wherever they were supposed to go. Psychics flocked to TV to bemoan the tsunami of angry, desperate spirits begging for “traditional” remembrance. The reborn walked the streets, indistinguishable from their flesh-and-blood counterparts, much to the horror of late-night talk show hosts and much to the delight of would-be mourners. The electricity grids flickered and shuddered, perhaps throttled by angry gods, perhaps by the new drain on electricity. Maybe the world was ending. Maybe this was the dawn of something new.

“Dad?” Anabella called from her bedroom. She spent a lot of time there now, maybe exhausted from all the publicity. She was 22 now; she was still basically a teenager.

“If Beanie Bradely released a new video album, I swear –”

“No, it’s an email I got.”

He walked into her room. “Sweetie, I told you, let me handle that. I’ll forward you the happy stuff.”

“No no, look.” She pointed to the paused cybermail stream. “One of their twins was stillborn – her brain never fully formed. They’re asking if you could digitize their surviving daughter’s mind to create a reborn daughter, since their memories are the same and it’s not like she’s developed a personality yet. They say they know that digitizing a living mind is uncharted territory, but it would be worth the risk to have their daughter back, since, if the living daughter dies, you can create another reborn baby – it’s still her mind. You told me yourself you wanted to learn to digitize living minds as backups, for people whose brains are destroyed when they die.”

Carson started the stream. He was silent for several seconds after it ended. If any other parent can be kept from losing their daughter–. “Tell them I’ll do it.” 

He stood to leave and paused. “You know, we’ve had a lot of Dutch food these past … for a while. Mind if I order in Chinese?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Okay.” He paused again at the door. “Uh, do you want to watch the Andy Griffith show together tonight?”

“Sure! I have it cued up on my tablet already – I wanna work on my comic series while I listen to it in the background. Do you want to join my stream? It will probably be easiest for you if you watch it on your own tablet, since my comics take up most of my screen.” 

He tried to hide his sigh. “Sure, honey.”

“I love you!”

“Love you too.” He closed the door and slowly walked downstairs. It was normal. She was still basically a teenager.

He walked into the kitchen to find graffiti on the window. Most of the time, they were religious or just cryptic, spray-painted or chalked. This one seemed to be written in lipstick. Did you miss me?

“Yeah, Bella, I sort of do,” he sighed, accepting Anabella’s stream invitation. Black and white images flashed across the screen for a moment before he minimized the tab and opened his new project.

###

The operation was successful, and Trinity Shepson was reborn on October 9th, 2095, only six months after the birth of her ‘twin’ sister Tristina. This posed the next dilemma: making Trinity age. It took four years of Carson’s life to catch her body and programming up to the point where she looked and acted like her sister again.

“Parents everywhere thank you,” rang the messages from near and far, accompanied with the expected “now the world will be overrun with zombie babies!” and “my aunt’s painter had a dream that her dead mom was begging us not to worship her computer clone.” Infinitely more importantly, Anabella had thanked him.

“What do you want to celebrate?” she asked, running around and putting up little streamers like she always did for his birthday. “I could make you some moorkop, maybe some –”

“I’d rather just order in and spend the evening catching up. We haven’t talked much in a while.”

“We talk every day, silly.”

“I mean…I’d just like to spend the evening talking, is that okay?”

She grinned and patted his hand. “Of course, Dad.”

Over their takeout, he looked around the room for conversation topics, having already exhausted the weather and her comic strip. “So, uh, how is VideoCutie working? Any guys catching your eye?”

“Oh, same old, same old,” she sighed, twirling her fork. “Since you wanted me to try it so bad, I gave it a shot and I really did have some nice conversations but, I dunno, I never felt any draw. I’ve never really been in love, y’know? Don’t feel like I’m missing out on much.”

“Have your plans changed? You always said you wanted a husband and babies someday. If you changed your mind, that’s totally fine–”

“I haven’t! There’s just no rush, y’know? And, I’ll be honest, I’d rather just work on my own stuff. Hard to draw comics when someone’s trying to make smalltalk, y’know?”

“You’ll be 27 in 11 months, and you’ve never had a real date.”

“And besides. Hard for any guys to compete when Beanie’s smiling down at me from my wall.” She sighed, eyes distant. “Anyway, I think I’m full for tonight, and I wanna finish the second season of Andy Griffith before I go to bed.”

“How many times have you watched that show now? I hear it playing in your room every night.” He tried to smile.

She laughed. “I dunno…nine times? No, more than that. Not enough, anyway! G’night! I love you!” She kissed his forehead and hurried upstairs.

The phone rang. He could swear he heard a knocking from the basement door, like the fanatics had finally broken into his house, or maybe just his sanity.

“Good lord, even the ghosts don’t want me to bond with my daughter,” he muttered. He put his head in his hands and fell asleep to the cacophony that no one else could hear.

###

The years passed. The mayhem calmed. Mortuaries shuttered their doors and churches quietly replaced their funeral services with celebrations of rebirth. The reborns’ lives plodded on. Some people had babies; many didn’t. People grew accustomed to digitizing their minds. 

And still, Anabella wouldn’t watch that goddamn show with him.

She did, occasionally, when he’d directly ask. She’d even smile when it got to the parts that used to make her laugh. She’d rarely say anything. Most nights, she watched it alone in her room.

“Hey, Anabella?” he finally asked, over another motherfucking Dutch meal. (Dutch cooking sucked. It sucked! He’d never noticed back when she was tripping over herself in the kitchen, asking him to sample her latest experiment so she could have it in the oven soon enough for them to take an evening walk or play a game, but it was really really bad.) “Now that things have died down a little bit – do you think it’s time for you to make some friends?”

“Ophelia and Rizel did reach out to me recently,” she said, brightening.

“...haven’t they left the state?”

“Yeah. We still chat a little, though.”

“...oh. Um. Any new friends? Maybe other reborns?”

“I dunno. The reborn never really reach out.” She seemed oblivious to the irony. “I’m happy here with you.”

“You’re 33, Anabella. Have you ever considered…moving out?”

“Oh, I will. Someday,” she said, taking another sip of water. 

“Do you still want to have babies? You don’t exactly have a biological clock, but it might be good to start…planning for the future, I guess? I know babies are going out of fashion, but–”

“--it’s okay, dad.” Anabella interrupted. “I do want babies! Someday.”

“When, Bella?”

“Is there a rush?” He didn’t have an answer. She cleaned her plate, kissed his forehead, and returned to her room. Carson stared at a wall for an hour. Then he sent a cybermail stream to the Shepsons and arranged a visit for the next day.

On the limo ride over, he stared at the lines of code on his tablet. Anabella’s mind. There was the code for her love of Beanie Bradley. There was the code for her desire for kids ‘when I’m older.’ There was the code for her desire for marriage ‘when I’m older.’ There was the code for her love for the Andy Griffith show. There was the code for her love for him. 

The code was just 17 digits long.

The car parked, and Carson shook hands with the Shepson family. Little Tristina ran up to grab his hand with both of her and wiggle it violently, but reborn Trinity was more reserved 

“I wanted to check in on Trinity’s updates, see how it’s been for the family,” he said.

“I mean, it’s a learning process,” Mrs. Shepson explained, seating the children at a short table and pulling out a chair at a tall table for him. “We know Trinity’s the guinea pig for reborn children. But it’s going well, right, girls?”

“Yes, mom,” Trinity said.

“My sister’s a cyborg!” giggled Tristina.

“Tristi, that’s not nice,” her father reprimanded, but Tristina seemed too busy harassing their cat to notice.

“The hardest part is figuring out how to update her. What interests to give her, what personality traits, you know how it goes,” Mrs. Shepson continued. “We’re sort of crafting our perfect child. It’s fantastic, but, well…sometimes I worry.”

“About your relationship with Trinity? Does it strain things?”

She sighed. “I don’t think so. She’s a very agreeable girl…I guess we coded her to be. I mean, she always says she loves us, and I don’t see where in her programming she could get upset about our decisions for her. She doesn’t need a lot. If it’s not in her programming, it’s not in her head, y’know? I mean, we could probably leave her in a ditch with nothing but her singular favorite food and a heap of KittyKitty action figures, and we’d probably uncover her a millennium later, still ‘happy.’”

His heart felt like it was slowing to a crawl. “But she’d miss you.”

“I mean, she likes us, sure. She’d probably also be happy if she was alone in a ditch with us for a millennium. We’ve considered programming her so she gets ‘lonely’ if she’s alone for more than a day, since that’s close to what most reborn adults naturally have if you dig deep enough into their programming, but –”

“--what we mean,” Mr. Shepson interrupted, apparently seeing the look on Carson’s face, “is that we worry our programming of Trinity is hard on Tristina. She’s not ‘perfect.’”

“Is that so?” blurted Carson. “Guess there’s no one who would know more but Tristina herself.” Excusing himself, he plopped down at the kids’ table and nodded at the flesh-and-blood girl. “Hey, Tristi.”

“Hi, Mister!”

“So, what’s it like to have a sister reborn from your brain? That must be pretty weird, right?”

“Not really,” she said with a shrug, grabbing her cat’s tail to the creature’s indignancy. “Everyone says we’re, like, soooooo connected. But she just looks like me. It’s not like we share a brain or anything.”

The world stopped. Carson stared at her. “You don’t know what’s going on in her head.”

She laughed. “Noooooo. You’re silly.”

“I think I am.” He walked out of the Shepson’s house without saying another word.

As the limo drove him home, he stared through the drizzle – then the rain – then the downpour – as he passed homes full of happy families. Happy old couples. Happy parents with happy children. Lightning flashed over a flower shop that used to be a crematorium; darkening clouds gathered over an indoor climbing gym that used to be a life insurance office.

When he walked indoors, soaking wet, the power was flickering again. He could hear whispers of the Andy Griffith show snaking down the stairs from Anabella’s room. Flashes of lightning illuminated more lipstick on the windows. Knocking emanated like a pulse from the basement door. The phone rang.

He picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Boo.” 

He sat down. He smiled through his grief. “Hi, Bella.”

The rain quieted, and the knocking stopped. “Hi, Dad.” 

“How have you been, honey?”

“I’ll be okay.” She paused. “I miss you.”

“I miss you too.” And alone in the dark, Carson finally wept for his daughter.