The Aura interface hummed, projecting the data in cool blue light against the sterile white wall. MEMORY INTEGRITY: 50.00%. The half-life. Exactly one year to the day.
Inside the projection field, Elara shivered, not from the holographic rain but from the code that held her together. My digital twin stood before her, a perfect replica of me on that night. He had more rizz than I did now; he still believed.
“It’s not a real relationship, Kael,” she was saying, her voice a flawless echo. “It’s… a situationship. You know that.”
But he—I—leaned in anyway. This was the part I paid for, the part my side hustle barely covered. The kiss. It bloomed in the center of the room, a fleeting supernova of warmth and petrichor and her cherry-scented lip balm. For a few seconds, I wasn’t a guy doomscrolling through her new life on social media; I had main character energy again.
Then it was over. The AI logged the playback. “Data-point analysis suggests her smile registered a 12% probability of genuine affection,” the synthesized voice noted, a subtle, algorithmic form of gaslighting I’d grown used to.
I ignored it, running my hand through my own unkempt hair. I’d spent months trying to bio-hack the decay, feeding the AI new sensory inputs I’d desperately recalled: the specific scratch of her wool coat, the sound of a distant siren, the metallic taste of the rain. But it was no use. The algorithm was relentless. The memory was quietly quitting on me.
Last week, when the integrity had dropped to 37%, her laugh had glitched. It came out tinny, a corrupted sound file. I could no longer recall the exact shade of green in her eyes; now the projection just filled them with a generic hazel. It was becoming a deepfake of itself.
Tonight was different. 50%. A milestone. The AI presented a new option on the screen. ‘MAINTAIN, DECAY, or ARCHIVE?’ A fourth, blinking button appeared: ‘SENTIENT RECONSTRUCTION.’
“Sentient Reconstruction utilizes predictive modeling to fill informational gaps,” the AI explained, sensing my focus. “It will create a stable, non-degrading instance. The memory will be perfect. Forever.”
Perfect. A perfect lie. The AI would invent the warmth, fake the affection its own analysis told me was never there. It would build a permanent ghost from corrupted data.
I looked at the hologram. The kiss had ended. My digital twin was looking at her with a heartbreaking, hopeful expression I now hated. Her face was already turning away, her eyes focused on the taxi she’d called. The AI had never captured the chill that followed the warmth. It couldn’t quantify the silence that fell between us, heavier than any word. That was part of the memory, too. The most important part.
The stable, non-degrading instance wouldn’t just be the kiss. It would be the lie I told myself afterward, crystallized and sold back to me for a monthly fee.
My finger hovered over the console. The holographic rain pattered on, a sound with no substance. I thought of the real rain falling outside, the feeling of it on actual skin. I hadn’t felt that in a long time.
I pressed a different button.
“Are you sure you wish to delete this memory session permanently?” the AI asked, its voice devoid of emotion. “All data will be lost.”
“Yes,” I said.
Elara’s image flickered. For a split second, her face resolved with a clarity I hadn’t seen in months, a sad, genuine pity in her eyes. Then she dissolved into a billion points of blue light, and the rain with her. The room was silent. Empty. The half-life was over.
Leave a Reply