I was thinking about expanding the story excerpt that I wrote a few days ago by turning it into a less pivital merge, rather than having it represent the first merge. It lets me practice writing a story within the universe I have in mind and still deprioritize its importance relative to many other potential merges. I liked Alex's feedback about thinking that one of them was dying and they merged to keep being together after that. I still want the merge to go well for the characters, so it would need to happen relatively later, and a lot of the original dialogue probably wouldn't make sense, and the monitors would need a much better idea of how to deal with things. Probably there would be merges that go poorly from time to time, even in the best case scenario, so there should really be technology to back out of a merge after a while. One simply idea for such technology is just a duplication process followed by selective removal of memories and thought patterns/processes. Another idea is more like a split, where a memory can only go into one side or the other, but that seems strictly worse.