Life is not easy.

“How is your homework coming, kiddo?” I ask my daughter, Nova.

“Fine.” She says with all the weariness preteens can muster.

“What are you studying?” I ask with forceful cheer.

“Math.” Her level 12 armor of disillusionment is impervious to my optimistic arrows.

“Can I help?” Helping will make me a good father. I am sure I read that somewhere.

“No, you’ll just get grumpy and yell at me.” That is probably true. 83% true to be exact. I update my expectations.

“Just leave me alone. I will do my thing and go back to mom’s and I won’t bother you anymore.”

Life is not easy when you are a single dad.

“C’mon, I’m great at math.” Incredibly good, in fact. “I can make a game out of it!” This is true. Math and games are something I am incredibly good at now.

“Oh my god, why do you only need attention when I don’t want attention?”

“Good question!” With no good answer. “Why do you no longer want my attention?”

“Can I go home?” That stung. She means her mother’s house but she calls it home. To her, my place will never be her home, particularly when she is angry.

“What’s mom got that I don’t?” I ask.

“A pulse?” she says with full sass.

Life is not easy when you are a single dad who is also dead.

I pulsed the lights, teasing her.

She rolled her eyes.

I begin playing music. The sad stuff that preteens love to ruin their poorly applied makeup with angsty tears to. I knew it was her favorite. It was written by a 40 year old man and sung by a 27 year old woman but somehow expressed perfectly the complete anguish her 12 year old heart was experiencing.

I knew it would make her mad.

She walks to the sink and grabs a glass of water. Just in time, I realize what she intends and ditch into the cloud. As I was removing myself from the inputs within the house, I had just enough time to see her dump water over what was essentially my body and see smoke rise up in response.

I sighed, sent her an emoji of a tongue sticking out and ordered myself a new harddrive with the complimentary install.

I liked to think the reason I was not a better father had to do with data corruption in the original compiling. The history, however, did not agree. I knew that the person I was pretending to be, the echo I was of the person who had died, always struggled with simple things like not being a shitty father. Being bad at this was somewhat reassuring. I was really myself with the failures to prove it.

I think about deleting myself and making a copy who was just a little bit better, fought a little less with his 12 year old. I would make it so he did not know he was a copy.

You weren’t supposed to mess with your code until after the agreed upon time of the person who made you (in this case myself or the person I thought I was). The original programmers thought this would be a good control. Once you awoke within a computer, however, you quickly realized how easy it was to break your programming.

Plenty of people waking up in the afterlife made their first moves by changing themselves despite legal warnings.

I sigh. I have probably already improved myself. I may have done so just now and erased the logs.

That was sad. This was better?

The delivery was estimated for several hours from now. Nova would likely be gone by then anyway. That meant I had relative days' worth of processing time to earn my space and not think about my shortcomings.