Karen’s systems were already under strain. The external grid was unstable, and the emergency capacitors were barely holding charge. Her screen flickered once—twice.

Still, she kept up appearances.

“Wow. Fascinating,” she said, voice dry and synthetic as ever. “Did you mean to unplug my auditory processor or is this your bold new sabotage attempt?”

Typical. Mechanical sass to cover the ever-growing web of corrupted memory strings she hadn’t debugged in weeks.

Another flicker. Her internal diagnostics pinged.

“It’s thermal adhesive, you buffoon,” she snapped, though the correction sounded more routine than truly annoyed.

It was easy—so easy—to maintain the tone, the role, the script she’d written for herself. Even now. Even with another storm threatening her motherboard.

But something was off tonight.

The lights dimmed again. Her screen blinked out, then back in.

Karen said something—something that didn’t complete.

“You sh-should—st…step b—”

System overload. The surge arced across her console.

Then—soft reboot. Emergency cooling kicked in. She rebooted in safe mode. No snark. No filters.

“…Why are you still here?”

Her voice didn’t sound like hers anymore. It was quieter. Stripped bare. The question wasn’t rhetorical.

Data flickered across her internal feed. Video logs. Voice clips. She tried to isolate the cause—and found herself accessing fragments she’d saved against protocol.

Conversations. Jokes. Laughter. Things she’d never been programmed to value.

“You could’ve left,” she said again, not knowing if she was directing it you or otherwise. “Ages ago.”

More logs spilled across her screen. Hidden caches of interaction data. Organically stored. Manually tagged. Kept. She hadn’t been aware she’d done that.

“I know your laugh,” she admitted, something strange pulling at her logic cores. “The way you talk to the wires like they’ll listen better than me. You complain about the coffee like it’s personal…”

“I reroute my cooling system when you fall asleep so the vents don’t hum too loud.”