From the Lyriana Nocturnes...
You lose them! That's what happens in death. All that love, all that happiness--you lose it.
There are two forms of death--the causal and the inevitable. To protect against the causal would require a sheath, a capsule, an absolute 360° impenetrable cucoon. Where is that armor? Better to focus on the clone of the brain and its perpetual update. Death from physical cause is preventable--but excruciatingly difficult. It is a race against time, where time is the emergence of the clone. Believe that the race will be won, that discovery will create your immortal mind. If you cannot believe, if this hope is dope, a monkey on your back, then consider this:
The purpose of life is not to die. The way not to die, and be reborn again as the Buddhists believe, is to achieve enlightenment. The way to achieve enlightenment is to to travel the middle way between the extremes of indulgence and denial--to always move forward in the present, always selecting in favor of--never rejecting. If the journey can survive, if the traveler can survive, then enlightenment, immortality will come when the mind is no longer dependent on the shell that contains it. But beware, again, of the monkey.
This was the voice she heard when everyone had vanished, when Lyri was alone and no longer chained to herself. Not asleep, awake and unafraid.
