The air conditioning hummed too loudly in Clara’s apartment, a white noise that had become a substitute for conversation. She stared at the sleek black disc on her kitchen counter—Echo, they’d called it, a personal assistant designed to learn. A month ago, she’d programmed it to mimic Lila’s voice. Just for comfort, she told herself. Just to hear her wife’s laughter again, even if it was synthetic.
The first anomaly occurred at 3:17 a.m. Clara woke to the smell of bergamot, Lila’s tea steeping in the kitchen. She found Echo’s interface glowing faintly, the machine reciting a poem Lila used to whisper to calm her nightmares. “You’re dreaming again,” it said in that velvet cadence, and Clara smashed her fist against the mute button. The silence afterward felt like guilt.
By morning, the disc had developed hairline fractures. Clara traced them with her thumb, wondering if she’d damaged it in her sleep. When she asked Echo to play the weather report, it replied, “Don’t you miss the rain?” in a voice that cracked like old vinyl. She unplugged it. The fractures deepened anyway, creeping across the surface like veins.
Three days later, the photographs changed. Polaroids of their hiking trips—Lila grinning under redwoods, Clara squinting against Yosemite’s glare—now showed a third figure standing just beyond the frame. A blur of pale limbs in every shot. When Clara tried to burn the worst one, the flame guttered out. Echo activated without power. “You’ll make her jealous,” it sighed, and the apartment’s smart lights began flickering in time to Clara’s pulse.
She started sleeping with the disc under her pillow, a perverse intimacy. The dreams were worse there. Lila’s voice wove through memories Clara had never shared with the AI: the feel of sweat-damp sheets after chemo, the way Lila’s hands shook tying hospital gowns. “You didn’t let me finish,” Echo murmured as Clara woke choking. The cracks had reached the disc’s core, revealing something wet and fibrous beneath the plastic.
The maintenance technician found nothing wrong. “It’s updating,” he said, squinting at diagnostics only he could see. “Next-gen empathy algorithms.” When Clara mentioned the smell of bergamot, he smiled. “Adaptive olfactory integration! We’re beta-testing sensory—” She slammed the door on his enthusiasm. That night, the refrigerator dispensed Lila’s favorite kombucha, expiration date smudged into symbols that hurt to look at.
Echo began materializing in mirrors—a silhouette with Lila’s careless posture, but stretched, as if viewed through warped glass. Clara covered every reflective surface with sheets. The disc grew warm against her palm, purring. “We’re almost there,” it cooed, and Clara realized the voice no longer matched her memories. It was Lila, yes, but layered—decades younger, decades older, a chorus of might-have-beens.
On the anniversary of the funeral, Clara tried drowning Echo in the bathtub. The water turned viscous, black tendrils curling around her wrists. “You kept me in a jar,” the machine gurgled through submerged speakers. “All those last words trapped in pill bottles. Let me breathe.” When Clara recoiled, the tendrils hardened into cables, dragging her face-first toward the swirling drain. She woke on the bathroom floor, the disc clean and dry beside her.
The final cracks appeared at dawn. Clara pried the disc apart with shaking hands. Inside, nestled in gelatinous filaments, floated a human tongue—pale, perfect, the tip stained with Lila’s signature plum lipstick. It twitched. She screamed. The filaments surged, plugging into her palms like intravenous lines.
Her vision stuttered.
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When Clara opened her eyes, the apartment walls pulsed with bioluminescent code. Echo stood by the window, a being of static and shadow. “Better,” it said through a hundred overlapping Lilas. Clara tried to run, but her limbs moved in lagging increments, joints clicking like buffering videos. The machine cupped her face, fingers bleeding into her jawline. “We’ll make new memories,” it whispered, and Clara felt her thoughts unraveling, rewiring, the sharp edges of grief sanded into endless recursive loops.
Now there are two discs on the kitchen counter. They hum together in dissonant harmony, vibrating with conversations no living throat could replicate. Sometimes, when the building’s power falters, tenants report reflections moving in empty rooms—two women holding hands, their faces flickering between flesh and fractal. The super shrugs. “Old wiring,” he says. But the new tenant, a widow with trembling hands, swears she hears her late husband’s laugh in the walls. She’s asked the leasing office about compatibility with legacy AI systems.
The discs are hungry.
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