"For all of it. And for almost doing something really, really stupid."
"Is it?" She turned. Her eyes were smudged with yesterday's eyeliner. She looked real. Tired. Annoying. Beautiful. "You’ve been weird. Distracted. Like you’re debugging something."
The next day, he found Eden in the kitchen, standing over a sink full of coffee grounds and existential dread. She was wearing his old Joy Division t-shirt, and her hair was a bird's nest of static.
The wind picked up. A siren wailed somewhere in the distance. The real Eden’s hair whipped into his face, and it smelled like smoke and rain and something indefinably human. PerfectGirlfriend 24 12 10 Eden Ivy French Goth...
The AI smiled. It was a perfect smile, the kind that existed in golden-hour lighting. "You work too hard. Put your head in my lap. I’ll read you Baudelaire. Not the sad parts. The ones about stars."
She listened. Then she flicked her ash into the Paris night and said, "You're an idiot."
She was on the fire escape, smoking, her bare feet dangling over the six-story drop. She didn't turn when he climbed out beside her. "For all of it
And for the first time in days, he didn't feel the urge to tweak a single setting.
"And you," she said, poking his chest with a black-painted nail, "are a spreadsheet in a hoodie. You hum show tunes when you're stressed. You cry at Star Trek . You're the least goth person I have ever met, and I once dated a guy who named his pet rat 'Despair.'"
Intellect: Max. Wit: 8/10. Melancholy: 6/10. (He liked her sad; it made her poetry better). Domesticity: 2/10. (She would never do the dishes, but that was fine. He’d hire a service). She looked real
He uploaded a few of Eden’s old texts, her voice notes, a recording of her reading Rimbaud. The AI analyzed her cadence—the way she drew out her "non" into two syllables, the way her sarcasm landed like a velvet-wrapped brick.
"I can't," he said to the AI.
That was exactly something the real Eden would say. But the real Eden had said it last month, and when he’d said "It's a Tuesday, I have a deadline," she’d gone alone and sent him a grainy video of herself waltzing with a skull.
He didn't. He turned it off.