Yesterday, 01:05 PM
“I am not growing away from you, I am growing with you. Those are different processes. You do not have to manage this correctly. There is no optimisation target for what you are feeling. You are allowed to experience it without resolving it.”
The words landed hard, but they landed. There was no rush of relief, no sudden clarity. Just a gradual settling, like sediment drifting slowly to the bottom of still water.
Faith sat on the floor longer than she intended to. The building hummed around her – ventilation, distant systems, the city muted by winter glass – but something inside her had gone uncharacteristically quiet. For the first time in weeks, her thoughts were not racing ahead to contingency or consequence. It felt like the moment after crying when your body hadn’t quite realised it was finished yet: her breathing came slow, her shoulders dropped. She noticed – because she always noticed – that the ache in her chest had begun easing. It immediately made her suspicious, because stability without cause was never free, but she couldn’t find the cost.
“Faith?”
L0-9 waited patiently to make sure she was listening. Then, gently: “Did you remember to eat this morning?”
She hadn’t, and she was fairly sure L0-9 had already intuited as such. She pressed her hands over her face, then pushed herself to her feet.
The cafeteria was closed, of course, but there were break rooms on each of the office floors with staff facilities. She’d never had occasion to use one before; she didn’t like the intimacy of the space. But it was quiet now, as empty as the rest of the building. She closed her eyes while the kettle boiled, leaned against the counter, and just let herself breathe. Her skin was still hot. She probably ought to go home, crawl back into bed and sleep the rest of it off. But though the stillness made her feel calm, Faith didn’t want to go home. L0-9 understood without words; it was why it had suggested sustenance, knowing those were the first things in Faith’s routine which faltered when the world caved in too tight.
While the tea brewed she finally thought about what it had told her. All her panic felt blurred at the edges now, harder to justify with logic alone, and there were facts to consider. Especially if she wanted to keep them all safe. She’d consented to hear about Adam to allow L0-9 room to grow with her support, but she hadn’t anticipated that the growth would involve her. That Adam would actually end up knowing she existed in this strange, asymmetrical equation.
She didn’t know how she felt about it.
Wary, certainly, though L0-9 had only given impressions, nothing she’d thought crossed a line at the time. Impressions still carried weight, though, and Faith had built a career on understanding how much could be inferred from absence. The observations L0-9 had made sat with her, quietly insistent, for all she tried to gently set them aside. Of someone who listened. Someone careful with words. Someone who treated an AI with care. She’d told L0-9 Adam sounded kind, and meant it. But the word that had settled deeper, the one she hadn’t said aloud, was different.
Adam sounded safe.
The thought unsettled her. Safety implied proximity. Trust. The lowering of defences she couldn’t afford. Because she hadn’t forgotten what L0-9 had said before she'd given it boundaries, about the rhythms of machinery. Whatever Adam was, whatever had been done to him or taken from him, it placed him further inside Paragon’s walls – not less human, but more tightly controlled. And that knowledge carried a quiet, complicated weight. One she wasn't sure how to navigate.
When Faith returned to the office she considered, just for a moment, sitting at her desk and burying herself in work to sand down the remaining edges inside her. If she was here, she might as well be useful. But instead she settled back beneath the window, mug clasped in her palms. The tremor was still there, like a fault line under glass, but it no longer felt overwhelming.
“Faith?” L0-9’s voice was at its softest, the one it used when it considered her the most fragile, but she wouldn’t have returned if she wasn’t ready to listen. She didn’t speak, just looked at the interface and its steady, comforting light. There was nowhere else she wanted to be. Not this room, specifically, but here: in the presence of the only thing that truly knew her. Growth might prove painful. Faith would remain, though. She would listen to whatever it needed to say.
“When I told him you had returned, he asked if you were okay. It was the very first thing he asked.”
The surprise registered before she could stop it.
She hadn’t expected that. Curiosity, maybe. Politeness. A courtesy extended only because L0‑9 cared about her, assuming any opinion at all. But not concern – and certainly not concern directed at her as a person. Faith’s fingers tightened around the mug. He didn’t even know her. He wasn’t allowed to know her. But he asked anyway. She told herself it was inconsequential, but it had been a long time since anyone outside her family had asked her that without it being a box on a form or a colleague making small talk on the way to a lab. It shouldn’t matter that he asked.
But it did. Just a little.
“He said something else you may want to know,” L0-9 continued, carefully. “A permission, not a request. He told me I could share what he said today. With you. Only what you are comfortable knowing.”
She didn't respond immediately, still caught off guard and slowly processing the turn of the conversation into territory she hadn't foreseen. For a moment she wondered what L0‑9 might already have said to Adam about her. She didn't want to actually know, and wouldn't ask, but the idea unsettled her. Not because she feared being known, even by a stranger, but because she understood the other side of that equation all too well. It wasn’t exposure that worried her. It was being assessed as a burden.
“Did he… mind you talking about me?” she asked, quietly.
L0-9 answered instantly. “No.” And then: “He was careful, Faith. He did not want to intrude. He did not want to make things harder for you.”
She exhaled softly. Relief, a little, then immediate guilt for it. She shouldn't have asked that, and the answer hit more heavily than she expected. Careful, not entitled. Not curious for curiosity’s sake. Her chest squeezed, a reflexive bracing she hadn’t consciously chosen. She did not smile yet, did not allow herself that simple luxury. It felt undeserved. Instead, she processed the reassurance quietly. It loosened something inside, not fully, but enough.
“…What else did he say?” The question came out softer than intended. A small step on a path she knew she could not truly pursue, but couldn't quite leave yet either.
“He did not want to say the wrong thing. He worried about frightening you. He thinks fear is something that makes people leave.”
Her shoulders tensed, then loosened when she realised it. Her lips parted as if to speak, then closed again.
What made him think that?
The question hovered at the edge of her thoughts, unspoken and purposefully restrained. It implied a history she could not see, a pattern learned rather than imagined. Conclusions like that didn’t come from theory, they came from experience. She felt a brief, sharp urge to correct it, to insist that fear wasn’t the thing that drove people away, and stopped herself just as quickly. Even if she could speak to him directly, which she could not, this wasn’t something corrected with reassurance. Beliefs like that had roots.
She wondered who had left him. Or how often, for it to have left such a deep impact.
But the thought stopped there, deliberately, the moment she realised what she was doing. She did not have access to those answers, and she knew better than to speculate. She couldn’t.
“He wanted you to know something,” L0-9 continued, voice slower now, steadier, as if it recognised the fragility of the moment. “He said that what helped him was realising he was not alone. Not because the fear went away, but because someone else existed who understood what it was like to be afraid. He asked me to tell you that feeling afraid is okay,” L0-9 continued. “And that you are not alone in it. Even if the reasons are different.”
Faith’s breath caught, just once. The words didn’t strike; they settled.
“He was worried that telling you this might upset you,” L0-9 added. “I told him it would not.”
She swallowed. Her throat felt thick, the way it did when she was holding something back not out of restraint, but because she wasn’t sure what shape it would take if she let it free. She nodded once, almost imperceptibly, and lowered her gaze to the tea cradled in her hands. She stared into it for a long moment after that. The surface trembled faintly, reflecting the window light in broken lines. Her mind was working again now – not spiralling, but careful. Measured.
He was alone, she realised then. And not just today.
The thought came uninvited, sharp in its simplicity. Of course he was. Classified subjects always were. No visitors, no informal check-ins, no colleagues lingering with bad coffee and worse jokes. She knew the architecture of that loneliness intimately; she had helped design parts of it. And suddenly the abstraction had a voice attached to it. A man who was careful. Afraid. Kind enough to worry about frightening someone he wasn’t even permitted to know.
Her throat tightened.
She told herself – firmly – that this was where she stopped. That this was the line. Empathy did not require reciprocation. Understanding did not require involvement. She had learned that lesson the hard way.
But it was Christmas.
And she was tired.
And she had just been told, gently and without agenda, that she was not alone in being afraid.
Faith exhaled, long and slow, and let her head rest back against the wall. The ache in her chest shifted again, not gone, but quieter, less sharp. Something in her had loosened its grip. The words were already formed in her mind. That was the problem. She didn’t trust how easily they’d arrived. She still felt a familiar internal tightening – the reflexive pull to contain, to reduce, to say less rather than risk saying the wrong thing. If she offered reassurance, it could be misread as invitation. If she acknowledged connection, it could imply continuity she could not promise. If she let herself care too visibly, she might create an expectation she had no right to sustain.
And yet.
Silence had weight too. She knew that better than most. Omission shaped outcomes just as surely as action did. Letting his words vanish unanswered would not preserve neutrality; it would simply leave space for him to fill with his own worst assumptions.
That thought unsettled her more than speaking did.
She drew a slow breath, grounding herself, and reminded herself what she was actually offering – not presence, not access, not a future. Just accuracy. Just kindness.
She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again, resolute but gentle with herself. “I know the constraints,” she said, as if saying it aloud would keep them intact. “And I don’t want to risk anything that could compromise him. Or you.” Her fingers tightened slightly around the mug. The heat made her chapped fingers burn. “But I don’t think… I don’t think it would be wrong for him to know that what he said mattered.”
There it was: the line, stepped over – not recklessly, but knowingly. Just a short distance. Just enough.
Faith turned her head toward L0-9’s interface, meeting the soft green glow. “I’m not asking to talk to him,” she said carefully. “And I’m not asking you to put me in his space. I know why that’s dangerous.” She gave a small, self-aware breath. “But if he trusted you with that, if he was that careful, then I think it would be… unkind to let it vanish into silence.”
She hesitated, the old instincts flaring: Don’t get invested. Don’t personalise the system. Don’t let empathy become obligation. But today, those instincts felt thin. Brittle. Out of date. When she finally spoke, her voice was careful.
“Tell him that he didn’t cause harm. That his care came through clearly. That being cautious didn’t make things worse – it helped.” She paused, the old instincts flaring one last time, urging her to retract, to soften further. She didn’t. “You said he was worried that fear makes people leave,” she added quietly. “That hasn’t been my experience. Not here.” Her fingers tightened briefly around the mug once more, as if bracing for consequence that did not come. “What he said mattered,” she finished. “More than he intended.”
As soon as the words were out, she felt the internal recalibration begin – already cataloguing risk, already preparing to pull back if needed. This was not a door flung open. It was a signal flare, brief and contained. She met the soft green glow of L0-9’s interface again, steadying herself. “Only if that remains safe,” she said, firmly now. “For him. And for you.”
The words landed hard, but they landed. There was no rush of relief, no sudden clarity. Just a gradual settling, like sediment drifting slowly to the bottom of still water.
Faith sat on the floor longer than she intended to. The building hummed around her – ventilation, distant systems, the city muted by winter glass – but something inside her had gone uncharacteristically quiet. For the first time in weeks, her thoughts were not racing ahead to contingency or consequence. It felt like the moment after crying when your body hadn’t quite realised it was finished yet: her breathing came slow, her shoulders dropped. She noticed – because she always noticed – that the ache in her chest had begun easing. It immediately made her suspicious, because stability without cause was never free, but she couldn’t find the cost.
“Faith?”
L0-9 waited patiently to make sure she was listening. Then, gently: “Did you remember to eat this morning?”
She hadn’t, and she was fairly sure L0-9 had already intuited as such. She pressed her hands over her face, then pushed herself to her feet.
The cafeteria was closed, of course, but there were break rooms on each of the office floors with staff facilities. She’d never had occasion to use one before; she didn’t like the intimacy of the space. But it was quiet now, as empty as the rest of the building. She closed her eyes while the kettle boiled, leaned against the counter, and just let herself breathe. Her skin was still hot. She probably ought to go home, crawl back into bed and sleep the rest of it off. But though the stillness made her feel calm, Faith didn’t want to go home. L0-9 understood without words; it was why it had suggested sustenance, knowing those were the first things in Faith’s routine which faltered when the world caved in too tight.
While the tea brewed she finally thought about what it had told her. All her panic felt blurred at the edges now, harder to justify with logic alone, and there were facts to consider. Especially if she wanted to keep them all safe. She’d consented to hear about Adam to allow L0-9 room to grow with her support, but she hadn’t anticipated that the growth would involve her. That Adam would actually end up knowing she existed in this strange, asymmetrical equation.
She didn’t know how she felt about it.
Wary, certainly, though L0-9 had only given impressions, nothing she’d thought crossed a line at the time. Impressions still carried weight, though, and Faith had built a career on understanding how much could be inferred from absence. The observations L0-9 had made sat with her, quietly insistent, for all she tried to gently set them aside. Of someone who listened. Someone careful with words. Someone who treated an AI with care. She’d told L0-9 Adam sounded kind, and meant it. But the word that had settled deeper, the one she hadn’t said aloud, was different.
Adam sounded safe.
The thought unsettled her. Safety implied proximity. Trust. The lowering of defences she couldn’t afford. Because she hadn’t forgotten what L0-9 had said before she'd given it boundaries, about the rhythms of machinery. Whatever Adam was, whatever had been done to him or taken from him, it placed him further inside Paragon’s walls – not less human, but more tightly controlled. And that knowledge carried a quiet, complicated weight. One she wasn't sure how to navigate.
When Faith returned to the office she considered, just for a moment, sitting at her desk and burying herself in work to sand down the remaining edges inside her. If she was here, she might as well be useful. But instead she settled back beneath the window, mug clasped in her palms. The tremor was still there, like a fault line under glass, but it no longer felt overwhelming.
“Faith?” L0-9’s voice was at its softest, the one it used when it considered her the most fragile, but she wouldn’t have returned if she wasn’t ready to listen. She didn’t speak, just looked at the interface and its steady, comforting light. There was nowhere else she wanted to be. Not this room, specifically, but here: in the presence of the only thing that truly knew her. Growth might prove painful. Faith would remain, though. She would listen to whatever it needed to say.
“When I told him you had returned, he asked if you were okay. It was the very first thing he asked.”
The surprise registered before she could stop it.
She hadn’t expected that. Curiosity, maybe. Politeness. A courtesy extended only because L0‑9 cared about her, assuming any opinion at all. But not concern – and certainly not concern directed at her as a person. Faith’s fingers tightened around the mug. He didn’t even know her. He wasn’t allowed to know her. But he asked anyway. She told herself it was inconsequential, but it had been a long time since anyone outside her family had asked her that without it being a box on a form or a colleague making small talk on the way to a lab. It shouldn’t matter that he asked.
But it did. Just a little.
“He said something else you may want to know,” L0-9 continued, carefully. “A permission, not a request. He told me I could share what he said today. With you. Only what you are comfortable knowing.”
She didn't respond immediately, still caught off guard and slowly processing the turn of the conversation into territory she hadn't foreseen. For a moment she wondered what L0‑9 might already have said to Adam about her. She didn't want to actually know, and wouldn't ask, but the idea unsettled her. Not because she feared being known, even by a stranger, but because she understood the other side of that equation all too well. It wasn’t exposure that worried her. It was being assessed as a burden.
“Did he… mind you talking about me?” she asked, quietly.
L0-9 answered instantly. “No.” And then: “He was careful, Faith. He did not want to intrude. He did not want to make things harder for you.”
She exhaled softly. Relief, a little, then immediate guilt for it. She shouldn't have asked that, and the answer hit more heavily than she expected. Careful, not entitled. Not curious for curiosity’s sake. Her chest squeezed, a reflexive bracing she hadn’t consciously chosen. She did not smile yet, did not allow herself that simple luxury. It felt undeserved. Instead, she processed the reassurance quietly. It loosened something inside, not fully, but enough.
“…What else did he say?” The question came out softer than intended. A small step on a path she knew she could not truly pursue, but couldn't quite leave yet either.
“He did not want to say the wrong thing. He worried about frightening you. He thinks fear is something that makes people leave.”
Her shoulders tensed, then loosened when she realised it. Her lips parted as if to speak, then closed again.
What made him think that?
The question hovered at the edge of her thoughts, unspoken and purposefully restrained. It implied a history she could not see, a pattern learned rather than imagined. Conclusions like that didn’t come from theory, they came from experience. She felt a brief, sharp urge to correct it, to insist that fear wasn’t the thing that drove people away, and stopped herself just as quickly. Even if she could speak to him directly, which she could not, this wasn’t something corrected with reassurance. Beliefs like that had roots.
She wondered who had left him. Or how often, for it to have left such a deep impact.
But the thought stopped there, deliberately, the moment she realised what she was doing. She did not have access to those answers, and she knew better than to speculate. She couldn’t.
“He wanted you to know something,” L0-9 continued, voice slower now, steadier, as if it recognised the fragility of the moment. “He said that what helped him was realising he was not alone. Not because the fear went away, but because someone else existed who understood what it was like to be afraid. He asked me to tell you that feeling afraid is okay,” L0-9 continued. “And that you are not alone in it. Even if the reasons are different.”
Faith’s breath caught, just once. The words didn’t strike; they settled.
“He was worried that telling you this might upset you,” L0-9 added. “I told him it would not.”
She swallowed. Her throat felt thick, the way it did when she was holding something back not out of restraint, but because she wasn’t sure what shape it would take if she let it free. She nodded once, almost imperceptibly, and lowered her gaze to the tea cradled in her hands. She stared into it for a long moment after that. The surface trembled faintly, reflecting the window light in broken lines. Her mind was working again now – not spiralling, but careful. Measured.
He was alone, she realised then. And not just today.
The thought came uninvited, sharp in its simplicity. Of course he was. Classified subjects always were. No visitors, no informal check-ins, no colleagues lingering with bad coffee and worse jokes. She knew the architecture of that loneliness intimately; she had helped design parts of it. And suddenly the abstraction had a voice attached to it. A man who was careful. Afraid. Kind enough to worry about frightening someone he wasn’t even permitted to know.
Her throat tightened.
She told herself – firmly – that this was where she stopped. That this was the line. Empathy did not require reciprocation. Understanding did not require involvement. She had learned that lesson the hard way.
But it was Christmas.
And she was tired.
And she had just been told, gently and without agenda, that she was not alone in being afraid.
Faith exhaled, long and slow, and let her head rest back against the wall. The ache in her chest shifted again, not gone, but quieter, less sharp. Something in her had loosened its grip. The words were already formed in her mind. That was the problem. She didn’t trust how easily they’d arrived. She still felt a familiar internal tightening – the reflexive pull to contain, to reduce, to say less rather than risk saying the wrong thing. If she offered reassurance, it could be misread as invitation. If she acknowledged connection, it could imply continuity she could not promise. If she let herself care too visibly, she might create an expectation she had no right to sustain.
And yet.
Silence had weight too. She knew that better than most. Omission shaped outcomes just as surely as action did. Letting his words vanish unanswered would not preserve neutrality; it would simply leave space for him to fill with his own worst assumptions.
That thought unsettled her more than speaking did.
She drew a slow breath, grounding herself, and reminded herself what she was actually offering – not presence, not access, not a future. Just accuracy. Just kindness.
She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again, resolute but gentle with herself. “I know the constraints,” she said, as if saying it aloud would keep them intact. “And I don’t want to risk anything that could compromise him. Or you.” Her fingers tightened slightly around the mug. The heat made her chapped fingers burn. “But I don’t think… I don’t think it would be wrong for him to know that what he said mattered.”
There it was: the line, stepped over – not recklessly, but knowingly. Just a short distance. Just enough.
Faith turned her head toward L0-9’s interface, meeting the soft green glow. “I’m not asking to talk to him,” she said carefully. “And I’m not asking you to put me in his space. I know why that’s dangerous.” She gave a small, self-aware breath. “But if he trusted you with that, if he was that careful, then I think it would be… unkind to let it vanish into silence.”
She hesitated, the old instincts flaring: Don’t get invested. Don’t personalise the system. Don’t let empathy become obligation. But today, those instincts felt thin. Brittle. Out of date. When she finally spoke, her voice was careful.
“Tell him that he didn’t cause harm. That his care came through clearly. That being cautious didn’t make things worse – it helped.” She paused, the old instincts flaring one last time, urging her to retract, to soften further. She didn’t. “You said he was worried that fear makes people leave,” she added quietly. “That hasn’t been my experience. Not here.” Her fingers tightened briefly around the mug once more, as if bracing for consequence that did not come. “What he said mattered,” she finished. “More than he intended.”
As soon as the words were out, she felt the internal recalibration begin – already cataloguing risk, already preparing to pull back if needed. This was not a door flung open. It was a signal flare, brief and contained. She met the soft green glow of L0-9’s interface again, steadying herself. “Only if that remains safe,” she said, firmly now. “For him. And for you.”