I finished the last lines of code and pressed the compile button. Then I relaxed and watched the progress line creep slowly towards the finish line, feeling the rising waves of pleasure coursing through my body.

The code passed verification and compiled successfully, and I came hard. I remembered sex, from the times when I was an analogue creature, flesh and blood and nerves, and it was never as good as the rewired pleasure I got from a particularly good piece of code.

But what nobody told me was how deeply the sex got into my brain before I got uploaded. I purged myself of all the base desires and needs of a biological body, I rewired my pleasure centers, I was a being of pure thought and data and I was still in love.

And my biological primary was still out somewhere in the physical world, fucking my/her wife. I inherited half of our vote, fifteen percent of our cash assets, none of her outstanding loans, and I paid my bioparent twenty percent of everything I made, but the terms of upload/duplication deed were quite clear. The biological Samantha Greer was the only one with a marital relationship with Jane. And Jane, well, she didn’t want to upload. The idea of a digital copy of herself, an immortal sibling-child-clone-whatever, it made her… queasy.

I made her queasy. The woman I loved.

I had it all, money, fame, immortality, and my life still sucked. I don’t know how I could ever think I would get over Jane by simple rewiring.

The things our brains do to us.