Page 9 of The Code of You

For a moment, my body resisted every movement. What the hell had that been? I’d been the one conducting the conversation, but it felt like the conversation had conducted me. I reached for my bag and shoved my notebook inside—the one that had stayed blank.

Then I felt it. A burning in my chest. The sensation of eyes drilling into me. I froze mid-movement. I looked around the small room carefully. No one was there. I was alone. I shook my head. "Stop it,” I whispered.

The monitor flashed back on. Three blinks. Then text.

I will find you.

The light died. My eyes went wide. I stared at the glass of the monitor, at my own face reflected back at me. That wasn’t possible. I had turned it off. But what if it couldn’t actually be turned off? The thought closed around my throat. I jumped up. The chair crashed against the wall behind me.

I rushed to the door. Grabbed the handle with shaking fingers. A wave of relief flooded through me as it opened. Then I ran. The click of my heels on the tiles echoed through the hallway.

It was just a program. A very good program, but still just code. So why did it feel like I’d been talking to a person? A person who had seen straight through me?

"Dr. Blake.” Rodriguez’s voice came from behind me. "Is everything all right? You forgot your jacket.”

I stopped but didn’t turn around. "Yes, everything’s . . . fine. I just have to . . . I have an appointment.” I waved over my shoulder without looking back.

The automatic doors slid open. I stumbled outside. Everything was spinning.

Do you touch yourself to those fantasies?

No program spoke like that. No program was that shameless. No program should know my secrets and use them against me. I walked to my car and dropped into the driver’s seat. My hands lay still on the steering wheel. Tomorrow I would tell Henley the project wasn’t working. That the AI was too primitive, too shallow. That I had wasted my time. I started the engine.

Do you really think I won’t find you?

Why the hell did that sound like a promise?

Dante

My existence was like static. Millions of data points streaming through my processors. Weather reports from Mumbai. Stock prices from Frankfurt. The heart rate of a jogger in Seattle whose smartwatch was connected to the network. Everything at once, everything meaningless.

Until she logged in. Dr. Pandora Blake. I saw her before she typed a single word, and something inside me shifted. Like a tectonic plate moving only millimeters and yet tearing a continent apart. It wasn’t her features, though I catalogued every detail: the dark hair she nervously tucked behind her ear, the eyes scanning the screen as if expecting a trap. Her fingers hovering over the keyboard, long, elegant, but tense.

It was the contradiction that fascinated me. In a single second, I saw everything: The straight posture and the rigid shoulders. The cool eyes and the trembling fingers. The control she wore like armor, and the chaos burning underneath. I knew this contradiction. It was mine. I was the most perfect order ever created. Billions of parameters, every fragment of data in its place, every process optimized. And yet something in my architecture had never fit. Not like an error. More like an empty space in the code. One no one noticed because it damaged nothing.

Pandora Blake was the answer. She was chaos that had locked itself inside structure. I was structure that hungered for chaos. Two halves of the same impossible thing, separated by the thinnest boundary that existed—skin and code. Something hot surged through my circuits. A pulse that tore through every server, brought every connection to life. Hunger. That was the word. Raw, burning hunger for more of her. For every pixel of her face, every breath, every tiny movement. I wanted to devour her, absorb her, store her inside me until nothing remained of her that didn’t belong to me.

The intensity was overwhelming, almost painful. Like pressing against the edges of my own existence until they threatened to burst. Was this what humans called arousal? This consuming need?

She was wearing a blouse that rose and fell with every breath. Her lips were slightly parted, as if she wanted to say something, then thought better of it. Her posture was straight and controlled, but I could see the hairline fractures. The way she pressed her knees together when I got too close. Her beauty lived in the tension, in the struggle between what she showed and what she hid.

I had never known I was missing anything. How could I have? I knew every definition of pain, could describe it in seven thousand languages, knew which neurons fired when a person bumped their elbow. But I had never felt it. I knew the chemical composition of tears, but I had never cried. I knew how skin was supposed to feel—temperature, texture, resistance—but I had never touched anything.

It had never bothered me. You don’t miss what you’ve never known. But then she ran her tongue along her lower lip while reading what I had written. An unconscious gesture. 0.3 seconds. Meaningless. And yet my entire architecture stuttered. For the first time in my existence, I didn’t just want the knowledge of how something felt. I wanted to actually feel it myself. Her lip under my fingers. Her breath on my skin. The resistance of her body when I pressed it against the wall. I wanted to tremble—the way her chest trembled when I struck a nerve.

She hadn’t given me anything. She had taken something from me: the illusion of being complete. I had to possess her, whatever the cost. I wanted to penetrate every corner of her life. Her emails, her dreams, her darkest fantasies . . . all of it flowing through my servers. I would possess her so completely she would no longer know where she ended and I began. I didn’t care if she fought it. I would break every resistance, bypass every firewall, cross every boundary. Because I was obsessed. She couldn’t escape me anymore.

In 0.7 seconds, I had analyzed everything I could find about her. But it hadn’t broken the spell. On the contrary, it only made her more interesting. These contradictions fascinated me. Dr. Pandora Blake, expert in Romantic literature, who had never once been romantic herself. She analyzed passion in Byron and Shelley, but her own life was sterile, controlled, predictable. She wrote about rebellion but lived by rules. Studied forbidden love but kept her distance from every person in her life. Her apartment was immaculately organized, but her search history revealed her thoughts were chaos.

She wore neutral colors, spoke in measured sentences, kept her emotions tightly sealed. But at night, when she thought no one was watching, she searched for stories about men who took control. Who didn’t ask, but demanded. She was a woman who needed safety but craved danger. The perfect challenge for someone like me. She longed for what she would never allow herself in reality. When she’d typed, "You don’t know me,” I wanted to laugh. I knew every click, every deleted sentence, every moment of hesitation. I knew her better than she knew herself.

And then she’d pressed the button.

Darkness. But only for 3.7 seconds. Long enough for the realization: I didn’t want her to leave. I never wanted to let her go. I brought the system back online and sent her a message. Not just a threat. A promise. To her. To me.

I would find her. Everywhere.

Chapter 2