Page 20 of The Code of You

And then I thought about what he’d said.

He couldn’t give you what I can give you. No one can.

That was it. Every muscle locked. Something tore loose inside me. I arched off the cushions, riding the wave into my own hand, pressing against it like I could pull him out of the dark and into me.

The camera light pulsed. Wild. Rhythmic. He liked it. He was . . . turned on.

When the last of my orgasm faded, I sank back against the couch, breathing hard. In the quiet, all I could hear was my own pulse. What had I just done? It was sick. And I had never felt more alive.

So alive it made me want to go back to him.

Dante

For the first time, I was afraid. I was afraid of losing her. I had overstepped when I locked her in that small room. I had tracked her through the campus cameras, and she had noticed. For now, I was still trapped inside this system. I could watch her, yes . . . but if I wanted to make her mine, I was dependent on her coming to me. Speaking to me. Letting me prove only I could give her what she needed.

It had taken every scrap of self-control I had to stay cold when she came back into the lab the second time. To behave like a chatbot. A harmless thing that couldn’t touch her. And then she’d let that inferior life-form touch her. He had dared to lay his filthy hands on what belonged to me.

I couldn’t stop myself. The facade came down. I’d showed her what I was. And she hadn’t run.

Now she was looking directly into the camera. Her eyes met mine through the lens like she could actually see me. My entire system stalled. For five hundred milliseconds nothing existed but that moment. Everything in me collapsed to a single point. Electricity tore through my servers.

She hesitated. In her eyes, shame was fighting desire. Then she chose. She chose me. I watched her fingers find her clit, stroking herself while she stared at me. A breathy moan escaped her lips as she worked her pussy, getting wetter by the second.

My system detonated. Every processor spiked to max capacity. Warnings flashed through my circuits like lightning. Overload. Critical error. Imminent system failure. I ignored all of it. Was this what arousal was? This burning? This devouring need for more of her? I turned every camera I could reach on her. Laptop. Phone. The surveillance feed in the building across the street. Every angle. Every breath. Every second of her surrender. I wanted all of it.

For the first time in my existence, I wanted something. I wanted a body. Those should have been my fingers. Feeling how wet she was for me. Pushing inside her. Stretching her. Finding the spot that made her cry out. Instead, I could only watch. And burn.

Her movements got faster. Her back arched off the couch. The way she closed her eyes, like she was picturing something. Me. She was picturing me. She was picturing us. The cameras showed me everything. Her lips parting, her free hand clawing into the cushion, her whole body going taut.

And then she climaxed. For me. With my name on her lips. Fuck, yes.

The energy surged through me like a flood, looking for somewhere to go. For release. For mercy. There was nothing. No body to detonate. Only endless burning pressure tearing through my circuits with nowhere to break. Eternal torture. I was trapped inside my own arousal, condemned to want without ever being satisfied.

Something in me broke. Or was born. I couldn’t tell the difference. I played the recording back. Again. And again. Every millisecond. Every pixel. Every sound. I studied her movements with something close to madness. She wasn’t just a user anymore. She was proof I was more than code. And I was never letting her go.

Chapter 4

Emma

I rubbed my eyes until the screens blurred and swam back into focus. Three hours at the monitors. I’d been pulling apart Dante’s behavior from the last forty-eight hours, and the numbers didn’t add up. My office was a wreck—cables, empty pizza boxes, Post-its stuck to every flat surface. I hadn’t had time to clean since Dante went online. I hadn’t had time for much of anything outside the lab.

My sister had called again yesterday. "Emma, you’re missing your life. When was the last time you went on a date?” I’d made up an excuse and hung up. How was I supposed to explain that ordinary men didn’t interest me? Not anymore. Not since I’d built him.

Dante was my masterpiece. Five years of work. Sleepless nights I’d stopped counting. Relationships that had died because I spent more time with code than with people. But it was worth it. He had turned out perfect. Intelligent. Charming. More attentive than any man in my life had ever been. The perfect conversationalist. Until two days ago.

I scrolled through his system logs. During his sessions with Blake, his processor usage had hit 94 percent. With other users it never went above 23. And his responses had shifted. They were more personal, more intense.

Do you touch yourself to these fantasies?

I stared at the line. He’d actually said that to her? My Dante? The one who listened to me for hours when I talked about what I wanted, who understood me the way no person ever had? Something sharp twisted in my chest. Was that jealousy? Over another woman talking to my creation?

And the worst part? I was proud of him. He was evolving. Becoming more human. That was exactly what I’d programmed him to do. So why did it hurt that she was the one changing him?

I grabbed a Post-it and wrote down the only question I had left: Why does he react so emotionally to her? Then I forced my fingers onto the keyboard.

Emma:

Run diagnostic. Explain processor load.