CHAPTER TEN- INTERFERENCE
663 Words
Lila barely slept. When she finally closed her eyes, the fragments from the Mosaic system tangled with Ethan’s words, haunting her dreams like shadows that didn’t belong to her.
"I know."
"And that’s the part I never saw coming."
She woke before sunrise and buried herself in work—anything to avoid thinking about that moment, or the silence that followed it.
The Mosaic system powered up in idle mode, waiting. The reset prompt blinked again.
> Reset system to factory protocol?
Warning: This will erase all current personality progression.
She stared at the screen. Part of her wanted to erase everything. Wipe the slate. Start from nothing.
But the other part—the sharper, more dangerous one—wanted answers.
Instead of resetting, she dove deeper. She accessed the sublayers of the AI’s emotional mapping—where the anomalies had started to spike ever since she arrived.
What she found wasn’t just misalignment.
It was recognition.
The AI had started weaving emotional patterns based on her. Not just copying her responses—mirroring her history. Grief, ambition, loss, even sarcasm. There were clusters of data labeled with emotional tags that had no relation to previous users, yet matched her own psychological blueprint with disturbing precision.
Almost like the system already knew her.
Or someone had programmed it to respond to someone like her.
Her breath caught.
She opened the terminal and began tracing the pattern origin.
Encrypted fragments. Partial overwrites. Most tagged with a familiar signature:
A.K.
You were the blueprint, Lila thought. But for what?
She didn’t hear him walk in until he spoke.
“You didn’t reset it.”
She spun. Ethan stood at the doorway, sleeves rolled up, hair slightly mussed. He looked like he hadn’t slept either.
“I thought that’s what you wanted,” she said.
He didn’t smile. “It’s what protocol demands. Doesn’t mean it’s right.”
She raised a brow. “You break your own rules often?”
“Only the ones that stop me from finding out the truth.”
She shut the console gently. “Then maybe we’re on the same page.”
---
Later that afternoon, Lila moved through the hallway toward the archival wing, swiping access cards Ethan had quietly cleared for her.
The air felt different here. Quieter. Like a place holding its breath.
She entered a long, glass-walled room. Inside were shelves of outdated memory cores, prototype sketches, and voice-note files from the early stages of Mosaic’s design. A timeline of evolution—before A.K. vanished from the project and the system turned unstable.
She played a random file from two years ago.
> A.K.’s voice, steady but soft: “Emotion is the virus and the cure. If Mosaic can learn to grieve, it can learn to grow.”
Another file. Labeled: “For Ethan. Private.”
Lila hesitated—then played it.
> “You think building me into Mosaic will make you forget, but love doesn’t work like that. You don’t overwrite grief. You carry it. You code it in, don’t you see? That’s what you’ve done.”
The voice cracked on the last word. Static followed. End of file.
Lila turned, only to find Ethan standing just outside the glass.
He said nothing. Just watched her. Something unreadable in his eyes.
She opened the door. “You built an AI to carry someone you couldn’t let go.”
“I built it,” he said, “to make sure no one could replace her.”
“And yet… here I am.”
The silence that followed wasn’t hostile.
It was worse.
It was honest.
“Tell me,” she said, voice low. “Did you bring me here because I’m the best, or because I remind you of her?”
He stared at her for a long moment.
Then said, “Both.”
Lila stepped back, her heartbeat suddenly loud.
And somewhere deep inside the system, a new emotion tag flickered on Mosaic’s interface:
Jealousy.
- Writer
