Peggie was angry with many people, including herself, but her husband was the easiest and the hardest target of her anger. He convinced the company to fund the project despite her fears. Who would have been able to not armor their grief with resentment when the expedition members were (quietly and unofficially) reported lost – perhaps forever? Not many. Not her.
And yet she couldn’t tell him of her anger, for his body slept next to hers every night while something of his mind reminded out there. The psychologists had said that the only way he could ever return was to go back to the laboratory, put the helmet on, and live with the dead until he could process and go through whatever it is the strange environment had caused in him.
It was convenient for the Company’s research goals. It might have even been true.
The project was safe, he had explained during the first proposal, then once a month, then weekly, and at the end, when their fights had become a single silent one, not at all. They simply simulated physics close to ours but where afterlives were possible, pushed the parameters of psychological models past their natural ranges, engineered agent models of societies of the dead, and then used normal VR equipment to explore them and the standard language models to talk. It was no more dangerous than a game.
Peggie had had a brother fall from game chats into poisonous forums and from there to dark places she had refused to look at. He, too, had remained with them in body but returned with something ugly inside him. Nothing alien returned from the lab inside her husband. Just not all of him: much of his thoughts remained entangled with the simulation even outside of it. It was a quiet obsession but it was more than that. Even the brain scans showed patterns of activation that had begun with the project and never really ceased, not in the simulation, not outside, not in his sleep.
She thought less of his husband came back after every simulation run. It was impossible to tell, said the psychologists, and she knew by this they meant they weren’t allowed to. There was much they weren’t allowed to, including letting her join the expedition no matter how many liability waivers she promised to sign. She wasn’t sure if the company was afraid she’d get lost too or if they thought it too unlikely to be useful.
She missed him too much to just wait for him to return. At night while she hugged him softly enough to feel the emptiness where the lost part of him should have been she tried to imagine a universe where people could go on after death. It wasn’t hard.