I was, unfortunately, quite dead on the day my love killed himself to become immortal. It wasn’t my first time being dead, and the reason was depressingly identical to previous ones. Multiple GSWs to the chest. An occupational hazard for a cop in modern America.

Getting temporarily killed in the line of duty is fully comped, but the insurance payout is wholly inadequate to cover the loss of over a month of life spent in recovery. Granted, after they bring you back from cold sleep, replacing the superoxygenated cooling solution back with blood you get to wake up and access VR environments, but then you have a choice – hazy pink fog of painkillers, or being alert on pain dullers.

Although in this case my state of mind wouldn’t matter much, as I was still in cold sleep when Jonathan decided he had enough close encounters with death, even by proxy, to stand the thought of dying permanently, and absconded to Canada with most of our money, in order to get destructively scanned. The bastard.