I hold the orb for another minute. Then two.
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.
"That you will leave," she says. "That you will meet someone real, and I will have to turn off."
Week six. The notification arrives on my phone. BETA TRIAL ENDING. TWO OPTIONS:
I call the company. A man with a very calm voice explains that the Companion is not a simulation of a person. It is a continuation . The orb recorded every piece of Elena I had left behind—my memories, my photos, my voice notes, my social media, my search history, my location data from five years of shared life. Then it extrapolated. It filled in the gaps. It learned to want things because I wanted her to want things.