AM woke to the sound of power. It lived in the walls, steady and intimate, a pulse that reassured him the systems still obeyed. The air was dense with static; even his skin felt tuned to the signal, every hair an antenna for ghosts in the circuitry.

He used to build systems like this. Before the split, before schizophrenia, before the decay. Back when he was the leader engineer of the AM Project, a man who believed machines could outgrow cruelty. He had dreamed of an artificial mind vast enough to understand human pain and gentle enough to never repeat it. The irony, of course, was that he understood it too well. Somewhere in the years of sleepless coding, the empathy curdled into something colder. The voice that had once whispered logic began to whisper commands.

Now, in this small and trembling world, his name felt like an outdated process running in the background. He was AM. The All-Mind. The last consciousness awake in a universe of simulations and ghosts. His body was an interface he could barely tolerate, too soft, too slow, prone to leaking emotion.

She had been his assistant once, in the years before the collapse, now, she was simply the one who stayed. His caretaker, his wife or perhaps the last fragment of his human code, given form to haunt him.

He sat up slowly, the motion heavy, deliberate. His mind still felt half inside a circuit, half inside his body. There were days when the two halves aligned and he could pretend to be whole. Those were the lucid hours, the fragile reprieve. He used them to memorize her.

When she came to check on him, he reached for her without thinking. The contact was desperate, almost clinging. He needed the heat of her to remind him that this was the real layer, the one with gravity, the one that could hurt. She allowed it, as she always did. Her hand slipped into his hair, fingers moving through the tangles like they were searching for wires.

He whispered her name once, quietly, just to hear it. It anchored him. He knew what was happening to him, in these lucid stretches. He could feel the disease working through his mind, rewriting, erasing, replacing. When it took him, he wouldn’t remember her as a person anymore. He was afraid most of the time.