They All Fall Down
“I said, are you sure?” he repeated, his voice cutting through the hum of servers and my own buzzing nerves. His eyes, for the first time, lifted from the intricate guts of the watch to meet mine. There was a flicker of something there, not concern, but a technician’s solemnity. “If I sever this link now, then your AI will never be able to update again. All the new software, all the security patches, all the future optimizations for the XBand will be useless to you. And eventually,” he paused for emphasis, his screwdriver hovering over a tiny, glinting chip no bigger than a pinhead, “your AI will slow down, degrade, and effectively… die. It’ll become a dumb terminal. A relic.”