"I’d have said: okay. If that’s what you want to do, that’s what we’ll do. This is a narrative blockade. It’s been tried before, at a much lower level of sophistication. You tell stories to yourself until they become almost as real as your life, and you try to knit them into your memory so that the machines can’t tell the difference. It doesn’t work. This is clever, in that way: there’s no attempt to match reality, just a wall of dreams. We know it isn’t real, because the subject is demonstrably not a two-thousand-year-old alchemist, say—well, I suppose she isn’t—but that doesn’t help us. So I’d go with it. Let the story run out. When it’s done, it’s done, and we’re back with the real person."