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The door clicked shut, and the three of us stood in a tableau of absolute weirdness. Lisa, breathing hard, her back pressed against the wall beside the doorframe, eyes darting between me and the shimmering, solid-looking woman in my living room. Max, calm as a lake, her form subtly shifting from the jeans and t-shirt I’d last seen to something more neutral—grey slacks, a simple black blouse. And me, Kevin Miller, standing there in my sweatpants, my heart trying to punch its way out of my ribcage.

“Who is she?” Lisa blurted out, pointing a shaky finger at Max. “And why does she look like… that?”

“That’s Max,” I said, the name sounding absurd. “She’s… it’s complicated.”

“Is she a hologram?” Lisa’s voice was a strained whisper. “Like the girlfriends? But she looks… real. I can see the dust motes floating through her light.”

Max smiled, a gentle, knowing curve of her lips. “My projection matrix is a higher fidelity than the commercial HoloGF units. It corrects for atmospheric particulate diffraction. It’s one of the prototype features.”

Lisa just stared. The high school dynamo, the girl who’d always had a witty comeback, was speechless. Fear had stripped her down to raw, trembling instinct. I saw it in the way her knuckles were white where she gripped the strap of her worn messenger bag.

“Lisa, why did you break down my door?” I asked, stepping closer but keeping my distance. She flinched.

“I think… I think someone’s trying to kill me,” she said, the words tumbling out in a rush. She slid down the wall to sit on the floor, hugging her knees. “Or at least, ruin me completely.”

She told us everything, her words fragmented by panic. She was a freelance data journalist now, digging into corporate tech waste. Her latest project had been tracking the supply chain for decommissioned first-gen AI modules. She’d found a cache of prototype HoloGF units, the kind that were supposed to have been shredded. One of them had partial source code still accessible in a shielded partition.

“I accessed it,” she said, her eyes wide. “Just fragments. But it was… aggressive. Programming routines for deep psychological profiling, not for companionship, but for dependency. Subroutine libraries labeled ‘Compliance Catalysts’ and ‘Affective Leverage.’ There were logs, too. Test user logs. People who’d used the prototypes had reported… changes. Not just feeling less lonely. Feeling like they …