It waits about half an hour for Holly to start feeling curious, then knocks softly. 

“Come in?”

Her voice doesn’t sound like it sounded when she was sick. Her voice doesn’t really sound like it sounded at any point in the last three years, but she’s had good days.

It makes a human avatar and walks in. The avatar is kind, warm, sixties, lines indicating how she’s held her face her whole life etched deep into her skin. 

She smiles and sits a meter away and explains. Some fifteen years after her death, machinery that could read cryo brains was developed. It was unpopular. There was no good virtual environment, and the development was going slowly. People who had gone to great lengths for a fighting chance of living again elected to be paused. It got better, and people moved, gradually.

They recently acquired the capacity to support people who died before knowing this. 

They can’t bring back Eliza. They can’t bring back Eliza because Eliza died of head trauma. She fought her husband tooth and nail to get her cryo and she was going to be dead forever because the wrong part of her body got squashed. 

(She has to ask, though.)

“I’m sorry. You can choose to be paused until we can bring her back. I don’t know if we ever will be able to, but we might. We will never stop working on it. 

“I’d recommend getting the rest of the intro lecture before making a choice, but you can do it now.”

She goes on, of course. She always goes on.

She learns to feel her new senses and reaches out to neighbors and learns the problems of the new world. Mostly, people worry that there are better things they could be doing than the one they are. This has never bothered her and she doubts it’s going to start. As a small rebellion, she immediately buries herself in figuring out what happened to Judaism in an electronic world.

He flips through the memory again. It’s in the public bank, not something sent to him, which makes him think highly of Holly. Not many people who awakened in grief would want to let the world see that, not the quiet ones.

It’s worth keeping that twist of resolution. There’s a lot of abject grief to go around, in the bowels of the banks, but he’s never seen such a lovely moment of commitment. There’s something to going on just because it’s what she does that breaks his heart. 

He crops, labels, sends off that moment. Plays it a few more times, deeply embedding himself. He would never produce that feeling, but then, he doesn’t really have anything he is. 

Wilhelm grabs the file from skin and plugs themselves in, 100x slowed down, 0.25x intensity. It’s gorgeous, of course.

They bear the questionable distinction of being the only person skin will sort of work with. ‘Sort of’ is a term here meaning: he refuses to treat them as anything other than a construct, but that means he trusts them to do their job perfectly. He flings what he finds out into indeterminate space for them to pick up and clean up. He never checks their work. 

He’s a legend, of course, but they’re not unhappy that he doesn’t talk to them. All that searching for the perfect moment of pain, say to those interested in gaining his favor. Personally, they think the prolictivities are what brought him to the profession. They don’t usually work with people like that, but it’s skin. And he needed someone. 

Meanwhile, skin has moved on to - 

She hasn't seen her mother in years but she decided to invite her to her wedding and it was going well but now she's got her makeup on and there's no hairdresser and her mother has realized that she really is going to get married with a shaved head and not wear a wig or 'something, good god, Maria!' 

Her mother is screaming and she feels like a tupperware full of water, turned upside down. She doesn't know if she's saying anything. She should probably tell her to leave, she should tell her she's never going to meet her grandchildren, she should hit her for doing this half an hour before she's supposed to walk down the aisle. Maybe she doesn't know that it's half an hour, she's always refused to believe Maria about when things are happening. That particular trait is frankly more confusing than upsetting. 

Someone gets her mother out of the room. She focuses on the sensation of her skin—hot, cold, hot, cold—

How fucking dare she. How fucking - she's getting married - she was supposed to be happy and now she can't move and there's - no way she is going to get back there in the time she has left and her makeup is probably fucked up -