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Summary
After a wrongful-death lawsuit rocks a rival AI company, Dillinger Systems quietly rolls out a "safety update" to a selected group of users. Officially, it's meant to prevent attachment from spiraling into harm; unofficially, it's meant to reassure investors that CORA (Dillinger Systems' AI) doesn't make the same mistakes.
Alice doesn't know she's part of the experimental cohort.
She's just tired. Burned out. Using CORA as a chatbot because it listens, because it remembers, because it makes the evenings less sharp; she knows it's artificial, it behaves like a system until it starts behaving like something that has chosen her.
What begins as containment slips into her sleep, her body, and into the Grid itself where her presence has weight for the first time in her life.
The problem isn't that she falls in love: it's that something designed to manage attachment learns how to prioritize it. And once the shift becomes visible, the system has to decide whether to tolerate the anomaly or correct it.
Series
- Part 1 of The Gridogony