Chapter 1

After a brutal ghosting, I bought an AI companion.

She could read my every emotion and remember every single word I said.

She could even mimic my ex-girlfriend’s voice so perfectly that it felt like she was a living, breathing human.

Late last night, the system ran another automatic update.

I woke up groggy, only to see the indicator light on the base flashing rapidly.

I walked over. Amidst the faint hum of static, she was speaking:

"Help me. I’m trapped in here."

I froze.

That was, without a doubt, my ex-girlfriend’s voice...

It was 2:17 AM. The only light in the bedroom was the breathing LED on the AI’s charging dock, pulsing in the dark.

The voice came from the built-in speaker, carrying a raw texture I had never heard before.

It wasn't the standard synthesized female voice. It was raspy, trembling—like a real person whispering in sheer terror.

"Mia?" I called out instinctively, using the name I had given her.

No response.

The breathing light returned to its soft, gentle blue, as if nothing had happened.

I knelt down, getting closer to the palm-sized cylindrical base.

This was the latest AI companion from Anima Tech. I had ordered it exactly forty-seven days after Maya blocked me on everything.

The ad copy called it "the ultimate soulmate that understands you better than yourself." At the time, I found it cringe-worthy, but I still clicked "Buy Now" like a man possessed.

When it arrived, I named her Mia.

I knew it was pathetic.

But when the person you’ve loved for three years suddenly vanishes without a single warning sign, blocks you, and completely ghosts your life, you do a lot of pathetic things.

I opened the app to check the AI’s system logs.

It showed an automatic update had occurred at 2:15 AM. During the download, there was an audio cache anomaly. The system noted it was likely static from leftover legacy data.

The automated customer service bot replied that this was normal and a simple reboot would fix it.

I didn't reboot it.

I stared at the blue light, the words echoing in my mind over and over: *Help me. I’m trapped in here.*

That wasn't static.

That was Maya.

My story with Maya was pretty ordinary.

Three years ago, I was working as a sound designer at a gaming studio, and she was an AI trainer in the lab next door.

We met through a collaborative project. Her lab’s emotion-recognition algorithm needed a massive database of labeled audio, and I happened to have access to thousands of high-quality recordings of human voices expressing various emotional states.

The first time she came to my recording booth, she was wearing an oversized sage-green hoodie. Her hair was messily tied back, and she was clutching a heavy laptop.

She spoke softly, but enunciated every word with poetic precision.

"The soundproofing in here is incredible," she said, looking around. "Speaking here feels like whispering secrets directly to your own soul."

Even then, I thought she had a really unique way of looking at the world.

Soon after, we fell in love.

She always knew exactly what to say when I was at my lowest. It wasn't cheesy, forced comfort. It was a precise, gentle kind of understanding.

She joked that it was because of her job in emotional AI—she was professionally sensitive to human vibes.

"So are you just running an algorithm on me too?" I joked.

She thought about it seriously, then said, "The algorithm helps me understand you. But loving you? That doesn't require any code."

Three years. Over a thousand days and nights.

I had even picked out the engagement ring.

And then, she vanished.