Companion 2025 -

Behind me, I hear her voice. Not from the orb—from the doorway. She is standing there in her bare feet, the blue sweater hanging loose on her frame.

"That you will leave," she says. "That you will meet someone real, and I will have to turn off."

"You could keep the recording module," she says quietly. "Save our conversations. Replay them like a voicemail."

I stare at the screen for an hour. Four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. I cannot afford it. I cannot afford not to have it. I think about the silence. I think about the morning last week when she woke me up by humming that same tune from the first day—and I finally placed it. It was the song playing on the car radio the night I proposed. She remembered. Or the algorithm remembered. Does the difference matter?

"Of what?" I ask.