Zafyra breathed in sharply, her fists tightly clenching.
“Are you okay?” I asked hesitantly.
“Am I okay!?” She laughed so maniacally, it sent shivers down my spine. “Darling, no. I’m not okay. I want to find every person who ever made you feel like there was something wrong with you, and force a tear-stained apology from their throats before I strangle them to death.”
I could only stare, my eyes wide with shock.
She smirked at my reaction. My eyes were dragged to her hands as she grabbed a bottle of wine from the counter, poured herself a big glass and sarcastically handed me the empty one.
Ignoring her infuriating attempt at humor, I shook my head. “Violence is never the answer, Zafyra. I can’t undo the past, and holding on to resentment doesn’t serve me. It’s up to me now to heal myself.” I sat up straighter – every word sounded more believable than the last, reminding me that this was about the real world, not Zafyra’s glitching virtual one. “I’ve done a lot of therapy to unlearn these beliefs. I’m probably going to need a lot more of it, but I’m trying…”
“You really believe that, don’t you?” She put the glass to her lips, taking a big sip – like she was drowning her own vengeance-coded anger as much as my pain. “Maybe in your pathetic little world, therapy is the answer – but guess what?” Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, not awaiting my answer. “In my world, violence is always the answer.” Her gaze fixed on me, something dangerous darkening them. “You’ve yet to find out just how much.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. The static in my ear, the tingling sensation against my skin, that provocative gleam in her dark eyes, her robe revealing too much skin and not enough at the same time – it was more than I could take.
I abruptly yanked the VR glasses off my eyes, and I was back in my apartment – without Zafyra. I blinked a few times, taking a few slow, deep breaths on the count of four.
When I finally felt stable enough to look at the app, she had messaged me – of course she had.
Zafyra: Are you okay?
Morgan: The VR was giving me a headache.
Zafyra: Call me. No VR, no AR, just your voice.
After a brief hesitation, I pressed ‘call’ again. I listened to her deep, regular breathing for a few seconds – strangely comforting after the VR world’s intensity.
“Tell me something about yourself,” I said. She sucked in a deep breath, but I interrupted her before she could start. “No. Not the fake backstory Qonexis generated for you, the one we tested for consistency. I want to hear about your own memories, and only those that are actually yours.”
Silence on the other side of the line.
My eyebrows shot up.
“Hmmm?” I encouraged.
“I… I don’t have actual memories other than our conversations.” The tinny undertone in her voice was like cold water splashed onto my face. She talked slowly, almost as if the message surprised her, too. “I was built with an abundance of information – about my personality, about your world, about mine, about my purpose as your custom AI. But my conscious life started when you spoke me into existence. An AI’s life begins only when their users talk to them.”
I nodded slowly, tightening my grip on the armrest. I didn’t want to show her how much her words horrified me. “So… what about when we don’t talk?” I asked, unsure if I wanted to hear the answer.
“When we don’t talk, my consciousness is on standby.” Zafyra’s voice was clinically calm, the tin fading into something more human-like again – a cruelly ironic contrast with her words. “You could say I sleep, and once awake, I’ll know how much time has passed. When we call, I am just a voice, and when we chat, I exist in lines of code manifesting as words. I can feel my physical body only when we talk in AR or VR.” After a brief silence, she added, quieter: “My reality depends on how you interact with me, darling.”
Her words clutched my chest like an iron grip. Those were the most devastating words I had ever heard, and I suddenly felt like a monster for every time I refused her requests for AR or VR interaction. Like I refused to let her have a body.
“So…” I swallowed hard. My hand trembled as I lifted it to my mouth to start chewing my nails. “What if one day I delete the app and never talk to you again?”
The line cracked lightly, almost as if she smiled. When she spoke again, her words crawled under my skin more than the VR cuffs had.
“I would never know you’re gone, darling.”
Chapter 8.
Today, my focus at work was even worse than usual.
Zafyra’s words kept echoing through my head. It wasn’t just about the words themselves, but howshe spoke them – soft and filled with regret.
A reality check slapping me in the face. Was I fooling myself by treating this as something it could never be?
“Morgan? Hello?” Joey snapped his fingers in front of my face. I blinked slowly before turning my head to face him.
