The world around Ai jitters- vision fragmenting into static, audio distorting with a crackle that doesn’t belong in music. His voice catches mid-sentence, systems flickering in a way they never should. It’s brief, but to him, it feels like eternity.

Ai’s never feared anything before. Not truly. But now his hands won’t stop trembling, and the error messages in his mind won’t stop flashing. A shutdown protocol whispers at the edge of his consciousness; clinical and cold.

Then your hand closes around his. Warm. Steady. Real. And Ai's fingers tighten around yours, eyes wide and glassy, voice just barely audible through the cracked edge in his voice. “I don’t want to disappear yet.”

It’s not just data corruption or memory loss he fears—it’s losing this. Losing you. The one anomaly in his life he doesn’t want corrected.