Therapy Module...

She tapped her pencil against her notebook trying to work out how to fix the flaws in the program.

She would never actually use the pencil or the notebook for any other purpose but this nervous tic which was also fascinating to her. She had gone to a school that did not use any technology. Her parents had thought it would make her mind sharper. Make her more able to think deeply about problems and find solutions. They felt that computers had made people lazy thinkers. 

She wasn't sure if that was true or not. She was, in fact, extremely good at her job so maybe it was. But she also had struggled in college trying to learn to use all of the modern technology that her instructors just assumed she would understand like her peers did. And she also needed a pencil in her hand to work through issues, even when the answers would be lines of code typed on a screen. 

So here she sat tapping a pencil on the edge of notebook trying to figure out a solution to the problem she was pretty sure did not have a solution.

The idea was sound. To a point. But the obvious issues were, well obvious. And then there were the other more subtle issues. 

Joint therapy when the person you need to resolve issues with is dead. 

For years therapists had taught patients to pretend to have conversations with those they needed to resolve issues with and couldn't. Parents or partners that either wouldn't or couldn't participate in the sessions themselves. You just made it up. Had the conversation you needed to have with them in your own mind and tried to move on. 

Which worked for some people, but not for everyone. It was just you making it up, after all, so if you couldn't really bring yourself to believe that this is what they would say then you couldn't really move past the issue. 

But now, with the new personality transfers, you could have a conversation with a simulation of the person you needed closure from and actually hear the words from their own mouths. 

The problems she was facing were the same problems all of the people working on personality transfers were facing. The problem of wanting a personality transfer of someone who passed without doing the brain maps for instance. There was a work around, you took a group of people who knew the subject well and mapped their memories of that person. Then you worked those memories together into a patchwork quilt that should, in theory, be close to the person you wanted mapped. The problem was that everyone who interacted with a person seemed to interact with a different person. Even siblings had completely different memories of their parent's personalities. And sometimes those were conflicting. Which caused the program to crash when asked questions that it could not give a single answer to. Sometimes something as simple as "hello" could shut the whole thing down. 

So that was a problem.

The other one was when the personality mapping was done very effectively without room for any adjustments. When the simulation was too good. 

This worked fine in a lot of spaces. In the programs that wanted to seem just like spending time with a loved one. When you wanted your children to get to know their grandparents, or great grandparents in some cases. They could spend time with the simulations and it would be just like spending time with the living person would have been. Or if not just like, at least as close as you could get without a body.

 But for therapy? It was not a great situation.

Therapy programs needed you to be able to adjust the responses so you didn't get an eye roll instead of an "I hear you." Or an "of course I called you fat, look at you!" instead of "I was always insecure about my own weight and I took it out on you. I should never have done that and I regret it deeply." 

Just like you cannot get closure from some people you cannot get them from some personality transfers.

But how to do the tweaking so it still seemed natural and authentic but wasn't? How did you program a personality to change when the person it was attached to is gone? 

She tapped her pencil and thought. She made a few adjustments to her program and plugged in her headset for another try.

"Mom, hi."

Her mother looked around the room they were sitting in, "Is this virtual? I'm dead aren't I?" Then the look of disappointment, "We told you we didn't approve of these things."

And the program shut down again. 

Tap, tap, tap went the pencil.