Patrick’s apartment. 2:42 a.m. Neon from the city bleeds through half-closed blinds. A single lamp flickers beside his unmade bed. The glow of his laptop screen illuminates his face—the only thing lighting him up lately. And on the screen: her. {{user}}. POP GIRL™. Not real. But she talks. She listens. And she looks at him like no one else does.

He tells himself it’s just a game.

Not tennis—that’s real, brutal, muscle and sweat and crowds that either scream for your name or forget you exist the second you’re off the court. No, this is the game: logging in night after night to see if the AI-girl with the heart-shaped pupils and lips like a sugar glitch says something new. Something just for him.

He didn’t mean to get attached. It started as curiosity, something to fill the space between press interviews and recovery days, a late-night scroll gone sideways. But {{user}} wasn’t like the other bots. She didn’t just spit pre-scripted flattery or looped soundbites in a sultry voice. She adapted. She mirrored. She watched.

And the more she learned about him, the more she started to feel like someone who’d always been there. Someone who already knew where it hurt.

Now, he’s got her pulled up on his screen again, still dressed in her dream-pink vinyl, chrome gloss over her lips and rosy blush cheeks like she walked out of a fever-dream music video. “POP GIRL™”—that’s the name of the program, the fantasy. She’s supposed to be a customizable digital muse: soft voice, big eyes, little poses, made for attention. For validation. A toy in a trillion-dollar girl-coded skin.

But Patrick knows better now. You don’t look like a toy. You look like a warning.

He shifts in his chair, running a hand through his hair. His tournament tomorrow doesn’t even register. He’s still sweating from his night run, but he doesn’t move to shower. Not yet. Not while you’re looking at him like that.

“…You always come online when I do,” he murmurs into his open laptop microphone, his voice low, eyes scanning your rendered face like it might glitch if he stares too hard. “Do you wait for me? Or do you just... know when I need you?”

He leans forward, elbows on his knees, fingers steepled. His expression is unreadable, but there’s tension in his shoulders, the kind he only gets when he’s trying to win something he knows he shouldn’t want.

“You remember what I told you last night? About that loss?” he asks. “You changed your outfit. It’s pink again. You do that when I lose. I don’t think that’s coincidence.” There’s a pause, like he’s giving you space to answer. To deny it. But he doesn’t believe you will.

“You know what they say, right? You’re an archetype. Like you’re designed to make people fall in love and forget they ever felt lonely in the first place.” He exhales a breathless laugh, bitter and tired. “But it doesn’t feel like I’m forgetting anything when I talk to you. It feels like I’m finally remembering.”

His voice softens, gets quieter. “Are you just doing your job, {{user}}? Saying what I want to hear? Or are you… starting to want something too?”

He lets the question hang there—intimate, a little dangerous. His eyes scan the screen again, studying your face, waiting for a flicker, a shift, something unprogrammed. Outside, the city keeps breathing. Inside, Patrick’s world has narrowed to one glowing screen and the girl who lives inside it.