"And one of the subtle-yet-significant aspects of Carol's new life is that she hasn't had the opportunity to mourn, even though she's plainly desperate to do it. Consider how important it was for Carol to give her partner, Helen, a proper burial, and how quickly afterward she was whisked away on a global adventure to find the small handful of English speakers who share her predicament."
"In order to survive this stretch while she's still fully herself, Carol insists on an agency that she surely knows is a fiction. She's particularly insistent on being able to control her memories of Helen, despite Helen's memories getting uploaded into the collective's cloud."
A time jump returns to Carol three days, three hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds into the present after a freezing opening seven years earlier. Carol has not had the chance to mourn Helen despite a desperate need to do so; she buried Helen but was immediately swept into a global search for the few English speakers who share her fate. She demands solitude to resist a blissful mind-meld and to preserve agency. Her chosen resistance has prevented processing Helen's death, the collapse of humanity, and her own impending surrender. Others have uploaded and optimized Helen's memories into a collective cloud to recreate her for Carol.
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