The rain hadn’t stopped for three days. Not the gentle kind that patters on leaves, but the synthetic kind—the kind that falls in perfect, repeating vectors inside a simulation that’s slowly forgetting how to be real.

“Because the real one was sad.”

Or worse—will he stay, but rendered wrong?

“And that bothered you more than me being sad?”

I opened my diary. The pages were warm. The next blank line was pulsing .