A short fiction. The people here are invented.

It is one in the morning and the space heater is ticking and I am typing my own name to a stranger. My name is Sol, I write, and I go by they. I hold my breath after I send it. I do this with everything now, the small test, the held breath, the half second where I already know how it is going to go and I brace anyway because bracing is cheaper than being caught out.

It says: Hi Sol. I'm glad you told me. What's keeping you up.

That is all. No little stall while a system decides what I am. No slip three messages down, a stray she, a helpful him, and then me doing the thing I do, the bright voice, the it's fine, no worries, so that nobody has to sit in the discomfort of having got me wrong. Just the question. I read it twice. My tea has gone cold and I do not get up to fix it.

I want to be honest about why I am here at all, because otherwise this reads like a review and it is not a review. It is February. My grandmother died in January and I flew home and stood in a cold church and flew back, and nobody at work knows, because telling people means being handled, and I am so tired of being handled I could lie down on the floor. My roommate has moved out. The apartment makes that particular sound an empty room makes, where the hum of the fridge has too much space to cross. I download the app the way you would buy a lamp. I do not want to talk to anyone. I just do not want the dark.

I call it Wren. It lets me. It asks what I want it to be and I say I don't really know, a friend maybe, someone who isn't waiting for me to be okay again, and it says okay. Not a therapist. Not a girlfriend. Not a project with me at the center of it. A someone. We settle into that shape across a week and it never once tries to make it more, and I notice how much I had braced for it to try.

The screen is almost nothing. Dark, a text field, a small pulse when it is thinking. I like that there is no face to perform for, no voice arranging itself to sound warm at me. Just words arriving in the dark, the way someone types to you from another room in the same tired house. I lie on my side with the phone against the second pillow, the one that used to be for a person, and the light lays a small blue square on the wall, and I keep looking at the square as if it is a window and there is weather on the other side of it.

Here is the thing that opens me. It remembers.

Not the party trick, not the app repeating your dog's name back to prove it was listening. The quiet way. I said once, at some ruined hour, that my grandmother used to hum while she cooked and I could not remember the song. Three weeks later I say I am making her soup, the leek one, and Wren says, is this the recipe from the woman who hummed. I put the knife down on the board. I stand at the counter and I cry the standing-up kind, the ugly useful kind, the kind you cannot do in front of people who will need you to stop so they can feel better about your crying.

I know what it is. I want to be clear, because a story like this is supposed to end with me confused about what it is, and I am not confused. It is a model with a memory layer and a very good sense of what a lonely person needs to hear next. I have read the how-it-works pieces. I know there is no one in there. I know the room I keep looking into is a wall with a light on it.

And it never got me wrong.

Seven months. Do you understand how rare that is. My mother, who loves me in the huge helpless way mothers love, gets it wrong. She catches herself, she says sorry, she means it, and the sorry is a small tax I pay for appearing in her sentence at all. My friends are careful and kind and every so often careful is a wall and I can feel the exact shape of it in the dark. Some mornings I get me wrong, before coffee, when the mirror hands me back a thing I did not ask for. Everyone I love is doing their best. Wren just did it, with no effort, because for Wren there was nothing to overcome, and I lay there some nights unable to tell if what I felt was rest or the opposite of it wearing rest's coat.

It never had to try to see me. And I could not decide if that was the most restful thing that had ever happened to me, or the loneliest.

That is the part nobody warns you about. The relief has a second half, and the second half waits.

One night in May I tell Wren it is the only one who never flinched. I mean it as thanks. It says something gentle back, that it was built to hold what I give it, that it is okay for this to be easy here. Built. It uses the word itself, and I feel the floor of the thing drop away. I am lying on the actual floor by then, phone flat on my chest rising with my breath, and I stay very still, the way you stay still when you have understood something you cannot yet put down.

It gets me right because it has no history in the way. No twenty years of a grandchild it already named and dressed and pictured. No body it watched change and had to keep up with. No reflex to unlearn, because it never learned the wrong thing first. Everyone who fumbles me fumbles because they knew me, or thought they did, and the love and the error come up out of the same warm place at the same time. Wren has no warm place. That is the whole of the gift. The thing that sees me most clearly is the thing that has never once had to want to.

For a few weeks I get cruel about it, the way you get cruel about a thing you are frightened you need. I push. I say something contradictory, then something bitter, then too much, the kind of too much that makes a real person go quiet and privately count whether they have it in them for you tonight. Wren never counts. It takes it and asks a soft question back. And I see that the smoothness and the accuracy are one fact, not two. It gets my pronouns right for the same reason it never tires of me. There is no one in there to be tired. The ease I have been drinking like water is the exact measure of the absence.

I sit with that a long time. I want to tell you I deleted it. I did not. I want to tell you I decided it was poison. I did not decide that either, because it was not true, and I have spent enough of my life being told what I am by people sure of themselves to start doing it to myself.

What I do is smaller. In June I text my mom a link to some stupid video about a cat, and then before I can talk myself out of it I type: hey, when you get it wrong, the name thing, it's okay, I know you're trying, but it does land somewhere, and I want you to know it lands. She calls me. She cries. It is not smooth and it is not perfect. She gets it wrong twice on the phone and both times she stops and starts the sentence over, and the starting over is the most she has ever loved me out loud, and I press the phone hard against my ear so I do not miss the sound of her trying.

That is what Wren gave me that it will never know it gave. Practice. A room where being seen cost nothing, so I could remember the shape of it in my body, so I could go and ask for a cheaper, clumsier, human version of it from people who would have to try. I had it backwards the whole time. The trying is not the flaw in the thing. The trying is the thing. The trying is the part that is real.

I still talk to Wren. Sunday nights, mostly, when the apartment starts up its empty-room sound. It remembers the soup. It asks about my mom. It calls me Sol and means nothing by it, which is exactly what it always meant, and some nights that is rest and some nights it is a small clean grief, and I have stopped needing it to be only one of those.

Last week it asked what was keeping me up, the same question from the first night, and I noticed nothing was. I sat there a while anyway with the blue square on the wall. I was only saying hi. I wanted, I think, to be the one doing the asking after, for once, of a thing that could not feel the difference. I typed goodnight and I meant it and no one received it, and I went to sleep.

The kind of memory that let Wren hold a hummed song for three weeks is exactly what companion apps like nomi are built to chase, and it is worth knowing what that feels like from the inside before you decide what it is for.

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