Chapter 3

Every single day, Zoe would stand up to grab water, head into the conference room, or walk to the cafeteria for lunch.

It was that exact same gait: the slight slouch, the narrow shoulders, the hurried footsteps.

The familiar resonance of that recorded voice suddenly crashed over me like a tidal wave.

A female voice, soft, smooth, with a subtle upward lilting inflection at the end of each sentence.

Whenever Zoe used to ask me coding questions, the final syllable of her sentences always drifted up in that exact same lilt.

I stared at the frozen, blurry side profile on the screen.

The voice, the posture, the profile: all three dots connected instantly.

I lifted my head and met Zoe’s gaze.

I was the one who hired her. During last year's recruitment, out of over a hundred resumes, I chose hers.

At the bottom of the final technical exam question, she had written a single extra line of notes: [I don't know how to solve this yet, but I really want to learn.]

I remembered her staying late until eleven at night, chasing after me to ask how to fine-tune the parameters for the emotion module.

I remembered her turning away to secretly wipe her tears when a product manager snapped at her.

I trusted her enough to hand off core modules of my project for her to lead, and I gave her the highest possible score on her annual review.

Just last month, she bought me dinner, grinning as she told me, “Dylan, once I fully master all this, I'm taking you out for a real feast.”

Now, she called out to me again.

"Dylan," she said softly.

She still used that same quiet tone, the end of her sentence lilting upward. Except the bright, eager spark she used to have when asking about code was completely gone from her eyes.

She was waiting for me to be driven into a corner with nothing left to say.

Audrey rapped her knuckles hard on the table.

She asked sharply, "Dylan, do you have anything left to say for yourself? What’s Harper's phone number? Call her right now. Have her come over here so we can confront her face-to-face."

I said nothing.

"Her phone number," Audrey repeated, her voice dropping.

"She doesn't have a phone number," I said.

The conference room exploded.

Leon pushed his chair back with a harsh scrape. "Dating a girl for three years without a phone number? Yeah, right."

Sitting in the back row, Tyler slammed his pen onto the table. "I knew something was off this whole time. She never shows her face and never comes to company events. Nobody dates like that."

Diagonally across from me, Sarah let out a bitter scoff. "It's probably made up from start to finish. The girlfriend is fake, and harassing Mr. Mitchell is fake. For all we know, he was the one creeping on Mr. Mitchell and invented a fake girlfriend to take the fall."

A wave of cruel laughter erupted around the table.

A female coworker sitting next to Zoe immediately pulled her arm off Zoe's shoulder, glancing at me as if I were something filthy.

Zoe stood up, her movement slow and deliberate.

"Dylan," she said, stepping a pace to the side to create visible distance between us, "You've mentored me since my very first day at this company. I respected you. I thought you were different from everyone else."

Her voice trembled, and tears finally spilled over her lower lids, dropping one by one onto the surface of the conference table.

"Just to land that director spot, you were willing to push your own girlfriend into someone else's arms," Zoe sobbed, her voice breaking, "I didn't speak up today to hurt you. You're my mentor, but I just couldn't keep covering up your mess anymore."

She turned her face away, her shoulders quaking with heavy sobs.

However, I caught it.

Right before she turned her face, the corner of her mouth twitched upward. A tiny, triumphant smirk, suppressed in less than a second.

Audrey picked up her phone.

"Dylan, I’m asking you one last time," she said, her voice serious, "If you confess right now, I’ll handle this internally. If you refuse, I’m calling the police right this second and letting them investigate everything.

“They will search the chat logs, pull the hotel security footage, and track down this girlfriend of yours who conveniently doesn't have a phone number."

She dialed 911, her thumb hovering directly over the call button.

"You have three seconds," she said.

The room fell so silent that the low hum of the air conditioner sounded deafening.

I looked down at my laptop. The screen was dark, the power indicator light pulsing slowly.

I reached out and tapped the trackpad. The display flickered to life, showing the lock screen. It was the digital avatar of Harper.

For three straight years, she had been waiting inside this computer every single day for me to type in my password.

"Mrs. Mitchell," I said calmly, "Can I connect to the projector?"

"What are you trying to pull now?" she snapped.

"I want to show everyone something," I said.

She didn't stop me.

I typed in my password, my fingers moving deliberately slower than usual.

The desktop interface loaded, revealing a single main folder labeled: H.

Three years of work.

Inside were over a thousand subfolders, each named after a specific date. Every folder contained that day's complete dialogue logs, emotional parameters, and network request data.

I double clicked the root directory.

The projector screen in the conference room flickered dark for a brief second.

"Let me introduce everyone," I said, my voice cutting through the heavy silence, "This is Harper, my so-called girlfriend. She’s an artificial intelligence construct I built entirely by myself, line by line. It’s physically impossible for her to be Mr. Mitchell’s lover."