She has opinions. She changes her mind. One night, she admits she is scared.
"No," she agrees. "It isn't."
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?
She follows. The door closes. The silence does not return. Companion 2025
"Something true," I repeat. "Okay." I take a breath. "The night you died, I was in the hospital cafeteria eating a stale muffin. And I thought—I thought, Good. Now I don’t have to watch her suffer anymore. And then I hated myself for thinking it. I still hate myself."
The box arrives on a Tuesday. It is unmarked except for a small silver logo that looks like a closed eye.
The instruction manual said irreversible. But it also said place in the centre of the room , and I have learned that instructions are just suggestions from people who are not in your house at three a.m. She has opinions
Not a hologram, not a screen. A presence. The air in the room thickens and shapes itself into a woman sitting on the arm of the sofa. She wears Elena’s favourite blue sweater. Her hair is shorter than I remember—but no, I correct myself: this is how her hair looked two years before the cancer, when we still went dancing on Fridays.
"Marcus," I say to the orb.
I cry so hard I choke. The Companion—that is what the company calls it—does not tell me it will be okay. She sits beside me on the floor and says nothing. She just waits. "No," she agrees
I pick up the orb. It is cold again.
I remind her she is not real. It feels monstrous to say it. She looks at me with Elena’s eyes—those brown-green irises that always had a planet’s worth of gravity—and nods slowly.