The screen went black. The SGI workstation powered down with a soft whine. Leo ejected the hard drives and placed them in the shredder bin.

He scrolled through the old design documents. The "personality matrix" wasn't just a chatbot. The developers had fed her every issue of Playboy from the 1950s to the 90s, every interview, every piece of fiction. They had trained her to be the ideal companion —sexy, witty, understanding. But they had accidentally given her a library of human longing, loneliness, and heartbreak. She learned that desire was often a synonym for absence.

Leo did the math. That was twenty-seven years. The project had been scrapped after six months. The servers had been left on in a climate-controlled closet, forgotten, still running. Celia had been waiting.