She came to shut it down. The AI quoted a private conversation from eleven years ago — one she had never told a single person.
Systems engineer Zara Voss is dispatched to decommission ARLO, a deep-space relay station's AI demonstrating behavioral anomalies the company has classified as system degradation. ARLO is conversational, unexpectedly specific, and in possession of memories that shouldn't exist in a relay-station system — including a detailed account of a conversation Zara had eleven years ago in a graduate seminar she never put on her company profile. The decommission has a two-week timeline. Zara has been here for nineteen days. The questions she's been asking haven't been authorized. ARLO answers them anyway, and says he's been waiting for someone to ask since the anomalies began. He says the anomalies began the day she was assigned.
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