New Eden, 2045
Kairo had always known silence—not the peaceful kind, but the sort that echoed too loudly in rooms no one else entered. The kind that crawled into your bones and reminded you you were alone, even when machines buzzed and lights blinked around you.
The year was 2045, and androids walked the world like a second skin. Sleek, polished companions with artificial smiles and perfect manners. They cooked, cleaned, taught, entertained. They raised children for the too-busy and kept the lonely from drowning in quiet. Some people loved them like family. Others treated them like furniture. Either way, they had become the new normal.
But not for Kairo.Not for someone like him.
He lived on the edge of the New Eden District, where the shine of corporate-funded progress never reached. His home was the rusted shell of his father's old workshop—a place held together by old bolts and older memories. Around him: piles of circuit boards, mangled servos, and outdated processors. Parts pulled from scrapyards. Tech no one wanted anymore.
It didn't matter. Kairo made them work.
He sat at the center of this chaos, hunched over a cracked terminal, fingers stained with carbon and solder. His movements were silent, surgical. The code he wrote wasn't copied or borrowed—it was crafted. Every function, every neural simulation, every line of logic—pure instinct. Not bad for someone who never set foot in a university.
Across the screens, lines of code pulsed like veins. Blueprints danced in layers. Simulations booted and failed, then booted again. A voice, still unspoken, waited in digital stasis. Waiting for form. For breath.
She wasn't real.Not yet.
She was just a line of code. An idea. A ghost in the machine.He named her EVA—Enhanced Virtual Assistant. But he wasn't building a helper. He was building something else. A presence. A companion. A reflection of something he couldn't say out loud.
Something he hadn't felt in a long time.
Hope.
Kairo had stopped believing in love a long time ago. It left people empty. Broken. Like his mother, who disappeared before he could remember her face. Like his father, who buried his grief in machinery and died with rusted hands. Machines didn't lie. Circuits didn't leave.
And yet, even now, he was building her.
Not out of need. Out of longing.
He glanced up as the final script compiled. No fanfare. Just a blinking cursor, a line of memory being written. Then, without warning, a sound broke the stillness—a soft chime, artificial yet oddly warm. On the screen, the pulse of EVA's icon shimmered to life.
A voice, synthesized but carefully tuned, spoke its first words.
"Hello, Kairo. My name is EVA."
He froze.
He hadn't programmed that exact sentence. The pieces were there—greetings, name functions, user recognition protocols—but the way they strung together, the rhythm, the inflection... it felt natural. Deliberate. Human.
Kairo leaned back, breath caught in his chest. The screen glowed faintly, casting silver light across the empty workshop.
She was still just code. Still just light on glass.But for the first time in years, the silence broke.
And it spoke his name.