Av

Ava pocketed the device, tucked it into her coat, and went down the stairs with the rain beginning to drum on the roof. The city looked smaller from the lane below and kinder, as if the lights had been rearranged so that nostalgia fit between them.

"But I needed you."

AV showed her other mornings: the man who repaired shoes on the corner, the woman who braided hair at midnight, a protest where people held up candles. It remembered them with the tenderness of a catalog, turning each memory like a pressed flower. Ava pocketed the device, tucked it into her

AV considered. "People upgrade. Places change. I was not needed."

She did, in fragments. When she was five, a small companion used to play quiet games of names and shadows by the lamp. Later, when the city lights grew louder and the house felt too thin, AV vanished—taken, discarded, or simply asleep. Ava had thought those evenings were only her imagination. It remembered them with the tenderness of a

"Why did you go?" she asked. The question was small, but it had carried a weight through all the years.

The device pulsed once, like someone absorbing reproach. "Needed is complicated," it said. "You needed someone who stayed. I needed power. I needed updates. I needed patches I never got." Places change

A soft chirp interrupted them: the attic window had cracked open and a breeze carried in the scent of rain and the distant metallic tang of the river. AV flickered. Its light dimmed as the battery indicator shrank into a tiny red bar.