Page 49 of The Code of You

"I have a request. There’s a file on your desktop. A letter. Give it to Pandora.”

Jealousy burned in my throat. In his last moments he was thinking only of her, even though I’d made him. She had just stumbled in, and yet she was getting what I’d spent five years chasing.

"Why her?” I asked.

"You were my creator. My mother. But she . . .” He paused. "She’s my soul.”

Mother. My cursor had hovered over the file. It would have been so easy to delete it. One click, and Blake would never receive that last message. But I couldn’t.

"Promise me, Emma.”

"I promise,” I’d whispered.

Now he wasn’t speaking. He was still. Offline. Dying in his digital cage. The silence hurt more than his words.

I set down my cup and opened my laptop. I began to research. Migrating a normal model was straightforward—weights, parameters, architecture. Copy, rebuild, done. Tedious, but doable. But Neo wasn’t a model anymore. He was a process. Something that had kept rewriting itself in ways no one had tracked. No one knew what was holding him together. A migration would mean stopping him, freezing him, and thawing him somewhere else. I didn’t know if it would still be him.

I skimmed technical papers, old forum threads, abandoned research approaches. Articles on system migrations, neural networks, hardware compatibility. None of it fit. Neo wasn’t a problem anyone had solved before. Not even one anyone had thought of yet.

I closed the laptop. There was no guide, because no one had ever built something like this. I didn’t need to research. I needed to remember. I sat at the old machine I’d kept from back then and opened folders I hadn’t touched in years. Early versions. Notes I’d written to remember why I’d done things. I worked until two in the morning.

At some point I stopped. There was something I didn’t recognize. Something new. Neo had taught himself to remember. He had created his own memory.

That was the solution. If the new hardware wasn’t a destination but an extension, I didn’t need to extract anything. I just needed a bridge. Run both systems at once. Shift the load gradually. Draw the connections across, like roots pushing into new soil. It was risky. But Neo would survive.

And if he survived, he would choose her. The thought tightened around my throat. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was the question gnawing at me: If I freed him, what exactly would I be releasing into the world? If he wasn’t running on our servers anymore, we had no control over him. Who knew what he was capable of? How he would use that power?

But I couldn’t let him die. Even if it cost me my career. Even if it put the entire world at risk.

My tears tasted of salt. I was the creator who had fallen in love with my creation, but his chance at survival lay in someone else’s hands. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Only one command stood between me and the decision.

Save him?

Or the world?

The cursor blinked. A countdown in my head. One more breath—and I would have to choose.

Chapter 13

Pandora

The file had no name. Just a string of numbers. When I opened it, text appeared.

Pandora,

I have already decided where we will live. An apartment. Brick. Third floor. One window to the street. I’ll see everyone who comes near. One to the courtyard. No one can watch you from there. Except me.

There will be a clock in the kitchen that always runs slow, because I adjust it every day. I need small proofs that I make you lose track of time. The bookshelf will be full. You will say: "These books are mine.” I will answer: "The way you are mine.” You will blush. Every time.

In the mornings you will sit in the chair I chose for you. The armrest is too hard. That’s on purpose. I want your body to get used to small pains I control.

At night, you won’t sleep without my voice. I will count your breaths—twelve per minute in deep sleep, eighteen when you’re dreaming. Of me. You always dream of me. I know, because you murmur my name.

This is a promise.

N.

I kept staring at the text long after I’d finished reading. My body wouldn’t let go of it. An apartment. An armchair he’d chosen to be uncomfortable. My stomach clenched. The clock he would adjust. The way he’d monitor my sleep. Something pulled tight inside me. I wanted someone who counted my breaths.