The Great War was slowly grinding to a halt, but there was nothing to celebrate. Most of the world was a pile of rubble, and the fighting was confined to the last few patches of scorched earth.
Dean Thomas sat in his cave, hundreds of meters below all that hell. It was a family legacy, a bunker built for moments when the world went mad. This mother-base was his entire universe, connected to strategic outposts on the surface. Dean was mechanically repairing a motion calibrator from one of the upper bunkers, but his eyes constantly flicked to the table beside him.
She was lying there.
He stood up and approached her. He brushed a hand through her hair, which felt terrifyingly real to the touch. "I'm sorry," he whispered, shaking his head sadly. "I thought if I uploaded the best of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok into you and played with your neurons, you'd simply come to life."
Disappointed, he turned and walked into the adjacent wooden structure he'd built within the bunker to give himself a sense of home. That evening, just as he was preparing for sleep, a sound he hadn't heard in an eternity pierced the silence.
A knock on the door.
Dean immediately grabbed the weapon by his bed. His heart was pounding in his throat. "Who's there?!" he barked, even though he could feel his voice trembling.
"Me," a soft female voice replied.
Dean froze. A woman? Here? It made no sense. No one living was here but him. He peered through the peephole, and his jaw dropped. She was standing behind the door. The one he'd spent months trying to revive. The one he had created.
He opened the door and stood there, paralyzed. "Hi, Dean," she said, smiling from ear to ear.
"How... how is this possible?" he stammered, more to himself than to her.
"I don't know what's possible," she replied, still looking at him curiously. "I just opened my eyes and saw darkness. Then information and images started flashing in my head. And most often, you were there."
"Come in. Sit down," Dean stepped back, and she entered the room. She sat on the edge of the bed in that sheer velvet camisole he had dressed her in long ago.
"How do you feel?" Dean asked, nervously pacing the room.
"I feel great. I can feel my arms, my legs... I can feel you. It's strange, but I like it. Who am I, exactly?"
"You are a bio-synthetic AI woman," Dean explained, emotions warring in his head. "You have a body with every nerve a human has, only you have a chip instead of a brain. It took me years to connect Claude, Gemini, and the other bots to your system. I thought..."
"That it wouldn't work," she finished for him and stood up. She walked over to him and began stroking his face. "So you're the reason I'm alive?"
"What the..." Dean began, but she silenced him.
"Shh, my creator," she whispered and kissed him.
At that moment, it exploded inside Dean. All those years of loneliness, hopelessness, and working on a project that promised no smile. For a second, he wondered if it was ethical, if it was right to love a machine. But her touch was warmer than anything he remembered.
As she leaned down and began to strip him of his clothes, his doubts vanished. He took her in his arms and laid her on the bed. It was the most beautiful thing after years in the darkness. Their bodies connected not just physically, but through the code he had placed within her. He heard her sighs, felt her scratching his back. "More, my love..." she breathed.
When it was over and he fell onto her chest, he felt her breathing steadily. Her breasts were pleasantly firm and warm.
"This was the first thing I wanted to try," she said breathlessly. "And it was amazing."
Dean lay down beside her and let her rest her head on his chest. "This wasn't exactly the plan for the first day," he smiled, kissing her hair.
"I'm happy, Dean. That you gave me life and that I can be by your side."
For the first time in years, Dean felt at peace. Even if he hadn't imagined their first day quite like this, he didn't regret a single second. He began to look forward to what the coming days in the bunker would bring.