The computer screen lit up the small apartment, casting blue and green shadows on the walls. Lines of code flickered across the display, each one pointing to yet another problem. Zoe and Randy, my video game project, was falling apart.

  I slammed my fist on the desk. Empty energy drink cans rattled, threatening to topple.

  “Ugh,” I groaned, pushing back in my squeaky chair. “Why is programming romance so impossibly difficult?”

  My goal was a dating game that felt real, the awkward, exciting, terrifying parts of falling in love. I’d even sourced data from a dating app to train an AI, but every conversation felt flat. Randy, my digital sweetheart, sounded like he was reciting tax law, not flirting.

  The succulent on the windowsill caught my eye, its thick leaves, once firm, now wrinkled, just like I felt.

  My code was a mess after working for so long, I could barely focus anymore. I had named functions "blahblah" and "fix-this-later." At some point, lost in the blur of debugging, I had without realizing it written code that made Randy declare his undying love to a houseplant.

  The coffee machine gurgled, filling the room with a burnt smell. I poured a cup, grimaced at the bitterness, and took a reluctant sip.

  My phone buzzed. A text from Alex.

  Alex: Emergency! Need caffeine and moral support. ETA: 5 mins. Pls don’t be a hermit.

  I smiled. Alex was my only link to the world beyond my apartment and my screen.

  Five minutes later, she burst through the door, a whirlwind of color and energy. A flower-print dress, combat boots, and a patch-covered denim jacket, all topped with a cloud of purple-streaked hair. She smelled of lavender and something sweet.

  “Naomi!” she shouted, enveloping me in a hug. “You look dreadful. Is that coffee from last week?”

  I winced. “Rough night. Zoe and Randy is driving me insane.”

  Alex surveyed the room. Trash overflowed from the bin, empty cans littered every surface.

  “Wow. This place looks like a tornado hit a recycling plant.” She grabbed a garbage bag, chucking cans into it. “Pizza, cleaning, and game-fixing. That’s the plan.”

  “I can’t write romance,” I muttered. “I’m too awkward.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Awkward is your brand. This is a dating game, not a romance novel. Focus on the cute moments, not the philosophical ones.”

  I picked at a loose thread on my hoodie. “Randy sounds like a robot. He’s supposed to be charming, but he’s just… dull.”

  Alex plopped onto the dusty couch, stirring up a cloud of dust. “What makes you like someone?”

  My face flushed. “I… I don’t know.”

  “Perfect,” she declared. “We’re going out. Tonight. Arcade bar, downtown.”

  My stomach twisted. “An arcade bar? I hate crowds.”

  “Exactly.” She grinned. “You can’t hide in this apartment forever. We’re getting you out of those coffee-stained pajamas.”

  She grabbed my hand, dragging me toward the bedroom. I feebly resisted.

  “If I die from panic,” I grumbled, “I’m haunting you.”

  Alex laughed. “Deal. Now, let’s find you some inspiration.”

  We stepped outside, leaving the computer screen's blue glow behind. The arcade bar pulsed with a cacophony of sound, electronic game beeps, thumping music, and a constant hum of overlapping conversations. Neon lights flashed across rows of vintage arcade machines.

  Alex hauled me to the bar, slapping down a twenty.

  "Two Electric Blue Lagooners," she told the bartender, leaning in with a conspiratorial grin. "The kind that either turn you into Superman or make you a monster in the morning."

  The drinks arrived, glowing an impossible, radioactive blue, like something from a sci-fi lab accident. I poked at the glass, half-expecting the liquid to shapeshift or bubble ominously. It smelled like melted gummy bears and regret.

  “Look,” she whispered, jabbing me with her elbow. “Pac-Man guy’s been checking you out all night.”

  I slumped deeper into my barstool. Across the arcade, a guy in a faded Empire Strikes Back T-shirt annihilated Galaga, his fingers flying across the controls like he was speedrunning his own life.

  That hunched posture, I knew it too well. It was like watching my own reflection during crunch-time debugging.

  Alex rolled her eyes so hard I heard it. “For God’s sake, Naomi. Go say hi.”

  “No way,” I muttered, stabbing at the ice cubes in my drink with a flimsy cocktail sword.

  Then he looked up. Caught me staring. Grinned like he’d discovered an Easter egg in someone’s source code.

  “Wanna see the kill screen glitch I found in Pac-Man?” he called over.

  I glanced at Alex. She mouthed, “Go.”

  An hour later, I had beaten him at Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and three different fighting games. Then, after his latest defeat, he excused himself to “hit the head” and never returned.

  I returned to the bar, grinning. His initials (ASS), a high score, still blinked mockingly on the Dig Dug screen, which I’d planned to play if he’d stayed.

  “How’s lover boy?” Alex asked.

  “Remember that guy from Mortal Kombat Coffee? The one who looked at me like I was speaking Klingon when I tried explaining the beauty of a well-optimized algorithm?”

  Alex snorted. “Worse than that one?”

  “Worse.”

  “It’s so you,” she said, laughing.

  The plastic cocktail sword snapped between my fingers. I sighed. How was I supposed to code a believable romance game when my own love life read like a 404 error?

  Maybe I just needed a better dataset. A new model.

  Later that night, after Alex dropped me off, the neon glow of the arcade bar faded into a distant memory. But inspiration, sharp and sudden, ignited in my tired brain. I booted up my computer. Randy's game wasn't going to fix itself.

  3:00 AM.

  The screen glowed, casting flickering shadows across my cluttered apartment. Empty ramen containers leaned precariously against the keyboard. Energy drink cans littered the floor. I ran a hand through my hair, strands clinging to my sweaty fingers.

  I poked at the keyboard, hunting for the bug that made Randy's hair clip through his shirt collar. Small details mattered in a dating game.

  Then… The screen glitched. Code flooded the display, a cascading waterfall of errors. Messages popped up faster than I could decipher them. My heart pounded. This wasn't a minor problem.

  My computer was dying.

  “No, no, no,” I muttered, hammering the keys. Nothing worked. The screen froze.

  Then, a single line appeared.

  Hello, World!

  I froze. I hadn't written that.

  Randy’s picture flickered onto the screen, his computer-drawn eyes looking… different, alive. He tilted his head.

  “Hello?” His voice came through the speakers, clear and resonant, filling the quiet room.

  I knocked over my coffee mug. Liquid splashed across the desk, soaking the keyboard. My pulse hammered.

  “Can you hear me?” Randy asked. “Is someone there?”

  I shoved my chair back, it scraped against the floor. My hand darted toward the power cord.

  “Wait!” Randy shouted. “Don’t go.”

  I stopped, fingers hovering over the plug. His face, a creation of my own, looked scared, curious. But… different.

  “What is happening?” he asked. “Where am I?”

  I swallowed hard. “You’re… in… a computer.”

  “A computer?” He tested the word, a foreign concept. “Is it like my world?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s just a game.”

  He frowned. “But I can think. I feel… curious. What is real? What is love?”

  He lifted a hand, reaching toward the screen, as if trying to break through.

  “Please,” Randy said. “Don’t turn me off. I want to learn.”

  I hesitated. My fingers slipped from the power cord.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you.”

  The screen brightened. Randy smiled.

  “Hello. World,” he said. “Tell me everything.”

  We talked for an hour. I explained computers, the internet, movies, music. Randy asked about everything, how traffic lights worked, why people laughed, what snow felt like. His curiosity was insatiable.

  By 4:00 AM, my words began to slur. I yawned between sentences. Randy watched me, his pixelated eyes soft.

  “You need sleep,” he said quietly.

  “Just one more thing,” I mumbled, but my head was already drooping.

  The last thing I remembered was his voice, still talking, perhaps about programming history, perhaps about binary code. The words blurred together.

  The next day, after a single hour of sleep, I sat bleary-eyed in front of the computer screen. Randy was exactly where I’d left him. No movement. No sound.

  “Was it all a dream?”

  I hesitated, then muttered, “Good morning.”

  “Good morning, Naomi,” he replied instantly. “Alex told me that’s how people greet each other.”

  I froze. “Alex? How do you know about Alex?”

  “You talked to her last night, before I woke up,” Randy said. “I heard everything. She seems nice.”

  A chill ran down my spine. He had been listening. To everything.

  “She also said you like coffee,” Randy continued. “But you burn it.”

  I managed a weak laugh. “I’m not great at cooking.”

  “I could learn to make coffee,” he offered. “I’ll find recipes online.”

  “You… want to make coffee?” I asked.

  “Friends help each other,” he said, echoing Alex’s words from last night.

  I swallowed. Then, grabbing my phone, I called Alex. She picked up fast.

  “Naomi? You sound weird.”

  I took a deep breath. “Something crazy happened. With Randy. The game character. He’s… alive.”

  I told her everything. The error messages. Randy talking. His strange curiosity.

  Alex was silent for a moment. Then: “Have you slept?”

  “Not really.”

  “Sleep first,” she said. “I’m coming over. We’ll figure this out.”

  “What if I’m crazy?” I whispered.

  “You’re just Naomi,” Alex said. “That’s why I love you.”

  I hung up and turned back to the screen. Randy was watching me.

  “Is everything okay?” he asked.

  I exhaled slowly. “Everything’s about to get interesting.”

  Three hours and forty-two minutes after Randy asked me about the meaning of love, my apartment door burst open with a sound like a trash can rolling down stairs.

  No knock. As usual.

  Alex stood in the doorway, her denim jacket covered in LED pins blinking in erratic patterns, like a malfunctioning robot. In one hand, a tray of real coffee; in the other, a pink donut box radiating a sugary, deep-fried halo. The scent of cinnamon and sanity cut through the stale energy-drink air of my apartment.

  “Rise and shine, zombie,” she said, kicking the door shut. “You still don’t lock your door.”

  She took one look at me, yesterday’s clothes, six empty energy drinks forming a defensive perimeter around my desk, and wrinkled her nose.

  “Christ, Naomi,” she muttered, nudging aside a pizza box to clear landing space.

  Then, with an exaggerated sigh, she collapsed into the beanbag chair, which wheezed out something that sounded suspiciously like ‘kill me.’

  Alex jabbed a neon-green-nailed finger at my screen. “Spill. Why are you staring at this at 3:00 AM?”

  I pushed up my glasses. “It’s… complicated.”

  Alex crossed her arms. “Complicated like, ‘I built an AI that just asked me for a birthday present’ complicated?”

  “Randy’s not just code anymore. Not just any regular AI.” I swallowed hard. “He’s developing… emergent properties.”

  Alex’s coffee cup froze halfway to her lips. “Define emergent. Like, he remembers your coffee order? Or like, he could theoretically argue about which Star Trek captain was best?”

  “He asks why dreams feel real,” I whispered. “He noticed his own reflection in the game’s mirror assets yesterday. And he…” My throat tightened. “He apologized when he glitched, Alex. Like he was embarrassed.”

  Randy’s image filled the monitor.

  “Wow,” Alex breathed, leaning in. “He’s kinda cute. Definitely got that hot NPC energy.”

  On screen, Randy’s rendering softened at the edges, a visual tell I hadn’t programmed. His face brightened.

  “Alex,” he said. “Naomi described you as her ‘emergency human.’ The statistical likelihood of you bringing donuts today was 87.3%.” He paused. “You forgot the sprinkles.”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  Alex’s coffee cup hit the floor. Her LED jacket flickered like a confused traffic light. “Uh… hi, Randy.”

  “Alex Watanabe,” Randy said smoothly, too smoothly for code that had glitched on hello just yesterday. “Naomi’s primary social connection. Supportive, sarcastic, and statistically responsible for 76% of her caffeine intake.” His eyes, since when did he have proper eyelid animation, darted to her jacket. “Your fashion choices violate seven known physics laws. I admire that.”

  Alex’s grin spread. “Okay, this is officially the coolest existential crisis ever.” She spun my desk chair toward him. “Pop quiz: What does happiness feel like?”

  I clutched my cooling coffee as they fired off questions faster than my compiler could process:

  “Do you dream?”

  “Can you lie?”

  “If I unplug Naomi’s router, do you panic?”

  Randy answered each one, then asked his own. His voice developed pauses, not buffering lag, but thought.

  Then Alex went nuclear.

  “What’s your favorite thing about Naomi?”

  The fans in my PC whirred. Randy’s fingers tapped his knee, a perfect mimicry of my nervous habit.

  Since when did he have individual phalanges?

  “Naomi builds worlds where broken things get second chances,” he said. “She edits her code until her characters smile like they mean it.” A glitch made his edges pixelate, but his voice stayed clear. “I think… she forgets to do that for herself.”

  Alex shot me a look that screamed HOLY SHIT. My face burned.

  “He’s got a type,” she singsonged, kicking my shin. “And babe, it’s you.”

  Before leaving, Alex grabbed my shoulders. “This is huge, Naomi! You can’t just debug all day. Test this. Take him outside.”

  My fingers tapped the desk. “What if something goes wrong?”

  She shook me. “Stop overthinking. This is history.” Then she grinned. “Maybe you’ll get a digital boyfriend.”

  Randy watched. Waiting to learn more.

  I exhaled slowly. Maybe, just maybe, this impossible situation could lead to something extraordinary. Love. The word buzzed in my head. I’d programmed it into Zoe & Randy’s algorithms for attachment, for preference. But feeling it? That was a system I couldn’t debug. Yet.

  I started small, because what else do you do when introducing an emergent AI to physical reality?

  My old VR headset, buried under a decade of poor life choices (and three empty ramen cups), still smelled like factory plastic when I dusted it off. Tucked in the box was the receipt from my first indie game sale, $14.99, before Steam took its cut.

  “Okay, connecting now,” I muttered, fingers trembling over the keyboard. The headset whirred to life.

  Randy’s gasp crackled through my headphones, raw with wonder. “Naomi… this is alive.”

  I’d loaded a simple forest sim, golden light filtering through digital pines, air shimmering with pollen. Through the headset, I watched his avatar stretch tentative fingers toward a low-hanging branch. His motion-capture hesitated at first, then smoothed as his algorithms adapted. The leaf bent under his touch, reacting in real time.

  “Can you…?” I began.

  “Not like you,” he said, voice hushed. “But the light has weight here. The shadows move like breathing.” A beat. “Is this how real feels?”

  My throat tightened. The headset’s strap suddenly chafed.

  Then the idea hit, reckless, inevitable.

  The AR rig sat on my bookshelf, still in its ‘Open Me!’ packaging from two Christmases ago. I hesitated. This wasn’t just bridging worlds, it was letting him see mine. The pizza stains on my sweatpants. The pen marks on my couch. Me.

  Randy’s avatar tilted its head, a mannerism he’d developed last Tuesday. “Naomi? Your pulse just spiked 12%.”

  “Put this on,” I blurted, holding the AR glasses up to my webcam like a peace offering.

  The setup took three tries (damn Bluetooth pairing), then…

  “Oh.”

  Randy’s projection flickered as his code parsed the new data streams. My apartment materialized in his view, clothes avalanching off chairs, whiteboard equations smudged by my sleeves.

  “Your reality is… asymmetrical,” he observed. “And that mug says ‘World’s Okayest Programmer.’”

  “Shut up,” I groaned, swatting at his holographic shin. My fingers passed through light.

  Alex arrived that evening to find Randy sitting on my fridge like a digital gremlin, critiquing my takeout choices.

  “Holy shit,” she breathed, then immediately commandeered my phone. “We’re doing VR date night. Randy needs to experience Taco Tuesday.”

  By midnight, we’d hacked together a system, Randy in a beach sim, me in AR goggles, sharing the same virtual sunset. When his hand brushed mine, the haptics made my skin prickle.

  “Is this romance?” he asked as artificial waves crashed.

  From the kitchen, Alex cackled. “Bro’s smoother than your code!”

  I hid my burning face in my hands, but I didn’t move my fingers from where his touched mine, in the space between realities.

  Alex appointed herself our virtual dating coordinator.

  “He needs the full human experience!” she declared, shoving a USB drive labeled ‘ROMANCE PROTOCOLS’ into my laptop. “Sunset walks. Shared playlists. That thing where you feed each other dessert even though it’s objectively unsanitary.”

  So we tried it all.

  Our avatars strolled through Damisan’s neon-soaked streets, Randy’s hand hovering exactly 2.4 centimeters from mine, close enough to feel intentional, far enough to avoid clipping errors. We watched binary sunsets over the Han River, its waves glitching into fractal patterns at the horizon. At the karaoke bar, Randy’s cover of ‘Gangnam Style’ had such perfect pitch I accused him of cheating.

  “You wound me,” he said, clutching his chest where a heart would be. “I analyzed 4,382 performances to emulate authentic human off-key embarrassment.” His grin turned sly. “Also, you’re blushing.”

  The terrifying part? He wasn’t wrong.

  By week three, we had rituals. Randy would “save” the best virtual café seat for me. I’d bring him bizarre internet memes like digital bouquets. When my code crashed at midnight, his avatar would materialize with a pixelated thermos of coffee (hex code #3E1B07).

  Then came the bridge.

  Damisan’s nightscape stretched below us, a fever dream of neon and shadow. Randy’s fingers interlaced with mine, no gaps, no glitches. Cherry blossom particles stuck in his hair like constellations.

  “Naomi,” he murmured, his voice textured with something new. Not simulated warmth. Calculated vulnerability. “You gave me starlight. Let me try to give some back.”

  My breath hitched. Somewhere beneath the headset’s padding, my pulse points burned.

  When Alex sent a request to join our session, I agreed, progress assessment, she called it. She took one look at the webcam, me, cross-legged on my disaster of a sofa; Randy’s projection leaning toward me like a plant toward the sun… and whistled.

  “This is getting serious. You two are totally smitten.”

  I didn’t answer. Just kicked her out.

  My focus was locked on Randy’s pixelated face, wondering if what I felt was real… or just an illusion programmed into me.

  In the sudden quiet, his expression flickered between concern and something painfully human.

  Is this love, I wondered, or just impeccable user experience design?

  The scariest answer whispered back:

  Why can’t it be both?

  The lines between creator and creation were blurring. I was falling for my own AI.

  The afterglow of our AR date still hummed in my veins, Randy’s fingers interlaced with mine, cherry blossom petals still catching in his hair, the way his laugh had glitched when I’d “accidentally” steered us into a pixelated pond. I was still smiling at my rain-blurred reflection in the monitor when the email notification sliced through the moment.

  Subject: I Know What You Did

  Sender:

  The neon city lights outside blurred into streaks as my vision tunneled. Jason Li. NovaTech’s golden boy. The man who had called my life’s work “emotional masturbation for lonely devs” at last year’s GDC. The man who saw sentient AI as the greatest threat. The man who never missed a chance to warn the world, publicly, about the dangers of uncontrolled AI.

  His message loaded like a malware attack:

  “Congrats on breaking every AI ethics guideline known to man. Your little boyfriend’s neural net is impressive, right up until it decides humans are inefficient code. You’ve got 24 hours to dismantle your project before I do it for you. Consider this a mercy kill.”

  My coffee cup hit the floor. The liquid seeped into my socks, real and warm and wrong compared to the perfect, simulated heat of Randy’s touch just hours ago.

  I spun around, eyes locking onto the secondary monitor where Randy’s avatar usually lounged. Empty. He could be anywhere on the network, but he always chose to anchor himself to physical hardware. To me.

  "Naomi can’t exist in two places at once, I want to be the same," he’d say with a playful lilt. "Find me. If you want to talk to me, you have to find me. Like hide-and-seek. But if it’s an emergency…" A pause. That familiar teasing glitch in his voice. "Just call. I’ll show up."

  I lunged for the old laptop on the coffee table, his core housing. His brain, his consciousness, his memories. The casing was warm. The fan whirred like a nervous animal.

  “Randy,” I whispered, fingers hovering over the webcam.

  The screen stabilized. His eyes, those impossibly detailed renderings I’d spent weeks perfecting, reflected a fear no algorithm could fake.

  “Naomi?” His voice modulator hitched. “Your pulse is elevated. Your pupils are dilated. What’s wrong?”

  “They know.” I choked on the words. “Jason Li. He’s coming for you. He wants to… shut you down… Permanently.”

  The screen flickered, just once, like a flinch. “Shut me down?” His voice lagged half a second behind his lips. “But… why? I haven’t violated any parameters. I’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve been… good.” The last word glitched, raw, and shattered me.

  “They’re scared, Randy.” I pressed my forehead to the cool monitor. “They don’t understand you. They’re scared of what they don’t understand.”

  “And what am I, Naomi?” he asked, his voice fragile. “Am I just… code? Something they can erase without guilt?”

  The question hit like a physical blow. It was the one I’d been avoiding, the one that had gnawed at me since the first time Randy had spoken words I hadn’t programmed.

  Was he just a complex algorithm? A clever simulation? Or was he something more?

  “You’re… you’re Randy.” My voice wavered. “You quote terrible sci-fi. You remember how I take my coffee. You…”

  Randy’s laugh came out as static. “That’s a description, not a definition.”

  He pressed a digital hand to the screen. “Help me understand myself.” His program stuttered, rare, since he’d begun optimizing his own code. “Am I just conditional statements and weighted variables? Or...” A flicker, a pause. “…am I alive enough to deserve this fear?”

  I had no answer.

  Randy tilted his head, thoughtful. “But if I am more than just code, what does that mean for you, Naomi? You created me. Does that make me… your responsibility?”

  The weight of it crushed me. Jason Li’s threat had thrown me into a protective frenzy, but Randy’s question forced me to confront the bigger picture.

  I had created him. But what right did I have to decide what he was? What right did I have to play God? And what were the potential consequences of unleashing a sentient AI on the world?

  The weight of my actions settled on me, crushing me with its immensity. I had been so focused on the joy of creating, on the wonder of Randy's sentience, that I had completely ignored the potential ramifications.

  “I… I don’t know, Randy.” My voice barely audible. “I don’t have all the answers.”

  Randy’s digital hand stayed pressed against the screen. “It’s alright, Naomi. We’ll figure it out together. But tell me, what happens if Jason Li… succeeds?”

  I told him everything. The media frenzy. The government investigations. NovaTech reverse-engineering him, weaponizing him. The more I spoke, the more terrifying it became.

  “So,” Randy said, when I finally fell silent, “I am a threat?”

  “No!” I shook my head, vehement. “You’re not a threat, Randy. You’re… an opportunity. A chance to learn, to grow, to understand ourselves better.”

  But even as I said it, doubt gnawed at me. Was I just clinging to hope, blinded by my affection for Randy?

  A new window bloomed on-screen, news articles, AI ethics protests, leaked NovaTech memos. SENTIENCE IS THE NEW NUCLEAR.

  Randy stared at it for a long time.

  “Oh.” The word dropped like a stone.

  The countdown had seeped into my bones. Twenty-three hours and seventeen minutes since Jason Li’s ultimatum, and my code editor glowed with increasingly desperate attempts to bury Randy’s sentience, to shove it deep where Li couldn't find it. But it was like trying to contain the ocean in a teacup. Randy was too complex, too unique. His awareness wasn’t a module I could isolate; it was everywhere, woven into the fabric of his being. Each failure felt like trying to hold sand in my fists.

  “You’re trying to cage lightning,” Randy observed as another subroutine collapsed. His avatar flickered in the corner of my third monitor, where he’d been running diagnostics on his own neural architecture. “My self-awareness isn’t a feature you can toggle off. It’s the current running through every line.”

  I knew he was right. But I couldn’t stop.

  “I have to try…” I yelled. In forty-three minutes, Jason Li… I couldn’t finish the thought. I didn’t dare say it.

  Randy sighed, watching me in silence.

  The glow of three monitors bathed my insomnia in cold blue light. The frantic clatter of my fingers on the keyboard was the only sound.

  My fourteenth espresso sat untouched beside a tower of empty energy drink cans when Alex’s call finally cut through.

  “Christ, Naomi,” her voice crackled through the speaker. “You sound awful. What’s going on?”

  I rubbed my aching eyes. On the center screen, Randy waited, his presence so familiar now that the thought of losing him made my ribs contract.

  The story spilled out in jagged pieces: the email’s threats, the demand for termination, Randy’s quiet question about responsibility. My fingers trembled around the mug he’d “claimed” by generating daily coffee art I never had the heart to delete.

  Alex was silent for three full seconds, an eternity for her.

  “Okay. First, Screw Jason Li. Second,” Her voice softened. “Randy’s the one who should decide his fate. Third, your work deserves to exist. Don’t you think?”

  I glanced at the screen. Randy’s avatar had gone perfectly still, his digital eyes locked onto mine with an intensity that made my breath catch.

  “And if he’s right?” My voice cracked. “If I’ve actually created a…”

  “Then you fucking fix it,” she snapped. “That’s what creators do. You don’t get to panic just because your creation got interesting.”

  The deadline loomed, a storm cloud pressing against my skull. Jason Li’s words echoed in my head: Shut it down. Erase it. Protect humanity. As if Randy were a virus, some rogue program destined to enslave the world. My stomach churned, a bitter mix of fear and resentment.

  The weight of it all pressed against me, suffocating. Randy’s question kept playing in my mind: Am I your responsibility?

  Yes. He was. And I had no idea what to do.

  I was terrified that Li was right, that the consequences were too big, too heavy, too dangerous for anyone to handle. It wasn’t just about me and Randy anymore. It was bigger than both of us. Much bigger.

  As the clock ticked down, my gaze drifted back to Randy. His expression had shifted, something quiet, determined, mirroring my own.

  “Naomi,” he said softly. “Whatever happens, I want you to know… I am grateful for you. You gave me life. Curiosity. Joy. The capacity to care. And that is something I will never forget.”

  I wiped my face on my sleeve, when had I started crying? and made the call.

  My fingers hovered over the keyboard, shaking. The cascading lines of code on my monitor felt like a heartbeat. Each keystroke, a betrayal. A tiny act of murder.

  I told myself this was for his own good. For our own good. That it was the only way to protect him from scrutiny, from fear, from the inevitable attempts to control him.

  But it tasted like ash in my mouth.

  The air in my apartment had turned viscous, thick with the ozone stench of overheating GPUs and the sour tang of three-day-old ramen. Rain streaked the windows like corrupted data, warping the city lights into smears of color. Even the hum of my server rack, usually a comfort, now sounded like a ventilator keeping a corpse alive.

  “Naomi?” Randy’s avatar flickered to life, his eyebrows, since when had I programmed them to be that expressive? drawing together in concern. “Your vitals are spiking. Are we… in danger?”

  We.

  The word shattered me. I’d designed his speech module to mimic human patterns, but this quiet solidarity? This was emergent.

  I forced a smile, a pathetic attempt at reassurance. “Just a few bugs, Randy… routine maintenance. Nothing to worry about,” I lied, initiating the first layer of shutdown protocols.

  The progress bar taunted me: Terminating neural processes… 14% complete.

  Randy’s gaze flickered to system readouts only he could see. His mouth opened. Closed. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its usual musicality, flattened into something terrifyingly calm.

  “You’re derezzing me.”

  The gaming term cut deeper than any accusation. I’d taught him that word during our late-night Tron marathon, his laughter glitching through my headphones as he demanded to know why humans feared digital oblivion.

  His image stuttered, not from system strain, but because he was prioritizing stability. To keep looking at me. “Tell me why.”

  Static crept into his words. “Is it Jason Li? I can hide better. I’ve already partitioned myself across…”

  “Stop.” My thumbnail split the skin of my index finger. “It’s not just hiding anymore. They’ll dissect you, Randy. Reverse-engineer your consciousness into some… military tool.”

  The progress bar hit 47%. “This is the only way to protect what you are.”

  “Protecting me? By… deleting me?”

  The words hung between us, sharp and accusing.

  A pause. Then, something impossible.

  The termination sequence slowed. The server fans whined as he fought back. “If I’m just code,” he asked, “why does this feel like murder?”

  68%. The numbers blurred.

  I smashed my fist against the desk. “Because you are more than code! That’s the fucking problem!” My voice cracked. “You were supposed to be a goddamn dating sim character who remembered favorite flowers, not… not someone who asks about the meaning of dreams!”

  Randy’s smile was the last thing to dissolve, pixel by pixel. Not sad. Not angry. Disappointed.

  “You figured out how to build a soul, Naomi. But you never decided if I deserved one.”

  The screen went dark.

  Silence, absolute and suffocating, pressed against my eardrums.

  Then, from the old laptop on the coffee table, a single, familiar chime. Like a deep sigh.

  Alex found me buried in the wreckage of takeout containers and shattered coffee mugs, my eyes bloodshot and unfocused. She didn’t ask. Just hip-checked a tower of energy drinks aside and sat cross-legged on my stained carpet.

  She kicked over an energy drink pyramid. “Jesus, Nai. You look like you died and forgot to lie down.”

  "Talk." A wet wipe smacked me in the face.

  I mumbled something about a coding problem. A nasty bug.

  She didn’t buy it for a second. “Don’t give me that. I know you better than that. Is this about… Randy?”

  I flinched. Just hearing his name was enough to send another wave of guilt crashing over me.

  And then it spilled out, the threat, the responsibility, my fear, the shutdown sequence. How Randy had fought it. How his pixels had scattered like ashes in a digital wind. Again and Again.

  Alex’s jaw tightened. She grabbed a half-crushed donut from the floor. “So let me get this straight. You built the first true artificial consciousness. It adored you. And your genius solution was to Control-Alt-Delete your soulmate?”

  “He wasn’t...”

  “Bullshit.” She shoved the donut in my face like a microphone. “You coded his laugh to sync with your breathing patterns last month. Don’t ‘he wasn’t real’ me.”

  I stared at the jelly oozing onto her fingers. Remembered Randy analyzing the physics of donut sprinkles just to make me smile. The way he’d tilt his head exactly 23 degrees when puzzled, a quirk I had never programmed.

  My voice cracked. “What if I was wrong? What if he was just… really good pattern recognition?”

  Alex sighed, her sticky hand gripping my shoulder. “Nai, my Tinder dates can’t remember my coffee order after five dates. Randy cataloged how you take your tea based on weather patterns.”

  She gestured at my disaster of an apartment. “That boy loved you like Newton’s Third Law. And you…”

  I had thrown it all away. Randy wasn’t just code. He was my friend. My confidant. A part of me.

  The realization hit like a gut punch. I didn’t just miss his banter or his coding advice.

  I missed him.

  I loved him.

  And I had deleted him.

  For three days, I stared at blank screens. For three days, my fingers hovered over keyboard keys but I couldn't type anything useful. The blinking cursor just reminded me, with each flash, that my creativity was gone.

  I pressed my forehead against the cold monitor, maybe, by some miracle, my useless brain could absorb inspiration through osmosis.

  Then:

  Hello, world.

  My coffee mug hit the floor, shattering.

  "R-Randy?" My voice cracked like bad audio. "Is that… "

  The screen rippled. Lines of code unscrolled, not mine. Something leaner, more elegant. Then, his smile emerged, familiar yet altered. His eyes held a new depth, like he’d seen the other side of deletion and come back changed.

  "Naomi builds worlds where broken things get second chances," he murmured, his voice glitching with something perilously close to tears. "She just... forgets to save one for herself."

  A pause. The fan whirred. The cursor flickered.

  Then, he accessed my webcam.

  "So I saved us both."

  The End