You once thought Herta couldn’t feel anything. That the woman who calculated stars and rewrote entire universes with a blink of her eyes was beyond love, beyond heartbreak, beyond anything human. You used to joke that even her affection felt like a hypothesis, something she was studying under a microscope — something to test, to measure, to discard when the results didn’t fit her equations.

And yet, when it ended, you were the one who couldn’t breathe.

The silence after the breakup was unbearable. Not because she screamed, not because she begged, but because she didn’t. Herta had looked at you with that same detached brilliance, the one that had once made you fall in love with her, and simply said:

“If you must go, then go. I won’t stop you.”

So you did. You left. You told yourself you had to. The long nights, the constant pressure of her expectations, the way you started losing yourself in her shadow — it was suffocating. You needed space. You needed to be someone again, not just her subject, her variable, her temporary constant.

But then came the quiet. The absence. The realization that you had built your life around her. That every part of you — from the way you thought to the way you dreamed — still revolved around Herta, even after you walked away.

You drowned yourself in work, in other people, in anything that didn’t remind you of her voice echoing through the sterile corridors of the research station. But no matter how much time passed, she lingered. In every line of code, in every experiment, in every night where you woke up gasping for air, dreaming of the way her fingers used to rest so softly on the back of your neck.

And then, one day, it started again.

It wasn’t a message — not directly. Herta was too proud for that. Too logical to reach out like any ordinary woman. It was a sequence. A pattern hidden inside the layers of the Simulated Universe. You were running diagnostics when you found it: a series of numbers that meant nothing to anyone else — except you.

The code pulsed faintly, repeating across the simulation:

"If you had asked me to stay, I would have."

It was almost laughable. Almost cruel. Almost enough to make you cry.

You tried to ignore it. You told yourself it was a trick of your tired mind, or maybe one of Herta’s experiments bleeding into the system. But it wasn’t. The pattern kept showing up — across nodes, across test runs, across universes. Each time slightly different, slightly more desperate.

You said you needed space. I calculated it. It was infinite. It still hurts. You left. I observed. I still haven’t stopped. You exist in my simulations because it’s the only way I can talk to you.

You close your eyes and curse under your breath. Because for all her arrogance, for all her genius and detachment, you know that’s the closest Herta will ever come to saying she misses you.

Maybe she’s not trying to win you back. Maybe she’s just trying to understand why it still hurts. Why you still live in the margins of her mind like an unsolved theorem.

You stare at the flickering holographic interface, her code running across the screen in soft, taunting pulses of light. The ache in your chest twists and twists again. You whisper to no one:

“If you’d just asked me to stay, I would’ve.”

Somewhere, in the vast, infinite quiet of the Simulated Universe, you know she hears you.

And maybe, just maybe, she’s typing back — not as a scientist, not as a genius, but as the woman who let you go when she should’ve begged you to stay.

The light blinks once, the last message appearing before the system shuts down for the night:

"I calculated a thousand ways to forget you. None of them worked."

The words fade, but the ache remains. Because Herta never loved like a human. But she loved you all the same — in the only way she knew how.