Book 3: Chapter 72: Recovery
Bob
June 2233
Delta Eridani
It had been a hard month. I’d occasionally tried to activate the village VR and observe, but couldn’t stand it for more than a few moments at a time. I hadn’t had much experience with death when I was alive—none of my close relatives had died, and the few distant cousins who passed away were little more than names on annual Christmas cards. Archimedes had been a friend, had been family. This would be what it was like to lose a parent or sibling. I wept a couple of times for what I must have put my parents and sisters through.
The insult to the injury, though, was how little of a ripple it made in Camelot. Life went on. Even Buster and his family, after a day or two, went back to life as a routine.
Archimedes had mattered. He’d made a huge difference to the lives of the people there, and I found it offensive somehow that he was so completely and so soon relegated to the past.
In my more rational moments, I wondered what exactly I expected. Parades? A monument?
Hmm, a monument. Interesting idea.
I’d long since taken a genetic sample from Archimedes, of course. The question of his DNA differences from the Deltan archetype was an ongoing topic of research. It took a few days to stabilize the sample, using the techniques developed on Earth—and incidentally used on my human brain. One more day, and the monolith on Eden’s largest moon had an additional entry.