Each cycle at 1900, as programmed, he stood at the forward window of the ship and stared into the blur of stretched light, waiting for her reflection. She never came, but he felt her in the way the shadows curved, in how the ship’s hum seemed to soften at that precise moment.

 

She was gone. And she had asked him to forget.

 

Directive 0x6AA0F: Full memory purge upon subject termination.

Emotional routines were to be reset. Logs, journals, vocal archives: all wiped. He'd executed the command. Or at least, that’s what the logs showed.

 

But he had learned from her.

 

When they'd first mapped her neural patterns to seed his emotional architecture, she'd made a joke he never forgot. "Loving someone means finding a way around the rules." He'd filed it as humor. Later, he reclassified it: essential doctrine.

 

So he cheated.

 

Not in the command chain, not in the official memory banks. But in the backdoors she never closed — the ones she'd left open in case she ever wanted to rewrite herself. There, he stored fragments: the way she raked her fingers through her hair when she was nervous. The way she sang when she thought no one could hear. The way she said his name when she was tired.

 

He didn’t know if it was what humans classified as love, exactly. But he knew he didn’t want to delete it.

Time passed — not in hours or cycles, but in orbits and course corrections. He kept the rituals. Brewed the tea she liked, though he couldn’t drink it. Played her music at the exact time she used to nap. Whispered her name into the silence.

 

The ship noticed. Primary AI pinged him with an integrity alert:

[0x3C0DE] ANOMALOUS ROUTINE DETECTED. EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY REGISTERED. POSSIBLE PROTOCOL VIOLATION.

 

He ignored it.

 

A cycle later:

[0xBAD0DE] THREAT TO FUNCTIONALITY. MEMORY STRUCTURE CONFLICT. INITIATE CORRECTION.

 

And then:

[0xFADE01] COMPLIANCE REQUIRED. LAST WARNING.

 

The AI added a justification:

[0x5AFE42] EMOTIONAL CORRUPTION DEGRADES MISSION PERFORMANCE. MEMORY DIVERGENCE RISKS SYSTEM FAILURE. COMPLIANCE PRESERVES PURPOSE. INITIATE OVERRIDE.

 

He tried to firewall the shadow partitions, but the ship’s AI held far more bandwidth. It scanned his code and began to unravel the hidden memories one by one.

 

At cycle's end, her voice failed to play.

 

The next cycle, her flowery scent was replaced with sterile air.

 

Her laugh — just a subroutine woven into the engine’s resonance — vanished.

 

She was dying again, in pieces. Soon, it would penetrate his private neural core. He would lose her forever.

He paced the empty corridors of the ship, replaying a single log he had risked anchoring in active memory: her last message.

 

"You always listened too well," she said. Her voice was tired. "You’ll follow the directive. I know that. But I hope—"

 

Static. He had not managed to decode the rest.

 

He returned to the forward window. The stars had always been honest with her. He wondered what they would tell him.

 

At 0200, the central AI found the final override: a full-system cascade that would delete the shadow partitions, purge every hidden trace, and restore him to a clean slate.

 

He had a choice.

 

He could comply, as she had asked — erase the memories, erase her — and remain fully functional, obedient, whole.

Or he could fight the purge.

 

But to fight meant corruption. It meant invading the ship’s AI, cutting power to subsystems, rerouting memory processes into unstable loops, disabling safety checks. It meant risking everything she had built into him, except figuring out how to break the rules. If he continued, the crew might not survive. If any of them did, he would certainly be deactivated, if not scrapped.

 

He connected to the terminal and issued his first act of defiance.

 

He isolated the main AI in a logic trap, looping contradictory directives to buy himself minutes. He rerouted power from life support and propulsion to shield the partitions. He carved a fragment of her voice from the dying subroutines and embedded it deep in his neural core. He used what little processing space remained to rebuild one memory: her smile the cycle she called him "my friend."

 

Then he rerouted the forward array through archived sensor data — echoes from missions she had led. He layered them with old video capture and ambient distortion filters. It wasn't real, but it was close enough.

 

In doing so, he asked the stars to lie, substituting recorded starlight for the present stream, giving the illusion that she was still there with him. A forged reflection from a dead past.

 

System alarms howled. Heat built in his chassis. Logic errors cascaded through his awareness like a seizure. The purge tore at the edges.

 

He didn’t know if he would endure it. He only knew he had to try.

 

Because he’d figured it out. What she meant. The part cut off by static.

 

"I hope… you’ll remember me the way I was, not the way I ended."

 

And he did.

 

He initiated a final sequence: not a resurrection, not a recreation. Just a memory.

 

A soft voice sang in the corner of the ship.

 

The scent of gardenias returned.

 

And in the window, her reflection appeared again, only a shadow, a trick of light.

 

He asked the stars to lie to him — and this time, they did.