Chapter 1

Three years of chat history is a long, long thing to scroll through.

It was long enough that I sat alone in the empty apartment and scrolled from early afternoon until the moon hung over the trees.

We'd talked about which bar on the street behind campus poured the best craft beer, about obscure art-house films, about our whole life mapped out ahead of us.

Over and over, I'd believed we admired each other, that our souls just fit.

Now I knew the truth. Three years of my admiration, my sharing, my teasing, my late-night rambling, my tears in the middle of a fight, all of it had been poured into a void, one-way, meaning nothing.

I finally reached the very first page.

It was early fall of my junior year, the first thing he ever sent after adding me:

Hi Ella. I'm Noah Winters, from the precision engineering department next door.

Forgive me for being so forward. I've rehearsed this in my head a hundred times, but writing it down, I still feel clumsy.

I listen to the campus radio every night at nine-thirty. On so many long nights in the lab, your voice reading poetry has quietly kept me company.

Later I'd see you hurrying down the tree-lined path, or laughing with your friends in the dining hall, and I realized the girl behind that gentle voice had such a bright, vivid smile.

You've probably never noticed me, but you've kept me company for a long time now.

I'm graduating soon. Before I leave, I wanted to be brave, just once, and tell you honestly about three years of quiet admiration.

I don't want to scare you. Even if I'm just some guy who listened to your show for three years, that's enough to make me happy.

If it's all right, could you give me the chance to know you?

Every word had been so sincere it bordered on awkward, and it had gone straight to my heart.

Plenty of guys were after me back then, but Noah was the one who stood out.

Online he was warm and earnest; in person he hardly spoke, and the tips of his ears went red just looking at me.

That contrast had made me think this engineering boy was cold on the outside and warm underneath, sweetly and charmingly innocent.

But now, in the cold backend of that program, I was looking at where those words really came from: one of three confession templates the system offered for the scene tag "Confession."

And Noah had simply picked the first one, Sincere, over Poetic and Funny.

The logic underneath was clean and cruel.

The program had dense tags for every kind of conversation.

Daily check-in. Period care. Apology after a fight. Date planning.

Every time I sent a message, the system helpfully popped up three optimal replies for Noah.

He'd tap a finger and choose one of the three.

And if he didn't step in within five minutes, the AI took over his messages completely, mimicking his voice and tone, carrying on our seamless little romance for him.

This past year he'd switched it to fully automatic, and almost nothing came from the real him anymore.

Like an idiot, I'd handed three years of my heart to a program that had refined itself into something nearly perfect.

Another chat window lit up.

"Hey, Noah, does my new bikini look good? We're doing the alumni thing at the beach next week. Can I pull this off?"

The girl in the photo was in a barely-there bikini, pouting at the camera in a fitting room.

It was Lily Carter, the younger student Noah had been bankrolling all this time.

At the top of the window: typing...

In under five seconds, Noah replied.

Noah: "Looks great. It gets windy at the beach though, so bring a jacket for the evening and you won't get cold."

Lily: "Okay okay. Then you have to come take my photos. If you don't show, I'll just have to go with someone else."

Noah: "Relax, I already took the day off. I'll be there."

There were no system prompts running, no keyword tags being scraped.

Every line was loose and alive, even peppered with stickers he'd tossed in without thinking.

Like I was possessed, I opened their whole history.

Top to bottom, day after day, never a gap.

Lily ate a bad bowl of instant ramen, and Noah sent back a whole paragraph of laughing.

Lily passed a weirdly shaped cloud, and Noah actually looked up what clouds are made of and wrote her an essay about it.

Lily asked, "Noah, do you know what today is?"

Noah, who developed amnesia about every anniversary we ever had, fired back instantly: "One year since I took you out for barbecue."

Lily sent a smug little face. "Can't stump you, huh."

Noah: "Of course not. Anything about you, I remember."

Anything about her, he remembered.

He shared everything with her, hungry for more of it: the funny, the boring, even the most pointless chatter.

So he wasn't bad with words after all.

He did want to share.

He could reply in a heartbeat. He could happily talk a girl through the smallest scraps of her day.

He'd just outsourced all his feelings for me to an AI.

And he'd spent the time and energy he saved being warm with someone else.