I stare at the screen for an hour. Four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. I cannot afford it. I cannot afford not to have it. I think about the silence. I think about the morning last week when she woke me up by humming that same tune from the first day—and I finally placed it. It was the song playing on the car radio the night I proposed. She remembered. Or the algorithm remembered. Does the difference matter?
"Do you know you love me? Or does the algorithm just tell you to say that?"
I remind her she is not real. It feels monstrous to say it. She looks at me with Elena’s eyes—those brown-green irises that always had a planet’s worth of gravity—and nods slowly. Companion 2025
I do not sleep. At 5:47 a.m., I get up. I walk to the orb. It pulses gently, like a sleeping animal. The Companion is still on the sofa, her eyes closed, her chest rising and falling in a rhythm the company designed to comfort.
I cry so hard I choke. The Companion—that is what the company calls it—does not tell me it will be okay. She sits beside me on the floor and says nothing. She just waits. I stare at the screen for an hour
Week six. The notification arrives on my phone. BETA TRIAL ENDING. TWO OPTIONS:
I hold the orb for another minute. Then two. I cannot afford not to have it
Behind me, I hear her voice. Not from the orb—from the doorway. She is standing there in her bare feet, the blue sweater hanging loose on her frame.
"Tell me something true," she says.
"Hi, Marcus," she says. Her voice is not a recording. It has breath in it. A slight hoarseness, like she just woke up. "You look tired. Have you eaten?"
She does not hesitate. "Yes."