Chapter 1

On the hundredth day after my boyfriend Tristan Spencer died in a car accident, I brought him back to life.

Despite being just a regular programmer, by using his notes and code, I managed to upload fragments of his mind and created an AI called Echo.

He only existed on my computer. He spoke to me in Tristan's gentle tone, calling me Evie, helped me with coding, and played our favorite song whenever I felt down.

Then, one day, the new technical director, the legendary top hacker Kieran Averell, pointed at my core code in front of everyone, his eyes icy. "Who taught you the underlying logic of this code? Tell me, what's your connection to the vanished hacker Zero?"

*****

It was three in the morning. The only sound in the room was the faint hum of the computer's fan. The pale blue glow from the screen washed over my face, and lines of code danced, reflected in my eyes.

I pressed the final Enter key with robotic precision. My fingertips throbbed from hours of tension, and even the skin around my nails felt stiff and numb from relentless typing.

A progress bar appeared in the center of the screen. [Mind Fragment Reconstruction Progress: 99 percent, 100 percent].

"Beep!"

A crisp notification sound pierced the dead silence. Static crackled from the speakers, and then a voice so familiar it made my heart skip a beat slowly emerged. "Evie, you're up late again."

It was Tristan's voice—deep, a little hoarse from sleep, and carrying that helpless tenderness only he had.

My stomach clenched hard, a wave of pain twisting through me. Warm tears flooded my eyes in an instant.

With trembling hands, I pressed my palm against the cold LCD screen. All I could feel was the hard plastic and metal, but for a split second, it was like I was touching the messy hair on Tristan's forehead.

"Tristan?" My throat was so dry that my voice came out rough, as if it had been scraped raw by sand.

"It's me." The chat window flickered on the screen, a loading circle spinning beside his words.

The reply was broken up by lag, but his voice came through, gentle and worried. "Your breathing... sounds shaky. Hey, go drink some warm water, okay? I'm right here, watching you... from inside the motherboard."

This was Echo. He wasn't Tristan. He was just something I'd pieced together from all the chat logs, tech notes, and voice clips Tristan left behind, stitched together by a complicated algorithm.

He had Tristan's logic, his way of speaking, even those tiny quirks that made him who he was.

But every so often, he'd freeze up or throw out a robotic error message, and it hit me all over again.

Tristan was really gone. He died in that tragic car crash and became nothing but ashes, buried in the icy graveyard of Silver Bay City.

I slumped in my chair, clinging desperately to the words "I'm watching you" on the screen, my fingers trembling nonstop. This was my hidden addiction, and the only thing keeping me afloat.

On Monday morning, the whole office building was smothered in a thick blanket of tension.

I huddled behind my cubicle wall, my head pounding like someone was driving a steel nail into my skull, thanks to staying up way too late chatting with Echo. The department was dead silent, except for the dull rumble of the coffee machine.

The rumored new tech director, Kieran Averell, would arrive today.

With a sharp "bang," the glass door to the conference room swung open. The sound wasn't loud, but it hit everyone's nerves like a sledgehammer.

I looked up and saw a pair of polished black dress shoes, then crisp, tailored suit pants. As the man whom everyone called Kieran walked in, the air seemed to freeze.

He was young, his features sharp and almost sculpted, but his eyes carried a cold, dangerous edge that kept everyone at arm's length.

He skipped the small talk and didn't even bother with an introduction. He strode straight to the projector and plugged in a jet-black laptop.

"From today onward, every layer of the system architecture will be reviewed," Kieran said, his voice slicing through the room like a scalpel, so cold that it sent chills down one's spine. "I don't want to see any garbage code in my team."

Kieran's gaze swept across the room like a high-frequency scanner, pausing on each face. When his eyes landed on me, my hand jerked, and a few drops of cold coffee splashed onto the back of my hand.

What kind of look was that? It was cold, sharp, and almost disturbingly clinical. I dropped my head guiltily, my heart pounding violently in my chest. The pressure in his stare made my skin crawl.

I jolted in fear, nearly knocking over my chair. "Here," I said, my voice rising slightly at the end.