"Have I no rights?" sobbed Ross. She hated herself like this, emotions out of control like a child, her rational brain unable to harness her feelings like it once did.

"Unfortunately, no," replied Dr. Charon, his voice dry. "Society has never allowed suicide in otherwise healthy individuals."

"It isn't considered suicide to decline life-sustaining treatments," she cried, "especially when they lead to a poor quality of life." Surely the world couldn't have changed this much in the thousand years her memories had laid preserved in digital slumber. 

The doctor straightened his tie and smoothed back his jet black hair. Dignified and handsome, Ross couldn't guess his age. He looked at her with a practiced sympathetic, yet neutral expression on his face. 

"For a time, this country and many others did allow individuals to discontinue things like dialysis, or turn off artificial hearts, but after the drastic drop in the human population five-hundred years ago, we cannot afford that luxury the species is to survive."

Ross leaned back in her chair and seethed. Her mood swung violently. In a split second, despair evaporated, replaced by fury. 

"But do you agree with it, doctor?" she shouted.

"My opinions do not matter, Ms. Lakely," said the doctor with maddening calm.

She took deep breaths desperate to regain control, but it made no difference. Before she had died, she had considered herself a thinker. She preferred to push pesky emotions from her mind in favor of rational thought. 

Near the end of her life, the new science of digital resurrection struggled in vain to recreate emotions. As a result, most people brought back didn't last long. Digital people grew bored without emotions and asked to be turned off. 

"How are you so calm?" asked Ross, brows knit and arms crossed. "Are you one of these natural biological miracle babies that occasionally God still sends to earth?"

The doctor ever so infinitesimally flinched, something Ross may not have caught were she not so in tune with her feeling. But he ignored her question. 

"Why did you digitalize yourself Ms. Lakely, if you didn't want to live again?"

Ross' emotions betrayed her once more. She thought wistfully of her hopes for an emotion-free life. "I considered myself an intellectual, Dr. Charon. The idea of a life of pure thinking and sensory input seemed divine."

At seventy-five she had suffered a minor heart attack and decided to pay for the uploading process. That is where her current memory ended. He records indicated that at eighty she suffered a stroke and could no longer speak or swallow. The advance directives she had completed years earlier indicated she would not want a feeding tube. She died three weeks later on hospice.  

"The human race needs you. We face extinction. It took hundreds of years for us to perfect the technology of human digital resurrection, the body, the neurotransmitters, and circuits that can connect to them."

"You call this perfect?" screamed Ross. "I don't want to live like this. I'll throw myself off a bridge or something if you won't switch me off."

They stared at each other without speaking.

"They'll reconstitute me again won't they?" asked Ross now subdued. "That's why they back up my hard drive periodically, isn't it?" Dr. Charon's silence confirmed her suspicions. "I'll keep getting smarter too," she continued, "but will the emotions ever temper?"

Avoiding eye contact, Dr. Charon replied in a low voice. "From what I've seen it's unlikely, and will probably only get worse." 

Her visceral reaction was too much to bear. She stood and leaned over the doctor's desk swaying feeling like she might suffocate. Finally, she exploded. "I can't take this anymore!" she yelled sweeping her arm across his desk, and knocking the doctor's computer tablet to the floor. 

He stood restraining her from hitting anything else and pushed her back down in her chair. When she calmed he returned to the other side of his desk and opened a drawer. "There is one other option," he said. 

Ross's mind instantly focused on those words. Her emotions quieted for the first time since she'd been reborn. She watched him take out a thin piece of paper and a graphite pencil, objects she hadn't seen in this new society yet. He wrote a note in cursive writing and held it up for her to read. 

"Cursive is a lost art. It won't upload in your digital memory. Can you read it?" 

Ross nodded and Dr. Charon scribbled again before handing her the note. 

"Meditate. Quiet the mind. If you can perfect it during your digital uploads, over time the backup server will get emptier and emptier. The process is automated and nobody will notice. It may take many lifetimes, but eventually, they won't be able to reconstitute you and you can die."

Ross motioned for the paper. Her grandmother had taught her cursive but she'd never used it in her adult life. 

"Is that what you are doing?" she wrote.

Dr. Charon nodded. Then he took the paper back and used what looked like a thumb drive to burn it.

Ross rose to leave. "Namaste, Dr. Charon," she said.

He put his hands together at his chest and bowed to her in return.