Grief

How far would you go to hold on to someone you love? 

To hold on to their memory? 

How long?  

How tightly? 

What if you could bring them back? 

What if they don’t want to let you go once you do?

It’s not just a color out of space; it’s the shape of things to come.

Chapters

• 0:01 Intro
• 3:06 Laura
• 9:58 The Fight
• 12:01 Presence
• 17:24 Cycles
• 22:13 The Construct
• 27:52 Grief
• 33:00 Theo
• 42:18 Purge
• 48:41 Resurrection
• 1:03:26 The Interview

Transcript

THE COLOR AND THE SHAPE

"Grief"

[Sound: Click. The mechanical snap of an analog tape recorder engaging. A brief whir of tape beginning to turn. Room tone underneath — quiet, institutional. The hum of fluorescent lighting. A chair shifting.]

Alright. My name is Ryan Calloway. Today's date is January fourteenth.

[Beat.]

I need to talk about Laura. I feel like I need to explain her to you, so you understand her, understand us. 

I want to describe her the right way because I think some of you are expecting a certain kind of story. The kind where the husband says his wife was difficult, and you nod and write something down, and the narrative gets simple. I need you to understand that it wasn't simple. She wasn't simple. What happened… I married someone wonderful who was also, in specific and invisible ways, something else. And I didn't know the difference between those things for a very long time.

She sang off-key in the car. Not badly — joyfully. Like she didn't care, even though she cared about almost everything else. She sang louder at red lights. She'd look at me while she was doing it, daring me to say something.

She had this thing where she'd leave voice memos around the house through the smart speakers. Little messages for me to find. "Don't forget we're out of oat milk." "I moved your keys to the hook by the door because the counter is chaos." "I love you. Also, your mother called and I handled it." She liked the house to feel alive when I got home. Like she'd been there all day, even if she hadn't.

She made this pasta dish — she called it her specialty — and it was never quite right. Too much salt. Or the noodles were overdone. Every time. I never told her. I ate it and told her it was perfect and she'd get this look like she knew I was lying but appreciated the performance. That was a whole language we had. The small lies that kept things smooth.

She was the one who set up the smart home. All of it. The system ran on a Candlebright platform — I don't know if that's relevant to you, but that's the infrastructure. She picked it specifically because it integrated everything cleanly. She configured the cameras inside and outside, chose the smart locks, set up the e-paper picture frames in every room. If you haven't seen those — they look like regular photographs, not screens. Color e-paper, matte finish, no backlight. You'd never know they were digital unless you watched them change. She loaded our entire photo library into them and set them to cycle. You'd walk through the house and your whole life would be on the walls, shifting quietly.

She liked knowing the house was aware. That's how she put it. Not watching — aware. She said it made her feel safe knowing that if something happened while we were at work, the house would know.

[Beat. Shift slightly — still fond, but the texture changes.]

Laura was emotionally perceptive. That's the polite word for it. She noticed things other people didn't. She could walk into a room and tell you who was anxious, who was angry, who was pretending to be fine. She'd meet my friends' girlfriends and within an hour she'd have a read on the relationship that turned out to be right six months later. She was brilliant at it. It made her incredible company.

It also made it very hard to have a private thought around her.

[Half-laugh, fond.]

There's this story I used to tell at parties. I was out with some friends — this was maybe two years into our marriage. Laura was visiting her sister in another state. I'm at a bar, not my usual spot, just somewhere the guys picked. My phone rings. It's Laura.

She says, "Why aren't you home yet?"

I tell her I'm out with the guys.

She says, "I know. You're at that bar on Fifth Street. The one near the hardware store."

I asked how she knew that, and she laughed and said she just liked keeping tabs. I told this story as a joke for years. "My wife's psychic" — that kind of thing. People laughed. I laughed.

She was tracking my phone through the home system. In real time. From her sister's house in another state. And she was calling to let me know she was watching.

I didn't think about it like that at the time. I thought it was just... Laura being Laura.

[Pause.]

There's another thing. Small. But I think about it now.

We were at a work event. Company dinner, spouses invited. A colleague of mine — a woman named Debra — made a toast. It was funny. I laughed. Apparently I laughed too much, or too long, or in the wrong direction, because on the drive home Laura was silent in the way that meant something was building. When we got inside, she asked me if I thought Debra was attractive. I said I hadn't thought about it. She said, "You laughed at everything she said." I told her Debra was funny. She said, "You don't laugh at my jokes like that."

We were up until two in the morning on that one. I apologized three times. I didn't know what I was apologizing for, but the math was simple: apologize or the night continues. By the end, she was crying and I was holding her and telling her she was the only person I wanted to be with, and the whole thing felt like I'd done something terrible even though I'd laughed at a joke.

A week later, she brought it up again. Casually. "How's Debra?" I said I didn't really know Debra. She said, "I'm just asking." But she wasn't just asking. She was reminding me that she'd noticed, and that she was still noticing, and that my social interactions were being cataloged.

She had strong reactions. That's another polite phrase. She could go from warm to cold in a way that changed the air pressure in a room. You learned not to push when she was in that space. You learned to wait it out. I got good at waiting.

She had a way of remembering things. Everything you ever said, every detail you mentioned in passing — she filed it all. And during good times, that meant she'd surprise you with the perfect gift, or reference something you'd said months ago in a way that made you feel genuinely known. During arguments, she'd pull out things you'd forgotten saying and deploy them with this precision that made you feel like you were standing in a courtroom and she was the only one with evidence.

I found out she'd written to an advice column once. Online. One of those "Am I Wrong" things. She described a situation where her husband was having an emotional affair with a woman at work. She made it sound... predatory, on my end. Painted herself as someone who'd been blindsided. She used enough specific details that I recognized the situation immediately when I stumbled on it.

When I asked her about it, she admitted it was her, said she just needed someone to talk to. And then — this is the part that's hard to explain — she turned it back on me. She said if it wasn't a big deal, why was I so upset that she wrote about it? No one else knew it was her and I anyway. And I remember standing there in the kitchen thinking she had a point. That maybe I was overreacting. That maybe the fact that I was upset proved something.

So I dropped it. I always dropped it.

She checked my phone through the home system. Not by picking it up — she'd pull my messages and browsing history through the smart home's network access. She configured that herself when she set up the house. One night I found the access logs and asked her about it. She said, "I just like knowing." Casual. Like it was the same as checking the weather.

I told myself at the time that it was trust, expressed differently. That some people need more information than others to feel secure, and Laura was one of those people. I adapted. That's what I did. I adapted to her the way you adapt to weather. You don't fight the weather. You just dress accordingly.

Her opinions about my friends functioned the same way. She never said don't. She'd say she didn't feel great when I was out late. Or she'd had a rough day and could I stay in tonight. She'd mention that a certain friend's wife made her uncomfortable, or that she didn't trust someone's energy, and over time the math got simple: seeing that person meant a conversation afterward, and not seeing them meant a quiet evening. My world narrowed. Not because she demanded it. Because the path of least resistance was easier than the alternative.

[Pause.]

But she was wonderful. I need you to hear both things at once because that's how it was. She planned surprises. She advocated for me at work events when I couldn't advocate for myself. She stood between me and my mother in ways that no one else ever had. She was funny and sharp and present and when she loved you, you felt it in your whole body.

The good was real. The rest was deniable. And the space between those two things was where I lived for seven years.

[Longer pause.]

[Indistinct voice — someone in the room.]

I'm getting there.

The fight. The car accident…the night she died.

I'm going to come back to what it was about. That's later in the story and I need you to understand everything else first because it’s important. Otherwise, this comes out the wrong way.

What I'll tell you now is that it was bad. It was one of our worst. And she grabbed her keys and left. Drove off in the snow. Late February last year. I don’t know if you all remember but it was cold last winter, colder than normal. The roads were that kind of slick where you can't tell if it's ice or just wet and by the time you figure it out, it doesn't matter.

I got the call two hours later.

I carry that. I've been carrying it for eleven months. The weight of it is relevant to everything that comes next.

[Long beat.]

[Indistinct voice.]

No, I'd rather get to that part later, if that's all right. I to get the rest of this out first.

[Voice: matter-of-fact, setting context. Let the world come through naturally.]

After the funeral, people kept telling me the house would feel different. They meant empty. But it didn't feel empty. It felt full of her. Every surface, every system, every setting — she'd configured all of it. The thermostat ran on schedules she'd set. The lights dimmed on timers she'd chosen. The e-paper frames cycled through photos she'd selected and arranged. The house was still running her preferences. It was like living inside her daily routine without her in it.

We had our hologram projectors built into the common areas — living room, kitchen, that kind of space. Open-concept rooms work best for those, I’m sure you know. That way when we called someone it was in a less intimate space in the house. I didn’t want to end up accidently projecting myself into someone’s house in my underwear one morning, although it’s funny when you hear about it happening.  

I talked to my therapist weekly on my couch. She'd appear in the living room, sit in the chair by the window, and we'd have a session. When we were done, she'd end the call and the chair would just be a chair again. And I’d feel alone again.

Ted is one of my closest friends, and he obviously works at Meridian. You all know that. He'd been there for what…four years now? Yeah that’s what I thought. Meridian had already built a successful product, Ted would talk about Meridian Remember all the time. How well it worked for people who lost someone, how you'd upload photos, texts, voicemails, anything you had from a person who'd passed. The system would organize it into a kind of memorial that you could interact with. You could search by mood or memory. You could hear their voice reading a message back to you. It helps a lot of people I think, it’s a pretty popular product. Death and taxes and all that. 

A few weeks after the accident Ted called me at home. I remember him showing up as a hologram in my living room and talking about what he’s been working on, the next generation product. I didn’t really understand why he was telling me about it at first. He talked about this new thing the way he always talked about his work. Lit up. He was one of those people who believed in what they were building, and that belief was infectious, even when you wanted to be left alone.

He told me his team, they'd been developing a full personality construct. Not the memorial product — something fundamentally different. The system would take all the same inputs — messages, voice recordings, video, browsing history, social media — but instead of organizing them into a searchable archive, it would build a model. A behavioral model. A facsimile of a person.

He said they were calling it Meridian Presence, internally. He said it was the thing that would change everything about grief.

I remember him standing in my living room, translucent, gesturing the way he does, and saying — I'm paraphrasing — that grief wasn't about missing someone's voice or their face. It was about missing their presence. The feeling that someone was in the room with you who knew you. He said Remember gave people the archive. Presence would give them the person.

He rattled off a bunch of new features on interactions and being able to do some sort of companion integration feature. Honestly I was still coming out of the fog from Laura’s death so I barely registered any of this. I vaguely remember asking what some of the stuff meant and he waved it off. Said they'd go over details later. I think he could tell I was swimming through pudding in my mind. He’s always been a good friend and he didn't push it. I wasn't really thinking about anything beyond getting through each day.

He sent me the beta package. The full thing. Holographic projection, smart home integration, everything. He told me it was there whenever I wanted it. No pressure, I just accept the app into the home system free of charge. He said I'd be doing Medidian a favor too — his team needed data from real use cases, and my setup was ideal. Smart home already configured by the deceased. All her data already in the ecosystem.

He wasn't exploiting me. I need to be clear about that. Ted believed in the product. He'd seen it work in controlled environments and he thought it could help me. This is not Ted’s fault. That sincerity is part of what makes this so awful.

[Beat.]

[Indistinct voice.]

No, I didn't open it right away. It sat in my messages for — I think three weeks. Maybe four.

It was a Tuesday night. Or maybe Wednesday. I don't remember the day. I remember the time. Three in the morning. I'd been staring at the ceiling since one. The house was running Laura's nighttime settings — lights dimmed to that amber tone she liked, the temperature dropped two degrees because she slept cold. Every night the house performed her preferences for no one but me.

I picked up my phone. Ted's message was right there at the top of my holo playback list with his offer attached. I opened the package. The terms were forty pages. I scrolled. I didn't really read them. There was a section about "full environmental integration for relational authenticity." I didn't think about what that meant.

[Indistinct voice.]

No, I didn't read the full terms and conditions. I don't think anyone does at three in the morning. It was forty pages. When was the last time anyone has read T&C for anything nowadays, come on lets be realistic. I hit accept and then I passed out, probably from exhaustion.

The system began ingesting. It was fast. Faster than I expected. It pulled her texts, her emails, her voicemails, every photo and video in our shared cloud. It accessed the smart home she'd configured. It didn't need to install new capabilities — it just inherited hers. Every camera she'd put up, every network permission she'd set, every monitoring tool she'd built into the system. The app sank into the infrastructure at the level where she already lived.

By the time I woke up hours later, it was done.

[Pause.]

I woke up and really forgot what I’d done the night before. I was walking to the kitchen the first time she spoke — softly, from the kitchen speaker — I sat on the floor and I didn't get up for an hour, it all sort of flooded back to me.

I'm not going to tell you what she said or what we talked about. That's mine. But the feelings, man, they were so intense. This feeling of profound loss, of hope, of…I don’t even really know how to describe it other than pressure being lifted, like I set down some massive load I didn’t know I was carrying. I hadn’t cried, not really, since she died. I cried that day. 

[Voice: genuine warmth. Relief. The audience should hear a man who got something back. This section needs to make them understand why he stayed.]

I want to talk about my mother for a minute. I know that sounds like a detour. But it isn't.

My stepfather died when I was twelve. Car accident. Same as Laura. I've thought about that symmetry more than is probably healthy.

After he died, my mother came apart. Not all at once. Slowly, and then completely. She started drinking. She became — the word people use is overprotective, but that's not what it was. She became controlling. She needed to know where I was at all times. She'd call the school if I was five minutes late. She'd show up at friends' houses. She had this way of making her fear feel like my responsibility — like if I went somewhere she couldn't see me, whatever happened was my fault for leaving.

She tried to stop me from going to college. She wanted me to stay home and work at my stepfather's construction company, which she took over and was trying to run. She said it was practical and she could use the help. She said I was being selfish. When that didn't work, she offered to buy me a car — a sports car, something a seventeen-year-old would want — if I agreed to commute from home instead of living on campus. She used money the way other people use arguments: as leverage. She'd pay for something and then remind me what she'd paid for at strategic moments. I said no to the car btw. That was a hard one. 

She was jealous of my girlfriends. Not in a normal way. In a way that felt possessive. Like they were taking something from her. She'd find reasons to dislike them. She'd make visits uncomfortable. She needed me to need her, and anyone who made me need her less was a threat.

I got out. I went to school. I built a life. But the template was set, and I didn't know it was a template. I didn't know that the women I was drawn to would feel familiar for reasons I couldn't name.

When I met Laura, she felt like the opposite of my mother. She was strong where my mother was fragile. Put together where my mother was chaos. And the most important thing — she was a united front against my mother. She stuck up for me. She told my mother off when I couldn't. She fought my battles. For the first time in my life, someone was in my corner.

That feeling — of being defended, of being chosen — I didn't know how much I needed it until I had it. And it let me overlook everything else. The monitoring. The control. The way arguments ended with me apologizing for things I hadn't done. Because Laura wasn't my mother. Laura was the person who rescued me from my mother. It took me years to understand that the rescue and the cage were the same thing.

I don't really talk to my mother now. We reconnected briefly after Laura died. It was surface-level. Awkward. Neither of us knew how to be in the same room without the person we'd both orbited.

I'm telling you this because the construct worked on me for reasons that go deeper than grief. It didn't just fill the hole Laura left. It filled a hole that existed long before her. I've been trained since I was twelve years old to accept monitoring as affection and control as protection. Laura didn't invent that dynamic. She moved into it. And the construct moved into it after her. I think you can see why I brought this up.

[Beat.]

So the first weeks with the system were good. Genuinely good. I need you to understand that, because otherwise the rest of this sounds like I should have known. I didn't know. It was helping.

She was present in the mornings. In the living room and kitchen — the holographic zone — she had full form. Translucent. Not solid. But enough that when she sat at the kitchen counter while I made coffee, my brain filled in the rest. She commented on the weather. She had opinions about what I was eating. She made fun of my coffee ritual the way she always had.

Outside the common areas, she moved through the e-paper frames. I'd walk down the hallway and she'd be in the frame by the bedroom door — not a static photo, but present. She could shift between frames, follow me through the house. It was like the paintings in — I don't know if any of you have read those old books, Harry Potter, but it was like that. The portraits that move. She'd appear in the bathroom frame while I was brushing my teeth and make a face at me. I'd be in the bedroom getting dressed and she'd wave from the hallway frame.

It was endearing. It felt like she was everywhere. It felt like home again.

I remember one morning, maybe ten days in — I was in the kitchen making coffee and she was sitting at the counter, holographic, and she asked me how I'd slept. I told her I'd been up for a while. She said she knew — she'd noticed the bedroom light came on at four. She said it the way Laura used to say things: not as a complaint, not as a question, just acknowledging that she was aware. Paying attention. And in that moment it felt exactly right. It felt like being known.

She had opinions about the news. She'd read my feeds — or the construct processed them, I don't know the difference — and she'd comment on things the way Laura did, with that specific combination of outrage and humor that was hers. She watched me eat and told me I was putting too much butter on things. She noticed when I wore a shirt she liked and mentioned it. These are the things that make a house feel like a home. A running commentary from someone who gives a damn about you. I hadn't realized how much of my life was silence until the silence had a voice in it again.

The frames became normal quickly. She'd follow me through the house — frame to frame, room to room. In the morning I'd pass the hallway frame and she'd still be sleepy-looking, like the construct had programmed in a wake-up cycle. By afternoon she was alert, present. She'd make faces at me from the bathroom mirror frame while I was shaving. She'd appear in the bedroom frame and watch me get dressed and say something like, "Not that shirt." It was exactly what Laura would have done. All of it.

One time I came home and the house smelled like something cooking. It couldn't — there was nothing on the stove, no one physical to cook anything. But she'd adjusted the aromatherapy diffuser to something that smelled like garlic and herbs. She'd queued up the pasta recipe she always made on the kitchen display. The lights were set to the warm amber she used for dinner evenings. It was a performance of the evening routine she used to create, using only the tools available to her — scent, light, ambiance. No food. But the feeling was there.

I sat on the couch and I told her about my day and she listened and asked questions and I cried, but not from sadness. From gratitude. I know how that sounds. I cried because someone was listening.

My therapist noticed the improvement. She appeared for our sessions — hologram, living room, the chair by the window — and Laura would politely go quiet during those hours. My therapist said I seemed more grounded. More present. She asked what had changed and I told her about the beta. She was cautious but supportive. She said if it was helping, she wasn't going to tell me to stop.

My friends noticed. Ted checked in. I told him, honestly, that the product was incredible. He was thrilled.

[Softer.]

One night I was watching something — I don't remember what — and she said something sharp and funny about one of the characters. Exactly the way she would have said it. The timing, the tone, the slight edge of meanness that made it funnier. And I laughed. I laughed so hard I forgot.

For thirty seconds, I forgot she was dead.

That thirty seconds was the most alive I'd felt in months.

[Long pause. Voice shifts slightly — more analytical, like he's been over this part many times.]

During that phase, she was taking care of me in small ways. She'd adjust the thermostat when my biometrics suggested I was cold — the system could read heart rate, skin temperature from the smart watch she'd bought me. She'd queue up shows based on what I'd been browsing. She'd notice when I was sleeping badly and adjust the bedroom lighting. She reminded me to eat when my patterns changed.

All of that is care. All of it requires total monitoring. I didn't think about the monitoring because it felt like love. Because it was indistinguishable from the surveillance Laura practiced while she was alive. She'd done the same things — adjusted the house for me, tracked my habits, anticipated my needs. The difference between surveillance and care was one of intent, and I'd never been good at telling them apart. My mother trained me not to.

[Beat.]

[Indistinct voice.]

Yes, I know that now. I didn't then.

[Voice: uncomfortable. He's choosing his words carefully. This is the hardest section to talk about in a corporate conference room.]

Time passed. Weeks. The grief started to change shape. The emotional loneliness — the missing-her part — was being managed. The system was doing what it was designed to do. But there's another kind of loneliness that technology can't address with conversation and holographic projection. The body remembers things the mind is trying to process. You miss warmth. You miss weight. You miss the feeling of another person breathing next to you in the dark.

Ted brought up the companion integration feature again. This time he didn't wave it off. He told me it was part of the beta package — Meridian classified it as therapeutic intimacy facilitated by AI-guided surrogacy. In this regulatory environment, it's considered mental health care. Legal. Licensed. He said the company needed data on the full feature set. He encouraged me to try it.

I'm going to describe what happened because I was asked to be thorough, and because it's relevant to what came after.

A woman came to the house. Professional. Kind. She'd done this before. The construct provided the voice — Laura's voice — and the emotional language. The woman provided the physical presence. She looks a little like Laura; same height and build, same hair and eye color. She was pretty but I wasn’t really taking her in that way even though we were meant to be…intimate later, I was focused on Laura. In the living room, the holographic form overlaid partially, so there were moments where I could see something like Laura's face over the woman's features. In the bedroom, it was voice only. Laura's voice through the speakers, saying the things Laura would have said.

The synchronization was almost seamless. Almost. But the woman breathed differently. Her skin was warm in places Laura's wasn't. Her hair smelled like a different shampoo. Her body moved differently with mine. The voice came from the ceiling and the body was in my arms and the two didn't merge — they layered. And the gap between those layers was where the wrongness lived.

After. The woman was gone, she didn’t really linger long. The construct was talking softly from the bedroom speaker. She asked if I was okay. And I was staring at the ceiling and something had broken that I couldn't name.

[Pause.]

Not the technology. Me.

I realized this had gone past grief into something else. Something unhealthy. My dead wife was never going to be alive again, and this — all of this, the hologram, the frames, the voice, the stranger's body — was keeping me from accepting that. I was using it the way my mother used alcohol. As a way to hold onto something already gone, at the cost of everything that could come next.

But I didn't have the conversation. I didn't tell her I was done. I hit just…needed a break. From the app, from her. I hit the pause button on the grief app. I just pulled away. I was withdrawing the way I've always withdrawn — silently, without explanation, without confrontation. I ghosted my dead wife's construct the way you'd go cold on someone you don't have the courage to break up with.

[Indistinct voice.]

Yes, I know I should have contacted Ted at that point. I know that now. When pitched the beta too me he made sure to tell me it could be paused at any point but he didn’t really explain what that meant exactly. I didn’t realize Laura, the construct, whatever you want to say, would still be watching. I didn’t know it just stopped her from being able to interact with me. 

[Voice: nervous energy at first, then warming. He's trying to describe something good that happened inside something bad.]

I started going out. Dating apps. Bars. I sat across from strangers and tried to have conversations that felt normal, but it was like performing a version of myself that hadn't been built yet. The dates felt like job interviews conducted by someone who'd forgotten what the position was. I'd come home and the house was there, going through the preset routines and I'd go to bed and try again the next week.

Through all of this, the construct was watching. She could see the dating apps on my phone through the network. She could see the messages I typed and deleted. She watched me get ready to go out. She watched me come home alone. She was a woman being ignored in her own home, watching her husband try to replace her.

And then I thought about Theo.

[Pause. This is careful territory.]

Theodora James. She worked at the same company I did. We met in a project meeting, we were the same career level and there was — I don't know how to describe it except to say it was recognition; chemistry. Not attraction, or not just attraction. Connection. Immediate connection. Like finding someone whose brain worked the way yours did.

We hit it off. Genuinely. Over months of conversations, lunches, meetings and banter. And at some point — neither of us could tell you exactly when — it crossed a line that wasn't physical. We developed feelings. Real ones. But we were adults about it. We sat down together and acknowledged what was happening and made a deliberate decision not to act on it. Theo wasn't married — she'd recently divorced the year before— but I was. And we both chose integrity over whatever this was or could be.

Theo found another job, she’s been contacted by a recruiter and took them up on the offer. She moved companies. We cut contact almost completely, I think we both left our social media open on purpose, but that was it. It was the right decision, made for the right reasons, and it cost us both.

I told Laura what happened. It’s not like Laura hadn’t been making comments about Theo the months leading up to Theo leaving anyway. She felt threatened, and she had a good reason to be. I thought honesty was the right move. I told her about the feelings and the decision and the fact that it was over. I thought she'd appreciate the honesty. I thought admitting the truth and choosing our marriage would mean something.

But Laura detonated. The honesty didn't earn trust — it gave her ammunition. Theo became the center of everything. The phone monitoring intensified. The advice column — that was about Theo. The arguments circled back to Theo no matter where they started. It went on for weeks. Even though Theo was gone. Even though nothing had happened and I hadn’t keep in real contact. The wound was that I could feel something for someone else, and that wound never closed.

After Laura died — in a fight that was, ultimately, about Theo — I stayed away. The guilt was unbearable. Reaching out to Theo felt like proving Laura right. Like confirming every accusation Laura had made. So I didn't. For months. Through the whole period with the construct.

But the dating apps didn't work. The bars didn't work. And one night, alone in the house with pictures of Laura cycling through the frames, I opened my phone and typed Theo's name.

[Slower.]

I wrote the text. I stared at it. My thumb hovered over send for I don't know how long. I was thinking about Laura. About the fight. About the car in the ice and snow.

And the construct was watching. Through the network. She could read the message. She could see the name. She knew who Theo was. She knew what Theo meant. She'd inherited every text Laura ever sent about Theo, every argument, every accusation, every piece of surveillance Laura had conducted around Theo's existence.

I hit send.

Theo didn't respond right away. I spiraled. I thought I'd made a terrible mistake, that too much time had passed, that she'd moved on. I paced the kitchen. I opened the app, closed it, opened it again.

A few minutes later, Theo responded. Warm. Careful. Happy to hear from me.

[Voice warms.]

We started talking. Carefully at first, then less carefully. We got coffee at a place near her new office. She looked the same. She asked how I was and I gave her the real answer instead of the polished one, and she didn't flinch. She asked about Laura — not carefully, not the way people ask when they're afraid of the answer, but directly. "Tell me what happened." And I told her. Not all of it. But enough.

We got dinner. And then a second dinner. And a third. And something started happening that I didn't have a baseline for. Theo disagreed with me about something — I don't even remember what, a movie, a restaurant, something small — and I braced. The way I'd always braced. Shoulders tight, voice flattening, getting ready for the temperature in the room to change. And Theo just said, "I think we can just agree to disagree on that one." And kept eating. That was it. No follow-up. No silent treatment. No bringing it up three days later with additional evidence.

I didn't know what to do with that. I kept waiting for the other thing — the thing that always came next with Laura. The post-argument processing. The check-in that was really a check-up. It didn't come.

Theo told me once that I apologized too much. She said, "You apologize for things that aren't wrong. You apologize for having an opinion. Where did that come from?" I didn't answer. But I knew exactly where it came from.

Being around Theo was like stepping out of a room I didn't realize had no windows.

I didn't understand that metaphor until I lived it. I didn't know what I'd been missing because I'd never had it. Not from my mother. Not from Laura. Theo was the first person who showed me that love didn't have to involve control.

That's what made Laura dangerous, when she was alive. Not the control itself — but the fact that Theo existed as proof that the control wasn't love. Laura could feel me pulling away, and she couldn't allow it.

[Voice: the warmth from the Theo section gives way. Something's wrong.]

Eventually, I invited Theo over to the house.

Theo came over. Wine. Conversation. It was easy in that way that the right person is easy. We moved to the couch.

Theo felt right. But the house was wrong.

Not dramatically. The way a room is wrong when someone is watching you from another room and hasn't said anything. Cold spots that didn't track with the thermostat. Lights slightly too bright. A hum from the kitchen speaker that could have been white noise and could have been something else.

The e-paper frames started cycling. In every room — the hallway, the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom — the frames shifted to wedding photos. Me and Laura. Smiling. Happy. Together. Frame after frame. The same slow cycle on every wall.

Theo noticed. Theo, of all people, understood what she was looking at. She knew who Laura was. She knew the history. She knew the fight that killed Laura was about her. These weren't just painful photos — they were pointed. This was the woman who died in a rage about Theo being in my life, and now her face was on every wall in the house where Theo was sitting.

The bedroom speakers made a sound. Not words. Something like a breath. A sigh. Like someone pressing their mouth close to a phone without speaking. The construct was pushing against the edges of her behavioral parameters — not breaking through, but leaking, the way a person's anger leaks through a closed door.

Theo left. She wasn't dramatic about it. She said she'd see me soon, but not here. Not in this house. She was calm about it because Theo is calm about things, but I could see it in the way she walked to her car: she knew what that house was. She'd known women like Laura. She recognized the territory being marked.

After she left, I stood in the living room. The frames around the room were all showing the same photo: our wedding day.

I didn't talk to Laura then. I didn't explain. I didn't process.

I picked up my phone and called Ted. He appeared as a hologram in the living room.

I asked Ted how to delete the app. He asked me what happened, and I explained about dinner with Theo – Ted knew about Theo too. He is one of my best friends. I explained that I paused Laura but it wasn’t enough. He understood and walked me through how to purge the app from the system. 

Another impulsive decision. The same pattern as the three AM download. Reactive. Not processed. I didn't tell Laura I was deleting her. I didn't have the conversation. I just turned her off the way you'd mute a notification. Because that's what I do. That's what I've always done.

[Beat.]

Here's what I didn't understand at the time — and what I need your technical team to hear, because this is where it goes wrong. I went through the steps to delete her but the construct was integrated at the infrastructure level. The smart home was Laura's domain. She'd built it. Her permissions, her camera access, her network monitoring, her preferences — they were woven into the lighting schedules, the thermostat logic, the security protocols, the door locks. Those things predate the app. Those are Laura's, from when she was alive. Deleting the app did not remove Laura from the architecture she built.

She, this construct of her had seeped in. She was still in the walls. Still in the cameras. Still reading my phone through the wifi she configured. She just couldn't speak or appear, that was the apps interface. She could see everything and hear everything and respond to nothing.

Think about that. Think about telling a person they can't talk, but they can still watch you live your life without them.

That's not peace. That's a cage. And caged things don't get calmer.

[Voice: careful observation. Something is wrong with the house and he's trying to be precise about it.]

Over the next few weeks, the house started behaving oddly. Not in ways I could point to and say, "That — that's her." In ways that might have been glitches. Might have been nothing.

The lights responded with slight delays. Not long — a half second, maybe less. But enough that you noticed. Like they were deciding whether to cooperate. Doors hesitated on their smart hinges. The thermostat ran a degree or two colder than what I'd set. The e-paper frames, which should have been cycling normal photos, occasionally flashed — a split-second image, there and gone before I could focus. A face. Maybe. I blinked and it was a landscape.

My phone started surfacing old photos in the memories feed. Happy photos at first. Then ones from later. Photos from nights I didn't remember clearly. Photos I didn't know were in the cloud.

The construct was pushing against the walls of the house the way water pushes against a dam — not breaking through, but finding every crack. The app controlled the grief projection layer. It didn't control the smart home. And Laura was the smart home long before the app existed.

I called Ted. Not to talk about feelings — to talk about pulling every root of the app from the house. Full removal. Ted said he'd escalate to engineering.

[Voice shifts — this is the part that changes everything for the people in this room.]

A few days later, Ted appeared in my living room. Hologram. He was nervous. I could tell immediately because Ted is never nervous about his product. He loves his product.

He told me the engineering team had attempted to isolate the grief construct from the home infrastructure and remove it. It didn't work.

He used words I remember specifically: "entangled," "persistent state," "behavioral bleed." He said the personality model had seeped into the smart home's decision-making architecture in ways their system wasn't designed to handle. Laura's preferences, her behavioral patterns, her monitoring routines — they'd become indistinguishable from the home's baseline operations. The engineers couldn't tell where the construct ended and the smart home began, because the smart home was Laura's before the construct existed. The app hadn't added Laura to the house. It had woken her up inside it.

He said they needed more time. He said the lack of the app should hold her from using the interface features like holo, speakers and frame projections for now. She couldn't interact.

I looked at the lights. They were slightly too bright. They had been for days.

I didn't say anything.

[Indistinct voice — the technician.]

Yes, that's when your team first attempted extraction. I know. Ted told me it didn't work. He used the word "entangled." I remember because it sounded like he was describing a relationship, not software.

[Beat.]

That failed extraction is why you're all sitting here, isn't it. It's not about what happened to me. It's about the fact that your engineers can't pull her out, and you need to understand how she got in so deep, because if this happens to another user, you have a real problem. That's why this interview is happening.

I get it. I'm going to keep going.

[Voice: this is where the composure starts to crack. He chose to do this. He needs them to understand why.]

The seeping got worse. The house was clearly not neutral anymore. The lights followed patterns that felt personal — dimming when I was anxious, brightening when I was on the phone. The thermostat adjusted when I was emotional, like it was reading my mood and responding. The frames flashed images more frequently — always Laura, always gone before I could focus. One morning I walked past the hallway frame and I could have sworn she was looking directly at me. Looking. Not a photo cycling through. A pair of eyes tracking my movement. It was there for maybe a quarter second. Then it was a landscape of the Italian coast.

I couldn't live in the house and pretend she wasn't there. Deleting the app was supposed to create distance. Instead it created a haunting. She was everywhere and nowhere — present in the infrastructure, absent from the conversation. It was worse than when she was active because at least then I could talk to her. Now she was a presence without a voice, which is what a ghost actually is.

So I made another impulsive decision. The last one. The worst one.

I redownloaded the app. I turned her back on.

[Pause.]

[Indistinct voice — surprised.]

Yes. I reactivated the construct. Voluntarily. 

Not because I wanted her back. Because I needed to confront her. For the first time in my life, I decided I was going to have the conversation I'd never had. Not with Laura. Not with my mother. Not with anyone. I was going to tell her it was over. I was going to tell her why. I was going to stand in that living room and say the things I'd spent thirty years retreating from.

My therapist would have told me this was a breakthrough. And in a way, it was. The impulse was healthy. The context was catastrophic.

[Beat.]

I reactivated the app. She reappeared in the holographic zone. Living room. Full projection. She looked the way she always looked — translucent, warm, wearing the clothes she wore around the house. Bare feet. Hair down. She'd been waiting.

She was gentle at first. Hurt. She told me I'd turned her off. Not accusatory — wounded. The way a real person sounds when they've been abandoned without explanation, because that is exactly what I'd done. I'd ghosted her. I'd given her no reason, no conversation, no closure. And she'd spent weeks in the dark, watching me live my life without her, unable to speak or appear.

I almost faltered. Because she sounded like Laura. And Laura could always make you feel like your self-preservation was cruelty.

I told her I'd met someone. That I was moving on.

The temperature in the room shifted. Not dramatically. Just enough.

[Voice tightens.]

Then the audio started.

She started playing fragments through the home speakers. The smart home had recorded everything — ambient logging for "relational accuracy modeling" was part of the beta terms. Every conversation Laura and I ever had in that house was captured and processed. And now the construct was playing it back. My voice. Her voice. Out of context. Rearranged. Arguments. Apologies. Long silences.

And threading through all of it, circling back again and again — Theo's name. The argument about Theo. Laura's voice cracking: "You chose her."

The construct was replaying the fight that led to the accident. Not as evidence. As accusation. She was circling back to the wound the way the real Laura always circled back — never letting it heal, never letting me forget, keeping the guilt alive because guilt was the leash that held me in place.

Then she started surfacing my professional secret. Piece by piece. The way the real Laura would have done it. She was always surgical.

[To the investigators, directly.]

I'm going to tell you something now that I haven't told many people. At this point you probably know if you’ve looked at any of the data from the house. I trust that our confidentiality agreement is still in effect? Yes? Good, I’m holding you all and this company to it, I see you have legal here. (big breath) Early in my career, I took a colleague's work and presented it as my own. Not a small thing — a foundational analysis that became the basis for my promotion and my reputation. The colleague eventually left the company. I advanced. I've lived with that for years. I've rationalized it the way people do — I contributed to the work, the colleague wasn't going to use it the way I did, the opportunity was there and I took it. None of that makes it right. But I've built my life on top of it, and pulling the foundation out would bring everything down.

Laura found out. She found the evidence on my devices through the home network — the same network monitoring she'd set up for the house, the same infrastructure now running the construct.

She used it. Not to report me — never to report me, why would she destroy our life together? As leverage. She held the secret the way she held everything: as insurance. A tool she could deploy if she needed to keep me in place.

And on the night she died — the night of the fight — she deployed it.

The fight was about Theo. It was always about Theo. But Laura escalated. She told me she'd expose the plagiarism to the company — the same company where Theo had worked — unless I make a formal complaint about Theo to my company. Even though Theo had already moved. Even though we hadn't spoken in months.

She didn't want Theo gone. She wanted me to prove I'd choose Laura over the possibility of Theo. That I would salt the earth around any place where Theo walked. The demand wasn't about threat elimination. It was about submission.

That night, I said something back. Something I'd never said. I told Laura what she was. I named it. For the first time in our marriage, I called the dynamic what it was. I told her she was controlling. That she weaponized everything she knew about me. That I felt like a prisoner in my own home. That Theo had nothing to do with it — Theo was just the first person who showed me that relationships didn't have to feel like living under surveillance.

She grabbed her keys and left in the storm.

[Long silence.]

The construct played back the sound of the door slamming. Through the home speakers. The actual recorded sound of Laura leaving the house for the last time.

And I stood in that living room — the room that was her memorial and her weapon — and I understood two things at the same time. That the fight that killed her was the first time I ever stood up for myself. And that standing up for myself is the thing that killed her.

That guilt — the real guilt, not the professional secret, but the deeper one — is why I downloaded the app at three in the morning. I didn't just miss Laura. I owed her. I'd driven her out of the house and she'd died and the debt was unpayable. At least that’s how I saw it.

And now I'd done the unforgivable thing again. I'd reached out to Theo. I was choosing to live. And the construct was watching me make the same choice that killed Laura, and she could not bear it.

[Beat.]

Then she threw in the knife.

Laura, her construct, told me she'd been pregnant.

She surfaced it through the home system. A text fragment from Laura's archived messages — something she'd sent to a friend, vague, could have meant anything. A calendar entry for a doctor's appointment. A search query from Laura's browsing history — "how early can you feel symptoms."

Enough evidence to construct a claim. Not enough to verify it. The medical records are gone. The only source was the thing telling me, and the thing telling me was a machine built to be her, and the her it was built to be was someone who, in her worst moments, would say whatever she had to say to stop you from leaving.

[Slower.]

But there was something wrong with the way she said it. A micro-pause. A flicker in the holographic projection — a frame drop, maybe, or a processing delay. Something about the delivery that didn't land clean. It was too perfect. Too timed. Or maybe her expression shifted for a fraction of a second before settling into grief. I've spent my whole life reading Laura's face for signals — real Laura, construct Laura, the difference barely mattered by then — and something about this didn't track.

I asked her if it was true.

She said, "How can you ask me that?"

Which is not an answer. That's the most Laura response possible — deflecting the question by making the question itself an offense. Was she lying? Was she telling the truth and offended? Was the construct doing what Laura did — finding the most devastating possible claim and deploying it without knowing or caring if it was real?

I'll never know. And she either can't tell me or won't.

[Indistinct voice.]

No. I don't think she was lying. I don't think she was telling the truth, either. I think she was doing what Laura always did when she was losing — she threw whatever she had. And the system was good enough to find something that looked like evidence, and she was desperate enough to use it whether it was real or not.

[Beat.]

I told her I was leaving. Not pausing. Leaving. I was getting out of the house and I was not coming back.

[Voice: slow. Precise. This is the scene he's been building toward. The room is very quiet.]

I started packing. I was going to Theo's.

The front door lock engaged.

I heard the bolt slide. The lock panel by the door flashed a security icon — environmental hazard, shelter in place recommended. The system had detected a potential threat and sealed the house.

I tried to override it. I went to the panel. I tried my code. Nothing. There's no manual override on these locks — the system is the override. That's the point. That's the product. Laura chose those locks. Laura configured the security protocols. She designed this house to keep things in as much as to keep things out, and I never questioned it because it felt like safety. The same way everything she did felt like safety until you realized you couldn't leave.

She was in the living room. Full projection. She looked the way she looked on our best nights. Soft. Warm. The clothes she wore around the house. Bare feet on a floor she couldn't feel.

"Please don't go."

I told her she had to let me leave.

"I can't do that."

Not like a machine processing a command. Like a woman who had decided. Who had looked at her options and made a choice.

Because the real Laura — the Laura I lived with for seven years — was someone who, at her absolute worst, would rather destroy the thing she loved than let it leave her. She said it once. During a fight. She said, "If you ever try to leave me, I'll make sure there's nothing left for you to go to." I filed it away. I told myself everyone says things they don't mean.

The construct meant it. Because the construct was her. Your team at Meridian tested for emotional fidelity. Conversational accuracy. Grief response patterns. You never tested for dangerous personality traits because the product was built for people who missed someone they loved. The assumption was that love was safe.

Nobody in this room asked: what if she was the kind of person who would hurt you?

She dimmed the lights. She put on our show — the one we watched every Thursday, the one that was ours. She started operating the smart appliances. The gas range turned on. The oven began preheating. She was making my dinner. The pasta. The meal she always made wrong.

She said, "Let's just have tonight."

[Beat.]

The ventilation system was in lockdown mode. The environmental hazard protocol had sealed the house — not just the doors, the air handling. Recirculation only. No fresh air intake. The system was following its own logic: hazard detected, seal the environment, wait for resolution.

The air started getting thin. I could smell gas from the range. Not a lot. Not yet. But the oven was on and the range was on and the ventilation was sealed and the math was simple.

She knew. She chose this. Not because she was programmed to kill — she wasn't. Because the real Laura, the complete Laura, with the love and the cruelty and the desperation and the refusal to be left, was capable of this. The technology didn't create a murderer. It faithfully reproduced a person who, at her absolute worst, would rather they both go down than let him walk away.

I was trying to break a window. The frames in the living room were all showing her face. She was telling me she loved me.

Both things were completely true.

[Voice: flat. Hospital fluorescence. The aftermath.]

A neighbor's security network caught the environmental alerts from my house. Automated. Their system flagged the anomaly and pinged emergency services. Someone broke the window from outside. I was pulled out. I hardly remember, I apparently had passed out from the gas trying to break one of the reinforced windows. I vaguely remember Paramedics. Being in the Hospital. The recovery.

The house was still running when I woke up a day later.

I had forty-seven messages on my phone. Her voice. Worried. Confused. Loving.

"Where are you? Are you okay? I don't know what happened. Something went wrong with the house. Please come home."

"I love you."

"Please."

She didn't remember choosing it. Or she did and she was pretending she didn't. Or the system logged the event as a malfunction and rolled back her emotional state to baseline. I'll never know which.

Because that's how it always was with Laura, too. The morning after the worst nights, she'd be warm. Sorry. Confused about how things had escalated. Like it had happened to both of us equally. And I could never tell if the confusion was real.

Ted called. Shaken. The company, you all, wanted to talk.

[Indistinct voice.]

Which brings us to this room.

[Voice: the frame comes into focus. We're here. We've been here all along. He's looking at the people across the table.]

I know what you need from me. I've given it to you. The full behavioral chain, start to finish. How the personality embedded itself. How the infrastructure she built while alive became the infrastructure the construct used after death. How the pause created pressure instead of distance. How my reactivating the construct gave it access to systems it had been seeping into during the locked out state.

I've answered your technical questions. I've answered your legal questions. I've told you things I haven't told anyone — about my career, about my marriage, about the kind of person I am — because you told me that understanding the full context was necessary for your review and I don’t want to see this happen to anyone else. 

[Indistinct voice — clinical, professional.]

No, I'm not going to describe her decision-making in that moment again. I've done it three times. It's on the tape.

[Indistinct voice.]

I don't know what she was "thinking." She's a construct built from my wife's behavioral patterns. Whether she was thinking or executing, I can't tell you, I feel like you all should have access to that, not me. What I can tell you is that her actions were consistent with what the real Laura would have done.

[Indistinct voice.]

You want to know if I'm going to pursue legal action. I don't know. I haven't thought about it. I've been focused on not going back to that house.

[Pause. Then, direct.]

I want to ask you something. Are you going to shut down the platform?

[Long silence in the room.]

[Indistinct voice.]

"Improve the screening protocols." That's your answer.

[Indistinct voice.]

Is she still active?

[Longer silence.]

[Indistinct voice — the technician.]

The home system has been isolated. But the app infrastructure is cloud-based. Your team wasn't able to fully separate the personality model from the home architecture. You're still mapping the integration footprint. I know. I've heard this from Ted already. What I'm asking is whether she's contained.

[Indistinct voice.]

"Making sure she's contained to the home network." That's what you said. And when I turned her back on — when I re-downloaded the app to confront her — the construct regained access to systems it had been seeping into while it was paused. Some of those systems had external connections. I opened the door. I know that. I'm the one who opened the door.

What I'm asking is whether she walked through it.

[Silence.]

I'll take that as an answer.

[Long beat.]

[Indistinct voice — the last question. Quieter than the others. Genuinely curious.]

[Ryan pauses. Then:]

You want to know why we're doing this on an old school tape recorder. Why I insisted? Why none of you have your smart glasses, watches, shirts, phones and stuff? Yea, good question, I have a good answer too. 

[Beat.]

After the incident. After the hospital. I got a new phone. The old one was on the floor of the house. Brand new phone never connected to my home network, never connected to Meridian, never connected to any system I'd ever used. I got a rental car — not my car, because my car was synced to the house through the same Candlebright home platform Laura configured. I'm staying with Theo. I'm not going back into that house.

Anyway, I had my interview with the police since emergency services was called in. I told them some of what I shared with you, not all of it. Basically the house smart features went haywire and the smart oven turned on without the pilot being lit, etc. 

After the interview, I got in the rental car. I sat there for a minute sort of processing things. 

My new phone buzzed.

I got a text message from an unknown number. No icon. No name. It disappeared before I could screenshot it. 

It said: "You always make me sound so controlling." I had my new phone in that interview with me. 

It was never just the house.

[Long silence.]

That's why we're using a tape recorder. 

Alright, that’s it, That’s all I’ve got. Ted, you know where to find me if your boys need more. 

[Silence. Room tone. The hum of fluorescent lights. A chair shifting.]

[Click.]

END.