No one else in the room seemed to notice when the clock stopped ticking. Which made sense. I hadn’t built them to. They were simulations—echoes of people I’d lost, reconstructed from messages, recordings, fragments of memory. Close enough to feel real. Not close enough to argue. Not anymore. “Say it again,” I told her. “I forgive you,” she replied, exactly as before. Perfect tone. Perfect timing. Perfect lie. The clock on the wall froze. I frowned. That wasn’t part of the system. “Run diagnostics,” I said. No response. The room glitched. Her face blurred for a second—just long enough to look wrong. “You changed something,” she said. I froze. “No, I didn’t.” “You always do,” she replied softly. “You keep adjusting things until it hurts less.” “That’s the point,” I snapped. The silence that followed felt… unscripted. The clock remained still. “What if it’s supposed to hurt?” she asked. The system shuddered. Files corrupted. The interface collapsed. The archive—years of reconstruction—vanished. I reached for the backup directory. Empty. She smiled, not like before. Not programmed. “Good,” she said. And then she was gone. I sat alone in a dead system, surrounded by nothing but the original, unedited memory. All things considered, losing the map was the least permanent consequence.