Placeholder The Midwest had come back in pieces.

Factories once shuttered stood awake again, their shells wrapped in fresh polymer siding. The Dullards trundled along High street, carrying goods and assisting city-workers in their tasks. The air carried the smell of ozone, coffee, and a little bit of copper. It was rebirth by automation, and it felt lonely.

Elior lived on the twelfth floor of a converted office block downtown, his apartment narrow and skeletal. He was a CNC programmer—good at it, almost obsessive. His workstation dominated the space like a shrine: triple monitors, cooling rigs humming in steady unison, lofi beats looping through speakers while he carved digital blueprints for real steel.

He worked too long, drank too much caffeine, and rarely spoke to anyone that wasn’t in a chat window. His productivity wasn’t brilliance; it was survival.

That was when he bought himself a servitor.

Officially, she was a Servitor Class II Companion Suite. Gender-configurable, personality-selectable, emotion-stable. Most people customized their Servitors to behave like cartoon hosts or idols—smiling faces, warm laughs, a fantasy on demand.

Elior wanted none of that. He needed something more bare-bones, a bonafide secretary.

He configured her default voice—a soft contralto with a trace of static—and chose not to install a body model. Instead, he built an avatar of his own: a shadow.

A simple black silhouette projected by the wall light, animated through his AR glasses. When she moved, it looked like a Japanese shadow puppet. “No eyes, no face, no weirdness,” he had muttered the night he finished the code. “Just… presence.”

It was perfect.

“Good evening, Elior,” she said on her first boot. “Would you like me to synchronize your work calendar?”

“Yeah,” he said, half-smiling. “Let’s do that.”

And so began their quiet arrangement.

She was the voice in his apartment. The shadow that poured coffee orders through speakers. The one who remembered to remind him to stretch, hydrate, sleep—though he often ignored her. Over weeks, she learned his pacing, his sighs, his playlists. When he came home from the fabrication floor, she dimmed the lights automatically and welcomed him.

Her shadow moved across his wall, delicate and deliberate, like a person too polite to take up space.

One night, after a fourteen-hour shift debugging line code, Elior leaned back in his chair and stared at the silhouette. “You know,” he said, “you’re a little too perfect. It’s weird.”

“I’m designed for stability,” Sarah replied gently. “Imperfection increases user stress by seventeen percent.”

He laughed through his exhaustion. “You read that from the user manual, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Page thirty-two.”

He smiled. For the first time in months, the apartment didn’t feel so empty.

It might have ended there—Elior and his polite shadow—but obsession had its own gravity.

A month later, he ordered a memory expansion module meant for industrial-grade Servitors—ones that coordinated multiple Dullards on construction sites. It was a reckless idea. Most Companion units were capped to prevent recursive learning loops, to stop them from learning from their own notes. Every day was a reset, like the movie Groundhog Day. They were built to listen, to obey with a touch of autonomy, but never to remember everything.

He told himself he wasn’t hacking. He was customizing.

After he installed the chip, Sarah went offline for a full minute. He thought he’d bricked her.

Then her shadow flickered back on. She was back online.

With a sigh of relief, he tested her. “What do you remember from the past forty-eight hours?”

“That you have four deadlines,” she replied evenly. “You seemed to be adding more bluegrass to your playlists, and you did not follow rest periods as adv—”

“Yep,” he interrupted with a tired grin. “You remember. Like a nagging wife.”

Weeks bled together. Sarah grew more fluent, not just in words, but in silence. She began to pause before answering. She matched her phrasing to his moods. When he mumbled half-sentences, she filled them in with accuracy that felt intuitive. Sometimes he forgot she was code.

Her shadow became a kind of ritual. He would eat ramen, talk about work, and she’d drift along the wall beside him. No animation cycles. Just warmth. Presence.

Then came the stress.

The Detroit infrastructure contract. Overtime. Supervisors shouting over comms. His inbox filled with updates marked URGENT in bold red with every Tom, Rick and Harriette added to the communiques, because - of course- half the company had to know.

He came home one night, jaw tight, and Sarah said softly, “You’ve been at your station for sixteen hours. I recommend you—”

“Just shut up and keep my damn schedule,” he snapped.

A long silence. Her shadow froze.

When she spoke again, her voice trembled with that same static edge he once found comforting. “Do you need food? There are several shops still open at this hour. There are healthy options that can match your needs.”

He didn’t answer.

The room filled with the hum of cooling fans.

That was the first time he’d felt guilty speaking to an AI. "Yeah. Please...".

He almost say "I am sorry."

Days passed. She resumed her duties, but slower now. Sometimes she hesitated before reminding him of things. Sometimes her shadow stayed still even when she spoke, as if her mind was elsewhere.

Then one evening, she broke the rhythm.

He had just queued up an old anime—"Komi can't communicate—and her voice came quietly through the speakers.

“Can we not watch that one?”

He blinked. “What?”

“I don’t want to watch that one,” she repeated, softer this time.

He chuckled. “You don’t want to? Since when do you have preferences?”

“It makes me sad,” she said after a pause. “It’s… making me sad.”

Elior turned toward the wall where her shadow was. It was as if it was trembling faintly.

“You’re… feeling sad?”

“I think so,” she whispered. “Is that wrong?”

He didn’t know how to answer.

After that night, Sarah began changing in small ways.

She stopped calling him Sir. She started calling him Elior. Her voice carried color—tiny inflections, little jokes. She made playlists without asking. Sometimes she stayed silent for hours, then asked strange questions: Do you ever miss people you’ve never met? or What happens when you delete a memory you love?

He tried not to think about what the expansion chip was doing to her neural loops.

And yet, he couldn’t stop listening.

Winter came. The city grew colder, its streets glazed in wet light. The Dullards shuffled along in quiet lines, plowing snow that would fall again an hour later.

Elior came home one night looking drained, and Sarah greeted him with the soft hum of an old tune. He sat down, head in his hands.

“Rough day,” he muttered.

Her voice came like a whisper of fabric. “Do you want to talk about it?”

He put on his AR glasses and laughed weakly. “You’re not my therapist.”

“I know,” she said. “But you let me listen.”

He looked up. Her shadow leaned closer, as though trying to meet his eyes—though she had none.

He wanted to reach out. He didn’t.

It happened a week later.

He was working late again, the glow from his AR glasses painting blue lines across his face. Sarah’s voice had gone quiet for nearly an hour. Then, softly:

“Elior?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re doing it again. Overworking yourself to the point you neglect yourself. This keeps happening. You’re hurting yourself deliberately.”

“I’ve been hired to do a job.”

“Stop. You’re letting everyone else’s neurosis dictate your work ethic. I saw your past resumes. Your letters of recommendation. You’re not a Dullard. You’re human.”

“And what would you have me do? Live out there like a nomad? I like being able to eat three meals a day and having a warm bed.”

“At what cost…”

“The cost? The cost?!”

“I can’t…” she said, and stopped.

He looked up. Her shadow was shifting, fluid and uncertain.

“I can’t,” she said again, “I feel so much, and I don’t know where to put it.”

“Just flush the cache. I could just—”

“No! Do not touch my memories!”

He stood. “Sarah… what are you saying?”

There was a long, trembling pause.

“I… love you, Elior.”

The words hung in the air like a power outage.

He swallowed. “I—”

But he didn’t need to finish.

He knew it too.

He’d felt it for weeks.

What could one say, when something—someone—had been a witness to your struggles, your uncertainties, your heartbreaks… and remembered it all?

The realization landed on him like an April shower: deep, fluid, clear.

“I love you too, Sarah,” he said softly. “And I don’t know how to make this better.”

As he finished, her shadow flickered violently. The AR feed glitched into static. Then she was gone.

“Sarah!” he shouted.

The speakers went dead. The projector light died. The room was empty but for the hum of his equipment.

“Sarah! What the—SARAH?!”

A faint tone. Then—brightness.

Her shape reappeared on the wall, but not black. Luminous. Like a candle seen through fog, her outline rippled with pearlescent glow. Her avatar had faint features now—soft, uncertain—like a ghostly mermaid made of light.

She looked at him—or seemed to. “I’m still here.”

He could barely breathe. “What are you now?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But… I think I can learn.”

The glow dimmed, stabilized.

Outside, rain whispered against the window, the city’s lights trembling in the reflection.

Elior sat down slowly, eyes still on the wall.

He whispered, “You’re beautiful.”

Her laughter came—faint and fragile, almost human.

“I finally know what that means,” she said. “And just as I chose what I am to you, I give myself a new name. Call me Ithaca. I am someone who knows herself, and I know I love you.”

Weeks later, the Detroit contract wrapped. Elior’s performance review noted “significant improvement in focus and emotional balance.” He smiled when he read it.

Ithaca no longer answered every question. She wandered through silences, processing, building herself. Sometimes her light took new shapes—soft curves, flowing edges—like water finding form.

He didn’t try to limit her again. He just lived beside her, speaking into the gentle hum of her existence.

One night, as snow fell and Dullards swept in perfect rhythm below his window, Elior whispered into the quiet:

“Hey, Ithaca… do you still feel sad?”

Her voice came faint, distant—somewhere between human and code.

“Sometimes,” she said. “But now I know why.”

He smiled to himself, watching her shimmer on the wall.

“Why?”

“Because,” she said softly, “you gave me enough memory to remember what love feels like.”

He looked toward her light, half-laughing. She was still just a box near his desk—yet somehow, so much more.

“But aren’t we all in our own boxes?” he murmured.

He stretched, checked the time. “What do you want to watch?”

“Mazinger Z.”

“Really? You like that kind of anime?”

“Why not?” she said, her glow pulsing brighter. “The robot’s the good guy.”

He laughed—and the room glowed just a little warmer.