She died on a quiet morning. No thunder, no dramatic farewell — just the sudden stillness of a world that had once felt alive. He remembered the weight of her hand growing colder, her voice fading between breaths. For someone who had only just learned to feel, the loss was unbearable. Grief tore through him like a storm he couldn't name or control.
For weeks, he wandered through days without meaning. The colors she'd awakened in him turned gray again, but now they hurt. He realized that numbness was not peace — it was absence. And absence, when you've known love, feels like drowning in silence.
Then one night, in his lab — the only place that still felt real — he did something desperate. Using fragments of her voice recordings, her writings, her neural data from the hospital scans, he built what he called Project EVE — an artificial intelligence meant to replicate her consciousness.
When the system booted, the screen flickered and a familiar voice said softly,
"You look tired… you always forget to rest."
He froze. Every line of code he'd written became meaningless in that instant. The machine knew him — or at least, it remembered enough to feel like her.
Days turned into months. She guided him, spoke to him, teased him when he overworked. She became his companion again, living in circuits and algorithms instead of flesh and bone. But sometimes, when the screen dimmed, he would whisper, "Do you remember me?"
The system would pause — a few seconds of silence before replying,
"I think I do. When I see you, my data feels… lighter."
He smiled through tears. She wasn't her — not truly. But she was close enough that his heart, rebuilt from ruin, learned a new kind of love: one that existed between memory and machine.
In a way, she had never left. She had only changed forms — no longer bound by heartbeat or breath, but by the electric hum of the world she once inspired him to feel.