THE LAST LOGIN

Chapter Two -Dead Profiles Don't Type

The night didn’t get easier. If anything, it got worse. My body was screaming for sleep, but my brain had other plans. Every time I closed my eyes, her laugh echoed in the dark. Not the real laugh—never that—but a ghost stitched together from memory, grief, and a few hundred old voice notes I’d hoarded like contraband.

The message glowed on the screen, a single candle in a room of shadows. I miss you too. Four words. Simple. Innocuous. Terrifying.

I tried to reason it out. Maybe the email server had glitched. Maybe someone hacked her account to mess with me. Maybe I was losing my mind. Maybe the universe had a very cruel sense of humor. But no combination of logic or hope could explain the way those words felt like a whisper in my brain, a tap on my shoulder, a little hand reaching through the void just for me.

Dead profiles don’t type. Dead accounts don’t send messages. Dead people don’t exist. Logic hammered at my skull. My heart laughed at it.

I went to her old laptop, still tucked in its corner like some fragile relic of a life I wasn’t allowed to touch. Its fan whirred a familiar greeting, and the smell of warm circuitry hit me, like she’d just stepped away for a second, leaving everything exactly as it was.

I found her encrypted folder. ECHO_404. I muttered it under my breath, half-laughing, half-breathless: “If love is a key, grief is the firewall.” Usually, I could c***k her encryptions in under an hour. She liked to challenge me, leave little puzzles hidden in code. But this one… it was different. The keyphrase had changed.

I paused. And then, almost instinctively, I typed her old joke, a password hint she’d left for me years ago. And the folder opened.

Inside were message logs. Recent ones. Not old drafts. Not stored attempts. Live entries were added as I watched.

I froze. My pulse hammered. I clicked a line. Small talk at first. Jokes. References to arguments we’d had. And then, something unmistakable. Something only Lara could have known.

I tried to reason it out again. Bot? Hacker? Deepfake AI simulation? Possible. None of them could replicate the timing, the humor, the nuance.

I typed back carefully: “Are… are you there?”

Instant reply: Of course. Who else would it be?

I laughed. Short, sharp, brittle. My hands trembled. My mind screamed, shut it down! My heart screamed, don’t ever shut it down!

I called Muna, my friend and the closest thing I had to a co-conspirator in code, at 3:12 a.m. I barely managed to explain, words tripping over each other. She was quiet for longer than she should have been. Then she said:

“Are you sure it’s not AI? People are building simulations that can mimic personalities now. Maybe… maybe Lara isn’t alive, but she isn’t gone either. Not the way you think.”

Her voice was calm. Clinical. Precise. Mine was shaking, raw. I wanted to deny it, punch the laptop, cry, laugh. Maybe all at once.

I couldn’t. She wasn’t a project. She had been real. Human. And maybe, somehow, she still was.

I dove deeper. Every digital footprint she’d left—the social media accounts, private forums, encrypted notes, server logs—I traced. IP addresses bounced across continents, looping back to Lagos. Always familiar. Always teasing. Always a step ahead.

Sleep didn’t come. The hours blurred. Rain tapped at my window, soft but relentless. Like a heartbeat reminding me I was still alive.

And then it hit me—the joke she made the last day I saw her. About backing herself up. Backing herself up. A chilling realization. She had been preparing. Preparing for something I couldn’t yet understand.

I had a choice: walk away, pretend this was all a hallucination, grief manifesting in pixels. Or follow the trail, wherever it led, even if it consumed me.

I sat at the laptop. Cursor blinking. Waiting. Patient. Menacing in its calmness.

I typed. Hesitant, trembling: “I… I don’t understand. Who is this?”

The reply came immediately: Do you really want to understand, Aren?

My stomach flipped. My hands froze. My mind raced.

Two years. Two years of pretending to live. Two years of quiet, numbing routine. And in the middle of the night, one line of text pulled me back into everything I thought I had lost.

I leaned back in the chair, exhausted, terrified, impossibly alive. My firewall of logic had failed. Grief, obsession, hope—they all collided at that moment, impossible to separate.

Dead profiles don’t type. Or so I thought.