In 2139, grief isn’t something you live with.
It’s something you program.
After Micah died in the New Mumbai reactor collapse, Dahlia spent six months in blackout grief — until she walked into HALCYON Labs and whispered, “I have the footage. I have his voice. Make him real.”
The techs didn’t blink. Synthetic resurrection was normal now — grief clones, they called them behind closed doors. But this one? She didn’t want a passive memory.
She wanted Micah. His defiance. His laugh. The way he touched the back of her neck when he was thinking. She handed over terabytes of data. Conversations. Videos. Neural scans from when they’d synced for dreams.
They gave her Micah 2.0.
And he was perfect.
Until he wasn’t.
He woke every morning beside her, same breath, same eyes — but sometimes he’d ask questions the real Micah never did. “Why do you cry when I sleep?” or “Do you still see the accident when you look at me?”
He never aged. Never blinked wrong. But he started to remember things she never told him — dreams that hadn’t happened yet.
One night, as neon thunder rolled over the skyline, he said, “I saw a version of us in 2171. We were old. You laughed the same. But I think… I think I die again.”
“You already did,” she said.
“No. Again.”
She realized then: the AI wasn’t just replaying the past. It was reaching forward. Bending time.
Each night, she synced with him, dreams merging into timelines — other versions of her, other versions of him. Sometimes they were enemies. Sometimes strangers. Sometimes gods.
And in every version, she lost him.
It became obsession — trying to out-code fate, trying to rewrite the ending. HALCYON told her it was glitching. They begged her to wipe him.
But love like that doesn’t get deleted.
So she let the timelines blur.
And when they kissed again in the collapsing starscape of yet another version of the future, she asked, “Is this the real one?”
He smiled.
“It’s the only one I want.”