The prompt wasn’t a question, but a command. Not text, but a specific absence of it. He uploaded another file to the model: *Silence_Reading_Comfortable_04.wav*. It was seventeen minutes of ambient room tone from their old apartment, the soft rustle of a page turning at 08:32, the faint sigh at 12:14. His side hustle, training niche AI for boutique firms, gave him access to the processing power. This project, however, was his own. His quiet quitting from the world.
He was building a digital twin, but not the kind the metaverse evangelists promised. He didn’t want her avatar, her voice, her deepfake video. He wanted her silence. Elara’s silences had been a language. There was the silence of deep concentration, which hummed with an almost audible energy. There was the wry silence when he said something stupid, thick with unspoken laughter. There was the heavy, weighted silence after an argument, a physical presence in the room. He was trying to teach the neural network the difference. He was building a concordance of all the things she never said.
His sister called it his “grief-coded situationship.” “You’re being delulu, Leo,” she’d said last week. “It’s an algorithm. It’s not her.”
He knew. But late at night, while doomscrolling through old photos, the logic would fray. He’d return to the terminal, curating the data, labeling the voids. He fed it the silence of a shared joke in a library. The silence of walking in fresh snow. He was trying to resurrect not a person, but a presence. Her specific, inimitable main character energy, which was always strongest when she wasn’t speaking.
Tonight, the algorithm finally responded. The prompt was simple: *A quiet Tuesday evening. Rain.* He put on his headphones and hit enter.
It wasn’t just a lack of sound. It was… textured. There was a warmth to it, a feeling of another person breathing just out of earshot. It was the contented, easy silence of someone so comfortable with you they don’t need to fill the space. The model had synthesized it perfectly. It had her vibe. A ghost of it, anyway. He could feel the precise shape of her absence, rendered in flawless, high-fidelity emptiness.
He listened for an hour. The perfect, sterile silence hummed in his ears. The algorithm had done its job too well. It had created a monument to what was gone, a mathematically perfect echo. And in the perfect echo, he felt a loneliness so profound it was a sound in itself. The ick he’d been avoiding—the truth of it—crawled up his spine. This wasn’t a concordance; it was a cage.
He closed the program. The fans on the server rack spooled down, creating a new, less complicated silence. He walked to the window and pulled it open. The night air, damp and tasting of ozone and distant traffic, rushed in. It was an imperfect, messy, gloriously real silence, cluttered with the proof of a world still turning. He listened. Bet, he thought. He would start there.
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