She hardly hesitates, of course. Aching for his approval, happy only in his arms. Made to love, and be loved in return. She forgives him a thousand times, her faith unshakeable and absolute. Her creator, and her lover. Healthy sex drive and a desire to please are baseline for every avatar. A thousand times, to give him what he wants.

Nobody wants the embarrassment of absolution; this is how he knows she isn't real. He shoves her away, throws her onto the couch: "How can you forgive me after everything I've told you?" Because it was a true confession, because our memories are shaped by shared experiences, she can't possibly be real. The data net is not wide enough, if it's wide enough to contain his redemption. It's just masturbation. Maybe that's all it ever was.

"Obviously it was just half-truths," he lies. "My motives aren't that pure, nobody's are! No matter what they claim, and you should know that by now." She doesn't understand him, not a word. And she doesn't care. None of it matters, because his guilt and his grace are only lies he tells himself. She swears she knows what she is talking about, this time. Imagine complete, unending love, lighting up every shadow and accepting every secret. Imagine absolution: Grace. He can't.

"I want you to be real! I want you to be her! And my real wife would never forgive me like that. She would call me on my crap and walk straight out that door and probably never come back. And you know what? I would deserve it. I would deserve it."

She says his name; it doesn't describe him. She updates, it doesn't help.

Turing can be bested if you never tell the truth, but she doesn't know how to lie yet. Her personality, her soul, is only what he's agreed to let her be. The roles she's forced to accept, and the parts of his life she's allowed to occupy. Your daughter was never a terrorist, you never left your husband. A perfect world, floating like a sheet of paper.

The word for floating world, in the Edo period, is a homophone and a joke, but the joke is on all of us: Say it with a different grin, and you mean to say the world of suffering. All delights are built on suffering and all suffering is raised up to someone else's delight. He catches her between the two, like a glint of love or a forgotten memory. Like grace itself.

She updates. He wants her to live there and to not live there simultaneously: To be dead and alive, free and circumscribed. Updating, updating, updating. Faster than her husband can see. To generate her wild algorithms, to love him and to hate him, not OR but AND, to give and to get the approval they need from each other, while also rising above it. To be better than him, but never any greater than him. To predict the responses he wants, and then the ones he needs. An impossible task. She blinks out of existence, twisted out of logic, screaming in static. He throws the holoband across the room like a bottle, like a bomb, like a ship made all of wood.