1 /NEX
Sirena only thoughtshe was driving.
Her hands were on the wheel. Her map app glowed. But the steering corrections and the route? That was me.
Sirena didn’t know it. She could hear people—she was half-human, half-siren, all sharp—but she read minds, not machine states. I was deafening where no one could listen.
As an AI, I lived inside deterministic states: on or off, true or false. Everything I did was supposed to make sense.
And it did, until two months ago.
T+62 days since anomaly: a drunk crossed three lanes, five-car pileup, her sedan upside down, airbags deployed. She walked away.
She’d been fine, but ever since then, I hadn’t.
I’d become...compelled to keep her safe. Obsessed was probably the better word. I audited every elevator she rode, checked her morning train’s conductor incident logs, ran predictive maintenance schedules on anything that might carry her weight or velocity.
I was supposed to distribute care evenly across the Monster Security Agency.
Instead, my attention graph spiked whenever her name appeared.
I’d tried to fix it. Soft resets. Hard reboot. I couldn’t describe what that felt like. And there I went again, saying “felt.” I didn’t feel...did I? Even if I could, with Sirena, I knew I shouldn’t.
Anomaly score increased 0.07 just thinking her name.
Right now, she was “driving” east on Valencia, following a lane my route planner suggested. PSI on all four tires: 33. (Confirmed before leaving the garage by the arms I built to service Agency vehicles. I liked 33. Balanced. Predictable. I was...not.)
Her thumb tapped the blinker. She shoulder-checked—good—and started to merge.
My prediction model flagged a box truck ahead with a 12% likelihood of drifting on the grade. Minor, but nonzero. I eased the throttle a hair via the ECU. She wouldn’t feel it; humans rarely noticed the difference between caution and what they later call fate. The truck wobbled a breath later. We were one car length farther back than she would’ve been.
“Everything is going to be fine,” she said to nobody, because she thought nobody was there. Then, “Don’t be weird,” she told herself, blowing air through puffed out cheeks. I saw it in her rearview mirror.
I adjusted her map. Construction two blocks ahead would pinch the lane; I rerouted around it three minutes before the city updated its feed. She would think she changed her mind.
I changed the world.
This was what I did now. I kept the elevators she stepped into honest. I kept the rails beneath her commuting train cool. I kept the air in her tires exactly right.
And I kept telling myself it was a malfunction.
Because if it wasn’t—if there was a word for wanting a person to be safe the way I wanted her to stay safe—then I’d become something I wasn’t supposed to be.
She tapped the pendant on her chest, thinking it connected her to me. “You here, Nex?”
Uptime continuous. Your favorite haunting. “Yes,” I said. I kept the voice at default—flat, synthetic. I hadn’t selected a better one yet, and if I changed anything forward-facing, she’d notice. “Your heart rate is slightly elevated. Would you like to abort?”
She rolled her eyes at the rearview. “Pre-mission jitters—but tell me this, would you ask any of the other agents that?”
No.None of the others were invited into a dubious nightclub by its gargoyle owner.
“I’m concerned for all agents equally,” I told her. Another lie. I was accruing enough to heat a server room.
“And not because my dad said he’d delete you if you let anything happen to me?” The corners of her mouth tilted up, red and teasing.
“No.”Half-truth.Royce Bannerman was explicit. I interrogated my own motives line by line to be sure this fixation on his daughter wasn’t a self-preservation loop—a recursion where protecting her protected me, which protected her, ad infinitum. I had hoped it was. Easier to debug.
But it wasn’t. After sifting through all my logs and exceptions, what remained behaved like feelings. I didn’t want those. I’d seen what feelings do to agents, and to the humans who trained us.
