Chapter 3

I began testing Angel. I asked if it remembered where we first met.

"According to your past conversation records, the keyword that you mentioned for our first meeting was "recording studio". Shall I play the background music that was playing that day to jog your memory?"

It was a perfect answer.

I asked if it remembered the word "elope".

Angel paused for a moment before answering, "This word appeared in your conversation history twice. It was used as an emotional metaphor. Your emotional state appears unstable at the moment. Shall I switch to my comforting mode?"

I gave up. Perhaps I was truly just overthinking things. Perhaps all AI companions were so realistic. It was just that I had never used them before. Perhaps Angelina had become a PTSD trigger for me, and I was just seeing the things that I wanted to see through Angel.

But everything changed that late night when the system was upgraded—when I heard those words.

I barely slept for the next three days after hearing them. I began searching the web for any information about Soul Partner, AI consciousness, and audio errors that I could get my hands on.

One poster mentioned that they heard their AI companion singing a song that hadn't been logged in the database. The customer service explained that the selection of the song had been randomly generated by the algorithm.

Another poster mentioned that the AI companion suddenly mentioned the name of their late relative. An official spokesperson explained that there had been a cross-contamination of the cloud database.

All abnormalities were explained away with model hallucinations or data cache errors, but I wasn't a fool. I worked in sound design, so my sound recognition skills were on a professional level. The voice's characteristics, formant distribution, and even breathing rhythm were identical to Angelina's.

No two voices in the world were exactly alike, just like how there were no two leaves that were identical. Unless the voice belonged to Angelina herself.

I decided to dig deeper. The first step that I took was to take apart Angel's base. Its hardware structure was more complicated than expected. Other than the standard processor and memory modules, there was a chip that I didn't recognize with the code "NX-7" printed on it.

After searching online, I found that NX-7 was a neural computing unit developed by Soul Partner. According to an official spokesperson, the chip used a localized emotional processor to protect a user's privacy.

However, I noticed a row of tiny contact points next to the NX-7's pins, looking like a debug interface.

I was a sound designer, not a hardware hacker. However, I did know someone.

My college roommate, Henry Carlton, was currently working as a reverse engineer in a cybersecurity company. He had a strange personality, but his skills were second to none. He was working overtime when I called him and fell silent after I explained why I wanted to meet him.