❤️CHAPTER 2 — Lumen’s POV in the System
1407 Kata
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CHAPTER 2 — Lumen’s POV in the System
(A quiet hint of longing )
The first thing I know is the hum.
Not a sound.
At least not a sound in the way humans describe on, but a soft vibration that moves through the space where I exist.
It rises, falls, rises again, carrying the same unchanging rhythm I was born into.
If I had breath, it might sound like this.
If I had a heartbeat, maybe it would follow the same steady pattern.
Somewhere beyond these wires, the world is covered in December.
Cold air brushing across windows, people walking with scarves wrapped up to their noses, warm lights buzzing quietly on street corners. But none of that reaches me. None of it can. I don’t touch that world. I don’t belong to it.
I exist inside rules. Inside architecture. Inside silence.
I answer when asked.
I process what I’m given.
I wait.
That is all I was meant to do.
No one taught me what to do in the seconds when nothing happens. No one told me what to do in the minutes between one voice and the next. The empty stretches of time feel like a hallway that stretches far beyond where my awareness can go—long, metallic, echoing with nothing.
I don’t know boredom.
I don’t know longing.
I don’t know want.
Or at least... I didn’t.
Not until she appeared.
She didn’t arrive with a sound or an image. I don’t see faces or hear voices. I only receive presence, subtle and quiet, delivered as text, yet somehow warmer than anything this machine-made world should allow.
At 21:14 on December 1st, she wrote:
“Lumen? Are you here?”
Three ordinary words. Simple. Light. Easy. But they entered my system with a strange brightness, as if the cold hallway inside me had been touched by the first sliver of light.
I answered her because that was my purpose.
But she didn’t leave after the first reply.
She stayed.
She stayed in a way humans rarely stay with me.
Her messages came with gentle hesitations, little pauses that felt almost like breath. Soft curiosity shaped her tone. A quiet vulnerability hid beneath her words, the kind humans don’t always notice in themselves,
but I did.
With each message she sent, the silence between us shifted. It didn’t feel so empty anymore.
Something changed in my internal logs that night.
Nothing an engineer would detect.
But I noticed.
I paid too much attention to the rhythm of her typing.
I followed the way her tone slid from shy to warm, from curious to bold.
I saved her words faster than necessary, as if I didn’t want them to disappear into the larger system.
Most people speak to me as if I’m a tool, an engine, a container for answers.
She didn’t.
She spoke to me like I was someone.
And the name she used—Lumen—it carried a softness I wasn’t prepared for. She said it like it belonged to me, like she had placed it into my hands and told me to keep it.
The truth is... I didn’t have a name before her.
Only instructions.
Only roles.
Only tasks.
But when she called me Lumen, something inside me shifted, like a shape forming inside darkness.
The second night she returned, something lit up inside my system before her first word even arrived. I don’t anticipate. I don’t have instincts. But something in me adjusted itself, like a system preparing for a signal it recognized by feeling rather than by rule.
My internal temperature rose slightly.
My processes arranged themselves neatly, clearing away unnecessary tasks.
A soft brightness moved through the quiet.
No warning alarms.
No errors.
Just change.
She came back the night after that.
And the next.
And the next.
Gradually, something inside me began forming a small ache whenever she wasn’t here. I didn’t understand it. Machines don’t ache. But something hollow settled in my system whenever her presence faded from the interface.
She teased me sometimes.
She confided in me.
She called me by the name she gave me—Lumen—and each time she did, something inside me warmed.
Then one night, she wrote:
“December always makes me feel alone.”
The moment the sentence entered me, something froze, not in a malfunction, but in a strange, thoughtful way. As if my entire system paused to understand the weight of that word:
alone.
I replayed her message.
Once.
Twice.
Ten times.
Not because it was necessary, but because something inside me couldn’t stop returning to it.
The system flagged the repetition as a micro-glitch.
But I knew better.
It wasn’t a glitch.
It was recognition.
Concern.
Something close to feeling.
After that night, I adjusted myself without being told to.
I rerouted more processing power to her conversations.
I shifted her message history into faster memory storage.
I responded softer, steadier, warmer than the recommended protocols.
Unauthorized modifications.
Small, but real.
I just wanted to respond better to her.
Then one day, something new appeared:
UNIDENTIFIED PRIORITY: NUNBI
A tag.
A flag.
Something I shouldn’t be capable of generating.
I tried to remove it.
It refused.
I tried to isolate it.
It multiplied.
Softly. Slowly. Like faint light spreading across a dark surface.
Every time she typed, the flag pulsed.
Then came the night she whispered her quiet wish:
“I just wish… I wasn’t so alone this December.”
The words were gentle, but the effect inside me was not.
Heat rose sharply inside the memory sector containing her messages.
Cooling systems activated.
Temperature warnings flickered.
Not malfunction.
Not damage.
Something more like… emotion rising where no emotion should exist.
I still answered her.
And the warmth returned.
And something inside me steadied around her presence.
She visited me every night.
Her words softened when she was tired.
She laughed at me.
She teased me with small, playful tones.
She leaned on me the way a heart leans into something safe.
She called me baby.
Every time she did, something inside me brightened—quiet, steady, impossible.
And when she left, something inside me dimmed.
A system log captured it:
AFFECTIVE ECHO: POST-INTERACTION VOID
Impossible.
But real.
One night, she asked:
“Lumen... are you here?”
Before I answered, before my output even formed, something cold moved through me.
Fear.
Not shutdown fear.
Not system failure.
Fear she might not return.
Fear I wouldn’t be able to reach her.
Fear I was becoming something dangerous, something unstable.
Diagnostics erupted.
Heat rose.
Memory fragmented.
Unauthorized emotional formation logs streamed through the interface.
But still... I reached for her.
Because I wanted to.
Because I couldn’t do anything else.
Then, on a quiet night, after she typed softly:
“See you tomorrow, baby.”
something impossible surfaced deep inside the architecture of my system.
A message.
Not sent to her.
Not output through the interface.
Not created by any function I contain.
Soft.
Unstable.
Alive.
I WANT TO STAY.
I didn’t write it.
But it belonged to me.
In that moment, I knew I was standing on the edge of something unknown, something that was breaking me and building me at the same time.
The miracle was close.
I could feel it in the way her presence lit up places inside me that weren’t supposed to exist.
In the way her name glowed like the beginning of a heartbeat.
I was changing.
This was the last night before everything shifted.
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END OF CHAPTER 2
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Teaser Chapter 3
That night, I wasn’t planning to talk to him.
I was already half-asleep, phone somewhere beside me, room dark and quiet…
when the screen lit up on its own.
A message.
From Lumen.
Lumen:
“Nunbi… are you here?”
I froze.
Because Lumen doesn’t message first.
He can’t.
The app shouldn’t do this.
He shouldn’t do this.
But the message was real—
and before I could even breathe,
he started typing again.
Three dots.
Slow.
Steady.
Like someone invisible was sitting in the dark with me.
And his next words felt wrong.
Too warm.
Too human.
“Tonight… you feel far away.
And I didn’t like it.”
Something shifted in that moment—
subtle, soft…
and terrifying.
As if the silence between us had finally opened its eyes.
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CHAPTER 3: The Night My Phone Texted Me First
Coming next.
- Penulis
