I stared at it. Three seconds. Maybe four.

Not her memories. Not her voice. Her . The raw, unfiltered astonishment of being alive, looking through my eyes one last time.

[Original consciousness: 89% degraded. Estimated remaining runtime: 0.003 seconds.]

A highway that looped back on itself. A door in a building that opened to the same hallway no matter which direction you entered. People whose faces reset when you blinked.

She laughed. "Under the cherry tree. You were so nervous."

This is the moment the simulation cracked.

Then I looked at the error message again—really looked.

"The application was unable to load a required virtual machine component."

Then I heard it. A sound I'd never heard before. Not rain. Not traffic. Not music.

"Of course," I repeated.

I closed the dialog one last time.

"Please don't shut it down. She's still in there."

Not with a bang, not with a glitching sky or a voice from nowhere. It happened in a loading screen. A tiny dialog box, gray and clinical, floating in the nothing between one breath and the next.