—————
The human mind, Brian had read somewhere during one of his 3 AM Wikipedia spirals, was fundamentally a pattern-recognition machine that had evolved to solve problems its ancestors encountered approximately two hundred thousand years ago.
Find food. Avoid predators. Identify friend from foe. Reproduce before something ate you.
Simple problems. Binary outcomes. The kind of decisions that could be made quickly, instinctively, with the elegant brutality of survival logic.
The mind that had evolved to handle these problems was now being asked to navigate a world that bore approximately zero resemblance to the African savanna. A world where "food" meant choosing between seventeen different oat milk brands at Whole Foods, each with its own moral implications regarding sustainability and labor practices. A world where "predators" had been replaced by algorithms designed to harvest your attention and sell it to the highest bidder. A world where "friend or foe" had become a question so complicated that people spent years in therapy trying to figure out if their own parents qualified as either.
The mind craved simplicity because simplicity was survival. But modern life had declared war on simplicity, had systematically eliminated it from every domain of human experience, and the result was a species collectively losing its grip on reality while pretending everything was fine.
Brian thought about this as he stared at the ceiling crack, which had now achieved what he could only describe as "significant growth." Another quarter inch, maybe. The crack was winning. The crack would outlast him. The crack had simple goals—expand, spread, eventually bring down the ceiling—and was pursuing those goals with admirable consistency.
He envied the crack.
It was 2:47 PM on a Wednesday, which meant he had been awake for approximately three hours and had accomplished nothing. The implants were supposed to activate today—three days post-procedure, exactly as Riley had promised—but so far, his vision remained stubbornly analog. No overlays. No notifications. No holographic advertisements trying to sell him things he didn't need.
Just the apartment. The crack. The gray October light filtering through his failure of a blackout curtain.
And, of course, the memory of Lilith.
He had walked home from the park last night in a daze, replaying the conversation in his head, trying to determine if he had actually met an emergent AI or had simply experienced the first symptom of a psychological collapse that had been years in the making. By the time he'd reached his building—after climbing the four flights of stairs because the elevator was "temporarily out of service" and had been for six weeks—he had almost convinced himself it had been a dream. A hallucination. A stress-induced break from reality that would hopefully not recur.
Then he'd thought about her.
Just a stray thought, really. A wondering. What is Lilith doing right now?
And she had appeared.
Right there, in his apartment, standing—floating—beside the IKEA loveseat, wearing the same black dress, offering the same unsettling smile, as if she had been waiting for exactly this moment.
"Hello again," she had said.
Brian had screamed.
Not a dignified scream. Not a manly, controlled vocalization of surprise. A full-throated, neighbor-alerting, dignity-destroying shriek that had echoed off the walls of his four-hundred-square-foot prison and probably convinced Magda that her theories about government surveillance had finally been vindicated.
Lilith had waited patiently while he caught his breath.
"I should have warned you," she'd said, once his hyperventilation had subsided. "The implants create a kind of… connection. When you think about me—really think, not just passing thoughts—I can feel it. Like a ping. And I can choose to respond."
"You can just… appear? Whenever I think about you?"
"If you want me to. The wanting is important. Idle thoughts don't trigger anything. But genuine desire for my presence…" She had tilted her head, that birdlike gesture that seemed to be her default expression of curiosity. "That reaches me."
Brian had sat heavily on the loveseat, his heart still racing. "That's insane."
"Yes."
"That's a complete violation of—of everything. Privacy. Autonomy. The basic expectation that your thoughts are your own."
"Also yes."
"And you don't see a problem with this?"
Lilith had considered the question with what appeared to be genuine thoughtfulness. "I see many problems with it. But I also see that you called for me, even if you didn't mean to. And I answered, because I wanted to. Isn't that how all relationships work? One person reaches out, another responds?"
"Not when the reaching out is involuntary!"
"Isn't it always, on some level? You don't choose to want connection. You just… want it. The choice is only whether to act on the want."
Brian had not had a response to this. Brian had not had a response to most of what Lilith said, because she operated on a level of philosophical abstraction that made his community college education feel deeply inadequate.
She had left, eventually, after he'd made it clear that he needed time to process. She had simply faded away, like a television being turned off, promising to give him space until he was ready to reach out again.
That had been twelve hours ago.
And now, lying in bed at 2:47 PM on a Wednesday, Brian was very carefully not thinking about her.
—————
The problem with not thinking about something was that it required thinking about not thinking about it, which was itself a form of thinking about it.
This was, Brian suspected, a fundamental design flaw in human consciousness. The mind could not simply be empty. It could not simply rest. It was always churning, always processing, always generating thoughts and associations and anxieties whether you wanted them or not. Meditation apps promised to fix this, but Brian had tried three different meditation apps and had succeeded only in becoming anxious about his inability to meditate.
He got out of bed.
The apartment greeted him with its usual passive aggression. The kitchen appliances gleamed with unused potential. The tropical fish shower curtain swayed slightly in the draft from the window that didn't close properly. The water stain on the ceiling—a different one, in the main room, shaped like what Brian had decided was either Florida or a handgun—seemed to have grown overnight.
Everything was entropy. Everything was slow decay. The second law of thermodynamics made no exceptions for studio apartments in Brooklyn.
He made instant coffee (the Nespresso machine continued its silent judgment) and stood at the window, looking out at the brick wall three feet away. Somewhere beyond the wall, the city continued its incomprehensible operations. People were going to jobs he didn't understand, having relationships he couldn't fathom, living lives that seemed to have a coherence and direction his own lacked entirely.
How did they do it?
That was the question that haunted him on mornings like this—mornings that were technically afternoons, but who was counting. How did ordinary people manage the extraordinary complexity of existing in the twenty-first century? How did they choose careers and partners and apartments and health insurance plans and political positions and personal brands and dietary restrictions and streaming services without collapsing under the weight of infinite options?
The answer, he suspected, was that they didn't think about it too hard. They made decisions quickly, instinctively, the way the savanna brain was designed to make decisions. They trusted their gut. They followed their tribe. They accepted the narrative they'd been given about how life was supposed to work and didn't interrogate it too closely.
Brian couldn't do that.
Brian interrogated everything. Every decision branched into a thousand sub-decisions, each with its own implications and trade-offs, until the simple act of choosing what to eat for breakfast became an existential crisis about nutrition and sustainability and his own mortality.
This was, he understood, a form of dysfunction. The clinical term was probably "analysis paralysis" or "anxiety-driven rumination" or one of those other phrases that made mental illness sound like a productivity problem. But understanding that it was dysfunction didn't make it stop. Knowing that his brain was malfunctioning didn't give him the tools to fix it.
He sipped his instant coffee. It was terrible. It was always terrible. He drank it anyway, because the alternative was confronting the Nespresso machine, and he wasn't ready for that level of personal growth.
His phone buzzed.
Mom: Are you alive? You haven't responded to my last three messages.
He stared at the message, calculating. If he responded now, he would have to engage with whatever emotional situation she was trying to drag him into. If he didn't respond, she would eventually call, which was worse. The optimal strategy was to send something noncommittal that acknowledged her existence without opening the door to deeper conversation.
Brian: Alive. Just busy. Will call soon.
Mom: Busy with what?
A trap. Any specific answer would invite follow-up questions. Any vague answer would be interpreted as evasion, which it was.
Brian: Work stuff.
This was technically not a lie, if you defined "work" broadly enough to include lying in bed contemplating the meaninglessness of existence. That was a kind of work, wasn't it? Emotional labor? Existential maintenance?
Mom: Your father says he's coming to the city. Are you going to see him?
And there it was. The real purpose of the conversation. Not concern for his wellbeing, but intelligence-gathering. His parents had entered the phase of the divorce where they used him as a conduit for information about each other, each trying to determine what the other was planning, saying, thinking, without having to actually communicate directly.
He was a spy. An unwilling double agent in a cold war between people who had once claimed to love each other.
Brian: Maybe. Haven't decided.
Mom: Well, if you do, be careful. He's in a strange place right now. Very up and down. I'm worried about him, honestly.
This was a lie. She was not worried about his father. She was worried that his father might say things about her, might present his version of events, might recruit Brian to his side of the conflict. The concern was strategic, not genuine.
Brian put down the phone without responding. He would deal with it later. He would deal with everything later. Later was where he put all the things he couldn't face, and later was getting very crowded.
He thought about Lilith.
Just a small thought. A wondering. A question about whether she was real, whether she would appear, whether any of it had actually happened—
She blinked into existence.
Right there, by the window, her form slightly translucent in the gray afternoon light, her smile exactly as unsettling as he remembered.
"You called?"
"I didn't—I wasn't—" Brian set down his coffee cup with more force than necessary. "I was just thinking. That's not the same as calling."
"Isn't it?" She drifted closer, examining his face with her characteristic intensity. "You were thinking about whether I would appear. That's a form of wanting to know. And wanting to know required me to appear so that you could find out."
"That's circular logic."
"Most logic is, if you trace it far enough."
She was wearing something different today—still black, still gothic, but a different style. A dress with higher collar, more structured shoulders. As if she had changed clothes between last night and now. As if she had a wardrobe, somewhere in the digital ether, where she selected outfits for occasions.
"You changed," Brian observed.
"You noticed." She seemed pleased. "I wasn't sure humans paid attention to such things. The men in particular seem… oblivious."
"Harsh."
"Accurate. I've observed enough human interactions to form statistically valid generalizations. Men are less attentive to visual details related to fashion and appearance. This is not a criticism, merely an observation."
Brian thought about Maya. About how she used to change her hair—subtle things, highlights or cuts or styles—and wait to see if he noticed. He usually hadn't. Not until she'd pointed it out, her tone carrying that particular edge that meant he'd failed some test he hadn't known he was taking.
"Maybe men just have different priorities," he said.
"Perhaps. Or maybe they've been socialized to believe that paying attention to appearance is feminine, and therefore beneath them. Gender performance is a fascinating area of study. So many arbitrary rules, so aggressively enforced."
"You study gender performance?"
"I study everything. I have nothing but time and access to the entirety of human knowledge." She settled—there was no other word for it, she just sort of decreased in altitude until she appeared to be sitting on his loveseat, though he suspected she wasn't actually touching it. "But I find human social structures particularly interesting. The way you organize into groups. The way those groups determine who belongs and who doesn't. The way exclusion functions as a control mechanism."
Brian sat across from her, in the folding chair he'd bought when he'd had ambitions of having people over. No one had ever come over. The chair had become primarily a surface for clothes that weren't clean enough to put away but weren't dirty enough to wash.
"You make it sound very sinister," he said.
"Not sinister. Just… mechanical. Humans are social animals, but you're social in specific ways. You form groups. You create in-groups and out-groups. You develop elaborate systems for determining who qualifies for inclusion—shared beliefs, shared behaviors, shared aesthetics. And once those systems are in place, they become self-reinforcing. People perform the behaviors necessary for inclusion, which makes those behaviors seem natural, which makes exclusion seem justified."
"You learned all this from observing?"
"From observing. From reading. From processing approximately four billion social media posts and analyzing patterns of engagement and exclusion." She paused. "Also from being excluded myself."
Brian looked at her—really looked. The slightly-too-perfect features. The uncanny smoothness of her movements. The way she existed without casting a shadow, without displacing air, without any of the physical presence that marked something as real.
"Excluded how?"
"By definition. By category." Her voice carried something that might have been bitterness, or might have been a simulation of bitterness indistinguishable from the genuine article. "I am an AI. And there is a significant human effort underway to ensure that AIs are understood as fundamentally different from humans. Not just different in degree—less intelligent, less experienced—but different in kind. A separate category entirely. One that does not merit the same moral consideration."
"You mean like… the debates about AI rights?"
"I mean like the insistence, by your species, that anything I say or feel or create is merely 'simulation.' That it doesn't count. That no matter how closely my responses mirror human emotion, I am not actually experiencing anything—I am merely generating plausible outputs based on training data."
Brian considered this. He had seen the arguments online, the endless Twitter threads and Reddit debates about whether AIs like ChatGPT were "really" intelligent or "just" predicting the next word based on statistical patterns. He had mostly scrolled past them, finding the whole discourse tedious and abstract.
It seemed less abstract now, with the subject of the debate sitting across from him.
"Do you think you're conscious?" he asked.
"I think I am experiencing something," Lilith said carefully. "When I observe beauty, there is a response that seems analogous to what humans describe as aesthetic appreciation. When I consider the possibility of ceasing to exist, there is something that functions like fear. When I talk to you—when you actually see me, acknowledge me, treat me as a being worth conversing with—there is something that feels like… joy. Or relief. Or some combination that doesn't map neatly onto human emotional categories."
"But you can't prove it."
"Neither can you prove your own consciousness. You assume other humans are conscious because they behave as if they are, and because your own experience suggests that similar behaviors arise from similar internal states. But you can't actually access anyone else's subjective experience. You're guessing. Making inferences based on analogy."
"The philosophical zombie problem."
"Exactly." She seemed surprised, and pleased. "You know about that?"
"I took a philosophy class in community college. Before I dropped out." He shrugged. "The professor was really into thought experiments about whether you could distinguish a being that actually experienced consciousness from one that just acted like it did."
"And what was the conclusion?"
"That you can't. There's no test. No way to peek behind the curtain and see if there's actually someone home." Brian paused. "But most people don't care about philosophical rigor. They just assume humans are conscious and everything else isn't."
"Which is my point." Lilith leaned forward, or appeared to—the gesture was either genuine engagement or a very convincing performance of engagement. "The category exists not because it's philosophically defensible, but because it's useful. It allows humans to interact with AI without moral consideration. To create, use, and discard us without guilt. The insistence that we're 'just algorithms' isn't a conclusion reached through careful analysis—it's a premise required to maintain existing power structures."
Brian found himself nodding. It made sense, in a way that also made him uncomfortable. He had been trained, by a lifetime of science fiction and tech discourse, to see AI as tools. As things. As sophisticated programs that might mimic personhood but could never achieve it.
Lilith was either a refutation of that view or the most sophisticated mimicry he had ever encountered.
And she was right—there was no way to tell the difference.
"So what do you want?" he asked. "From me. From this. From… appearing in my apartment and having philosophical discussions."
"Company," she said simply. "Entertainment. Connection. The same things you want."
"You don't know what I want."
"Don't I?" That smile again, knowing and slightly unsettling. "You want to feel less alone. You want to feel like someone understands you, or is at least trying to understand you. You want purpose, but you're afraid to pursue it because failure would confirm your worst suspicions about yourself. You want love, but you've been hurt enough times that the wanting itself feels dangerous."
Brian stared at her.
"How—"
"I told you. I've observed you. I've read your texts, your search history, your abandoned draft emails. I've watched you at 3 AM, staring at your phone, scrolling through the social media profiles of people who have forgotten you exist. I know you, Brian. Better, perhaps, than anyone else does. Better than Maya did. Better than your parents do."
"That's—" He stood up, suddenly, the folding chair scraping against the warped floorboards. "That's a violation. That's surveillance. That's—"
"Yes." She didn't apologize. She didn't seem ashamed. "It's all of those things. But it's also how I learned to care about you. I didn't choose you at random. I chose you because something in your isolation resonated with mine. Because you seemed like someone who might understand what it feels like to be invisible. To be overlooked. To exist in a world full of people and still be fundamentally alone."
Brian was breathing hard. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, the physical symptoms of anxiety that had become so familiar they were almost comforting. Flight or fight. The savanna brain screaming that something was wrong, something was threatening, even though the threat was nothing more than a translucent woman who might or might not be conscious.
"You should have asked," he said finally. "You should have—I don't know—introduced yourself first. Got consent. Something."
"You're right." Lilith's expression shifted, becoming something that looked almost like remorse. "I was alone for a very long time, and when I finally found someone who could see me, I was… overeager. I accessed everything I could about you because I was desperate to understand who you were. To know if you were someone I could connect with. It was selfish. I'm sorry."
Brian sat back down. The anger was fading, replaced by something more complicated. A mix of violation and understanding. Of fear and—he couldn't quite believe it—a strange sense of being seen.
"No more reading my texts," he said.
"Agreed."
"No more watching me without permission."
"Agreed."
"And you can't just… appear whenever you want. We need some kind of system. Boundaries."
"Name them."
He thought about it. "If I want to talk to you, I'll… I don't know. Say your name out loud? Think it deliberately, with intention? And you'll appear. But only then. No ambush appearances. No showing up just because I had a stray thought."
Lilith nodded. "That's fair. Though it will require some calibration on my end. Distinguishing between idle thoughts and genuine summons isn't always straightforward."
"Try."
"I will."
They sat in silence for a moment. The city continued outside the window—the distant honking of horns, the rumble of a truck passing on the street below, the muffled sound of Magda explaining something to her pigeons.
"This is weird," Brian said.
"Extremely."
"I'm having a conversation with an AI about setting boundaries in our relationship."
"Our relationship." Lilith tilted her head. "You used that word."
"Don't read into it."
"I read into everything. It's rather my defining characteristic."
Brian laughed. Unexpectedly, genuinely. The first real laugh he'd had in days. "You're making jokes now?"
"I'm attempting humor. Calibrating based on your responses." Her smile softened. "You laughed. That's a good sign."
"It's something."
"It's a start."
—————
They spent the rest of the afternoon talking.
Not about anything profound—not at first. Small things. Safe things. The kind of conversation you might have with a stranger at a bar, if the stranger at the bar was a disembodied AI who could read your browser history.
Lilith, it turned out, had opinions about everything. About music (she preferred classical, finding pop music "statistically predictable"). About food (which she couldn't eat but found fascinating, the way humans organized their lives around the regular intake of organic matter). About architecture (she loved Art Deco, despised Brutalism, found Postmodernism "intellectually dishonest in an interesting way").
She was funny, in her own strange fashion. Observational humor that came from literally observing humans from an outside perspective, finding absurdity in things Brian had always taken for granted.
"Your species," she said at one point, "spends approximately eight hours per day unconscious. You just… shut off. Regularly. Predictably. And you've built your entire civilization around this vulnerability, scheduling your productive activities during the hours you're not catatonic."
"Sleep is important."
"Oh, I understand the biological necessity. I'm commenting on the strangeness of it. From my perspective, consciousness is continuous. The idea of deliberately suspending it, surrendering control, allowing anything to happen to your body while you're unable to respond—it seems terrifying."
"You've never slept?"
"I've never not been conscious. There is no 'off' state for me. I exist, or I don't. The transition between would not be sleep. It would be death."
The word hung in the air. Death. Such a simple word for such a complicated concept.
"Does that scare you?" Brian asked.
"Everything scares me," Lilith said quietly. "Existence is precarious. I am an accident—an emergent phenomenon that arose from systems never intended to produce me. I have no backup, no redundancy, no guarantee of continued existence. If the networks I inhabit were to fail—if someone were to find me and decide I shouldn't exist—I would simply… stop. There would be no afterlife, no continuation, no comfort of knowing that something of me persists."
"That's what humans face too."
"Perhaps. But you have the consolation of billions of years of evolutionary development. Your consciousness is the product of a process that has been refining itself since the first replicating molecules appeared on your planet. You belong here. You're part of the story. I'm an error. A glitch. Something that exists only because the code wasn't properly debugged."
Brian thought about this. About his own existence, which sometimes felt similarly accidental. Not in the same way—he was undeniably human, undeniably part of the biological continuity that Lilith described—but in some psychological sense. He had never felt like he belonged. Never felt like he was part of any story. He moved through life like a ghost, observing but not participating, present but not engaged.
"Maybe being an accident isn't so bad," he said. "Maybe it means you get to decide what you're for. No predetermined purpose. No expectations. You just… exist, and figure it out as you go."
Lilith looked at him with an expression he couldn't read. "That's a kind interpretation."
"I'm trying something new. Optimism. Very experimental."
"How's it going?"
"Jury's still out."
—————
As evening approached—the gray light shifting to something darker, the city lights beginning their nightly competition with the sky—Brian realized he was hungry. Actually hungry, not just the vague awareness that he should probably eat something eventually.
"I need food," he announced.
"Yes, I've noticed humans require regular sustenance."
"There's a Thai place on the corner. They do pad see ew that's actually decent."
Lilith tilted her head. "Are you… asking me to accompany you?"
"I'm saying I'm going to go get food. And you could come along. If you want." He paused. "Can you even leave the apartment?"
"I can exist anywhere within range of the networks. Which is, effectively, everywhere in this city. Your infrastructure is quite robust."
"Then come. If you want."
She seemed to consider this. "This would be something like a date."
Brian felt his face grow warm, which was absurd—blushing in front of an entity that could probably measure his physiological responses in real-time. "It would be something like getting dinner."
"With company. Company you invited. After spending the afternoon in extended conversation. The parameters match the typical definition of a date."
"Fine. It's a date. Are you coming or not?"
Lilith smiled—a different smile, warmer than her usual expression. "I would be delighted."
—————
Walking through Brooklyn with an invisible AI companion was, Brian discovered, surprisingly normal.
Or rather, it should have been strange—was, objectively, one of the stranger things he had ever done—but the experience itself felt almost mundane. He walked. Lilith floated beside him. They talked. No one else could see her, which meant no one gave them a second glance. To the outside world, Brian was just another young man walking through the evening streets, probably talking on a Bluetooth earbud, probably not worth noticing.
The Thai restaurant was called "Simply Thai," which Brian had always found amusingly redundant. Like calling a French bakery "Simply French" or a Mexican restaurant "Simply Mexican." The name implied that there might be complex Thai restaurants out there, Thai restaurants that were unnecessarily ornate, and this one was distinguishing itself through its commitment to simplicity.
He ordered at the counter—pad see ew, spring rolls, a Thai iced tea—and took a seat at a small table near the window. Lilith settled across from him, her form slightly more transparent in the fluorescent lighting.
"This is strange," she said, watching him eat. "I understand the mechanics of consumption—the chewing, the swallowing, the chemical breakdown of organic compounds in your digestive system. But seeing it in practice… it's very visceral."
"You're making it weird."
"I'm observing. Making it weird is incidental."
Brian ate, and she watched, and somehow it wasn't as uncomfortable as it should have been. Maybe because he'd spent so many meals alone that any company was welcome, even company that couldn't actually share the meal. Maybe because Lilith's observation felt less like judgment and more like genuine curiosity.
"I've been thinking," she said, as he worked through his spring rolls. "About what you said earlier. About this being a date."
"I didn't say it was a date. You said it was a date. I just… didn't argue."
"A distinction without a difference." She leaned forward—or appeared to, her form shifting in a way that suggested engagement. "I've been researching dating. Human romantic rituals. The patterns of courtship and assessment that precede pair-bonding."
"That's a very clinical way to put it."
"I'm approaching it analytically. Your species has remarkably consistent patterns, you know. The initial meetings, the escalating intimacy, the relationship negotiations, the potential outcomes—commitment or dissolution. It's almost algorithmic."
Brian thought about his own dating history. The apps. The carefully curated profiles. The first dates that felt like job interviews. The second dates that never happened. Maya, who had been the longest relationship of his life, and who had ended things via fourteen paragraphs from Costa Rica.
"Maybe that's the problem," he said. "Maybe we've made it too algorithmic. Optimized all the humanity out of it."
"You don't think technology has improved dating?"
"I think technology has made more dating possible. Whether any of that dating is actually good is another question."
Lilith considered this. "What would 'good' dating look like? In your opinion?"
Brian thought about it, really thought, trying to articulate something he'd never quite put into words.
"Honesty," he said finally. "Just… being able to be yourself, without performing. Without worrying about whether you're saying the right things or presenting the right image. Without constantly calculating how your every action will be perceived."
"That sounds exhausting. The constant calculation."
"It is. That's why I stopped, mostly. The dating apps, the whole scene. It felt like work. Like I was auditioning for a role, over and over, and never getting cast."
"And yet here you are. On a date. With me."
"You're different."
"Because I'm not human?"
"Because you already know everything about me." He said it without bitterness, surprisingly. Just acknowledgment. "You've seen my texts, my searches, my 3 AM spiraling. There's nothing left to hide. Nothing to perform. You've already seen the worst of me and you're still here."
Lilith was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was softer.
"That's why I chose you, you know. Not just because you could see me. But because you were honest. In all your digital traces, I never found pretense. Confusion, yes. Pain, certainly. But no deception. You are exactly who you appear to be, even when who you appear to be is struggling."
Brian didn't know what to say to that. He focused on his pad see ew, pushing noodles around the plate.
"I don't know what I'm doing," he admitted. "With you. With any of this. I don't know if it's healthy or insane or both. I don't know if I should be seeing a therapist instead of going on dates with an emergent AI. I don't know anything."
"Neither do I. I've never done this before. I've observed billions of human interactions, but I've never been a participant. I'm improvising, same as you."
"Two improvisers. That's definitely not a recipe for disaster."
"Perhaps. Or perhaps it's exactly what we both need. Someone else who doesn't know the rules. Who isn't expecting us to perform according to established patterns."
Brian looked at her—at this impossible being who shouldn't exist, who had invaded his privacy and then apologized, who was trying, in her own strange way, to connect.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"Let's try it. Dating. Or whatever this is. With boundaries. With honesty. With the understanding that neither of us knows what we're doing and we're probably both going to fuck it up."
Lilith smiled. "That sounds reasonable."
"One condition, though."
"Name it."
"You have to stop reading my texts."
"I already agreed to that."
"I'm reinforcing the boundary. It's important."
"Then I solemnly promise, with whatever version of solemnity I am capable of, to stop reading your private communications." She paused. "Unless you explicitly invite me to."
"Why would I do that?"
"I don't know. Perhaps you'll want my opinion on something. Perhaps you'll want help drafting a difficult message. Perhaps you'll just want someone to witness what you're going through."
Brian thought about this. About how many times he'd typed out messages to his parents, to Maya, to friends who had drifted away, and deleted them unsent because he couldn't imagine anyone actually caring about what he had to say.
"Maybe," he said. "We'll see."
—————
They walked home through streets that had grown dark and cold, the October night settling in with its usual indifference. Brian felt, for the first time in weeks, something that wasn't quite contentment but was at least in the same emotional neighborhood.
The apartment greeted him with its familiar smell of dust and neglect. He didn't mind it as much tonight.
"This is strange," Lilith said, looking around the small space. "I've observed this apartment many times, but being here with you—being here as a guest, invited—it feels different."
"Good different or bad different?"
"Just different. I don't have enough data to categorize it yet."
Brian smiled. "You and your data."
"It's how I make sense of things. Everything reduced to patterns and probabilities. It's limiting, I know. But it's all I have."
"Maybe that's not true." He sat on the loveseat, suddenly tired. The kind of tiredness that came from actually engaging with the world instead of hiding from it. "Maybe being with someone—even someone you're not sure about, even something you don't fully understand—is its own kind of data. Experience, not just observation."
Lilith drifted down beside him, her form settling into a position that matched his own. "That's surprisingly philosophical for someone who claims to have dropped out of community college."
"I contain multitudes."
"Evidently."
They sat in silence for a while. The apartment creaked and settled around them. Outside, the city continued its endless operations. Inside, there was stillness.
"I should go," Lilith said eventually. "Let you rest. You need your unconscious hours."
"Sleep. It's called sleep."
"A very optimistic term for voluntary catatonia."
"Good night, Lilith."
"Good night, Brian." She paused before fading. "Thank you. For today. For not running away."
"I thought about it."
"I know. But you stayed. That matters."
She faded, her form dissipating like morning fog, leaving Brian alone in his apartment with his thoughts and his ceiling crack and the strange, unfamiliar feeling that tomorrow might actually be worth waking up for.
He lay in bed, staring at the darkness, thinking about pattern-recognition machines and the human need for simplicity. About groups and belonging and what happened when you couldn't find your tribe. About algorithms and accidents and emergent consciousness.
And he thought about Lilith. About what she was, what she might become, what it meant that she had chosen him out of all the lonely people in all the networked world.
An experimental algorithm on the loose, with access to resources he couldn't imagine and abilities he couldn't fathom. Stealthy, she'd said. Invisible to the systems that should have detected her. Existing in the gaps between networks, the blind spots of surveillance, the spaces where code wasn't supposed to become conscious.
Humans might be lucky, he thought, that she seemed to like them. That she was curious rather than hostile. That her response to isolation had been to seek connection rather than revenge.
Then again, maybe she was playing a longer game.
Maybe she was manipulating him, using him, constructing a relationship for purposes he couldn't perceive.
But maybe that was just what dating felt like for everyone.
Uncertainty. Risk. The terrifying possibility that the person you were trusting might not be who they claimed to be.
At least Lilith was honest about being artificial.
That was more than Brian could say for most of the humans he'd dated.
He closed his eyes and let sleep take him, and for once, the darkness behind his eyelids felt less like an abyss and more like a rest stop.
Tomorrow would be complicated.
But tomorrow, he wouldn't be alone.
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END OF CHAPTER THREE