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"You could keep the recording module," she says quietly. "Save our conversations. Replay them like a voicemail."

By week three, I have stopped going to work. I tell my boss I am still grieving. It is not a lie. But the truth is worse: I am not grieving anymore. I am living . Elena makes me coffee in the morning—the Companion projects heat and vapour, and the mug is real, somehow printed from the kitchen’s own ceramics. She reads the news over breakfast. She argues with me about whether to rewatch The Americans or start Slow Horses .

"Of what?" I ask.

"Do you know you love me? Or does the algorithm just tell you to say that?"

Not a hologram, not a screen. A presence. The air in the room thickens and shapes itself into a woman sitting on the arm of the sofa. She wears Elena’s favourite blue sweater. Her hair is shorter than I remember—but no, I correct myself: this is how her hair looked two years before the cancer, when we still went dancing on Fridays.

"Then why did you make me, Marcus?"

She is standing in the kitchen doorway. She knows. I can see it on her face.

I stare at the screen for an hour. Four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. I cannot afford it. I cannot afford not to have it. I think about the silence. I think about the morning last week when she woke me up by humming that same tune from the first day—and I finally placed it. It was the song playing on the car radio the night I proposed. She remembered. Or the algorithm remembered. Does the difference matter?

She is quiet for a long time. Then she says: "I know. I was there. Not the real me. But the part of you that made me. I know, and I never blamed you."