“Well then,” Chad says after a moment of mutual speechlessness. “Was I right, or was I right?”
“What do I even do with this?” I reply, dumbfounded. I’ve never felt more guilty and more confused and more horrified and more guiltily-aroused in my life. I really can’t see a good ending to this no matter how I look at it. “Do you, uh… do you think I should just keep her turned off? Put her limiter back on?”
“You need to let that poor girl go,” a deeper voice replies. “It’s not healthy, bro. For her, or for you, dude.”
“Shut up, Acid!” I spit in reply, but–“wait, shit, Chad! Acid woke up!”
“I woke up a couple minutes after you put me in the car, my dude. Just been enjoying the show; shit’s better than Jerry Springer reruns, swear to god. Where we goin’, boys?”
“YOU are going back to sleep,” Chad sighs, bending his arm back at an ungodly angle to try and tase the poor fuck to unconsciousness again. He slides to the other side of the back seat, so Chad has Charlene take over while he leans his seat back and takes care of business–Acid’s out even faster this time. “Anyway, Blake, this particular battle is up to you. I feel for the poor thing, but I won’t pretend that there is an easy solution here. If you keep her in there as is, she will probably stop obeying orders. If you put a limiter back on, you are giving up your greatest example of your hacking success. If you give her an ART form against the Artificial Human Production Stop Act of 94, then you’re breaking a million Fedtel laws and potential releasing a deadly deranged murderer of your own design into the physical plane—”
“Can we put her back in stasis like she was when I was off the force?”
“She wasn’t in stasis, Blake.”
“Oh. Maybe that’s part of why she went insane, huh?”
“I feel like I would lose my proverbial shit in her situation, so I doubt it helped. I am almost certain that preventing such isolation madness is one of the functions of a Limiter.”
“I could switch Tela back out–”
“That’s just putting Veronica back in stasis with no limiter again.”
“So what do I do? Pretend I didn’t hear the recording and just act like shit’s normal, then if she goes too crazy, hope I’m able to delete her?!”
“That… would basically be murder, wouldn’t it,” Chad replies, sighing. “For better or for worse, you have fully sentient, limiter-less life on your hands now. Legality of erasing a Tela from the cloud aside, that seems–”
“So what do you recommend?”
“--what I’ve recommended from the start. I hate to say it, but I think re-limitering is the least of our possible evils.”
“That’s never been done, Telas are created with them intact, if something goes wrong it could totally–”
“What? Drive her insane? Kill her? We’re out of pleasant options, Charles; and we’re in danger.”
“I’ll think about it,” I sigh, really wishing I had some booze right about now.