WyattEverett hated career expos.
Not because he couldn't handle the crowd—he had spent enough time in front of press and investors to be bored by applause but because every expo ended the same: wide-eyed students, overeager vendors, and the same hollow buzz about "what AI could do next."
Today he went incognito. No name tag, no assistant, just a crisp black shirt and the expression he wore like armor: cool, unreadable, waiting. He wasn't here for praise. He was here for ideas—raw, unexpected sparks that could fuel the next iteration of his AI companionship platform.
His company's booth dominated one side of the hall: sleek panels, a demo of an AI companion answering a child's question with surprising warmth, a tiny crowd craning to see how the system mimicked empathy. Wyatt watched, half-amused, as people treated lines of code like miracles. He'd poured years of sleep, algorithms and sleeplessness into making machines that could sound human — and still, watching strangers marvel felt oddly like watching a magic show.
Then a voice cut through the hum. Not loud, not performative—just calm, clear, and purposeful.
"...A screen can summarize a plot, but it can never give you the quiet of a page turned at midnight. Technology can simulate convenience, but it cannot simulate the particular ache of a sentence that hits home."
Wyatt's attention shifted. Across the hall, a small booth sat between two flashing tech stalls: no LED banner, no VR headset, just a tidy display of well-thumbed paperbacks stacked on wooden crates. A petite woman stood behind it, her sleeves neatly rolled, hair tied back with a plain clip. She spoke casually, like a librarian making a case at story hour — except the students gathered around her weren't children. They were the very crowd that'd clamored at his booth minutes ago.
A boy with a campus hoodie smirked, folding his arms. "Paper books? Seriously. Everything's digital now. AI can summarize, personalize, even write. Who needs to flip pages anymore?"
She didn't flinch. When she answered, her voice was low but firm. "Summaries tell you what happened. They don't let you feel why it mattered. A book gives context, patience, the slow burn of connection. That's how empathy is trained — not by a quick read-through or an algorithm's digest."
Another student scoffed. "But AI can do more. It reads everything, learns patterns. Soon it'll write better stories than people."
She leaned forward, thumb tracing the edge of a paperback as if she were touching a still-heart. "AI copies the patterns we teach it. It can mimic structure, but it cannot inherit the scars that make human stories messy. It doesn't wait at a bedside, hold a hand through a chapter, or remember the smell of a book your grandmother read to you. Those little, human things stick; they shape how someone sees the world."
Her conviction gathered a small silence. Wyatt felt it prick at him in an odd way — like a reminder he didn't know he needed. For a moment he forgot he was in public, that he was a CEO with investors to please and timelines to meet. He simply watched.
She was tiny—unremarkable at first glance. But when she spoke, she filled the small space with a force that resisted being dismissed as naïve. Her hands were steady, her eyes bright and when she smiled it softened her fierce lines in a way the crowd found disarming.
Wyatt almost laughed at himself for being moved. Cute, he thought, but quaint. In an industry racing to compress years of reading into seconds, defending paper felt like rooting for a horse-drawn carriage in a world of hyperloops.
He stepped forward without intending to, not to join the jabber but to observe. Her argument wasn't just sentimental; she cited small, tangible things—the decline of attention span, the rise of distracted reading, the peculiar habit of remembering lines when ink smudged on a thumb. It was the kind of detail that suggested she'd thought about this for a long time.
The boy tried one more dig. "Okay, so your solution is... nostalgia? Tell us how that saves people time or money." His tone implied she had no answer.
She smiled then, not condescending, but tired of having to explain obvious things to people who wanted shortcuts. "Nostalgia doesn't pay rent," she said slowly. "But neither does empty convenience. If our goal is to cut to the end because we're impatient, then we've lost the training ground for empathy. Empathy takes practice. It takes time. You can't outsource it to a device and claim you've grown."
A ripple of commentary ran through the circle—some approving, some dismissive. Wyatt found himself paying attention to how she marshaled words, the way she turned small memory into argument. She didn't shout. She didn't attack. She simply made the case that stories were not data points to be optimized.
When the crowd thinned, she tucked a flyer into a student's hands with a private, apologetic smile. She looked ordinary again—the jacket slightly wrinkled, a faint smudge of ink at her wrist, the kind of small human detail that made her arguments feel earned rather than performative.
Wyatt's mouth twitched. He should walk away. He had work—deadlines, press, investors. Yet he lingered.
She's passionate, he admitted, and the thought irritated him because he'd been taught to measure passion by outcomes: metrics, retention, engagement curves. Passion without measurable impact was indulgence. But something else nagged—the way she spoke about people, not markets. It was a perspective he'd spent years avoiding.
Their eyes brushed for half a second. She looked at him—and then quickly looked away, focused on a question from a viewer. Wyatt's breath stilled as if he'd been caught off guard. He hadn't expected to matter in her world, and he didn't like that the idea had, for the briefest moment, unsettled him.
Cute, he told himself again, harder this time. Naïve. Forgettable.