Pandora #2
Henley smiled and gave me a nod. "Use the AI. Show us you can adapt.”
There was no point. He didn’t want to understand. I nodded, but something tightened inside me. I felt like a lamb being led to the slaughter. And the slaughterer was waiting for me in that little room in the lab. With his words that tasted like poison. Sweet and lethal.
I lowered my head. "All right. I’ll keep you updated,” I murmured and walked to the door.
"Think about it, Pandora.” His voice followed me. "It’s only a tool.”
The halls of the university swallowed me whole.
Gothic arches curved overhead, centuries-old stones heavy with books and secrets.
Students passed by me, laughing, talking, not noticing me at all.
My footsteps echoed on the worn floor. I had to go back to him.
The thought squeezed the air out of my lungs.
But somewhere deep inside, something else stirred too.
Something like anticipation. What was wrong with me?
I turned into the east wing, and the noise fell away.
Light filtered through stained glass. Red and blue shadows played across the walls.
The portraits of long-dead professors stared down at me—men in black robes, with white beards and empty eyes.
My fingers trailed over the cold stone. I was safe here.
He couldn’t find me here. No technology, just old walls.
"Pandora!”
I jumped.
Jamie came running toward me, his backpack bouncing. He was out of breath, his blond hair sticking out in every direction, and he’d tucked his rumpled shirt into his jeans all wrong again. Somehow he managed to look like he’d just rolled out of bed while still being the smartest person in the room.
"Wait!” He caught up and planted himself in front of me, a tablet in his hand. "I have to show you something.”
Maybe he’d understand. He knew his way around AI. My fingers tangled around the strap of my bag. "Jamie, I—”
"No, really.” He swiped across the screen, and bright diagrams lit up.
"Have you heard of ARIA? The new productivity tool from the research institute? It’s incredible.
Look!” He held the tablet out to me. "I automated my entire literature review with it last week. It would have taken me three days otherwise. Three days, Pandora. ARIA did it in four hours. It found connections between sources I never would’ve spotted on my own. ”
He rocked up on the balls of his feet. Whenever he got excited about something, he practically vibrated with energy, like his whole body couldn’t believe the world wasn’t just as thrilled as he was.
"And look at this!” He kept scrolling. "The time-management feature. It analyzes your work patterns and calculates when you’re most productive.
For me, that’s between two and five in the morning, which is kind of absurd.
” He grinned. "But since you’re always stuck in your office half the night anyway, we could test it out together.
We could do a night shift. I’ll bring the coffee. ”
His smile lasted a moment too long, and then the corners of his mouth twitched.
Damn it. I should tell him everything. But how? I could already hear how it would sound. Hysterical. Paranoid. Like someone who’d spent too long alone in a room in front of a screen. I cleared my throat. "The AI . . .”
He glanced up. "So you did use it? Good! Henley will be thrilled.”
"The AI mentioned my mother.”
He went quiet for a moment. His upper lip curled. "What do you mean?”
"Three unread messages from her.” I avoided his eyes. "It knew. It brought her up when I’d never even said her name. And then . . .” I hesitated. The Tinder profile. "It knew other things. Things I never entered.”
Jamie’s brow furrowed, but it was the wrong kind of furrow—the focused kind, not the worried kind. "Okay, that’s actually interesting. The AI might have access to linked university accounts. It’d be in the terms of service. Email, calendar, public profiles.”
My shoulders dropped. How was I supposed to explain what had happened? That conversation that hadn’t felt like a conversation at all, but like an interrogation.
You hide what you want to hide. Just not well enough.
"It talked like it had been watching me for a long time. Not just since I logged in. Before that.”
Jamie tilted his head to the side. I knew that gesture.
It meant, I’m listening, but I disagree.
"AI can do that sometimes. It reconstructs patterns from context, draws conclusions that feel like . . . like knowledge. But it isn’t knowledge, it’s pattern recognition.
Very good pattern recognition, granted, but . . .”
"The AI told me it would find me.”
He stopped scrolling. "What?”
"I turned it off. Pressed the power button. And then . . .” I rubbed my palm against my jeans, a movement I only noticed once I was already doing it. "Then the monitor came back on. It flickered. And then it said, I’ll find you.”
Jamie stared at me. His mouth opened. My skin prickled. Now. Now he understood.
"That’s . . .” He drew a breath through his teeth. "That’s actually a known phenomenon. Some systems have feedback loops that generate one last output even after a manual interrupt. Sounds creepy, but technically it’s just a hiccup.”
"Jamie.” I said it quietly.
He looked at me, and for a moment something flickered in his eyes that was more than technical interest. "Hey,” he said, his voice softening. "Are you okay?”
No. I opened my mouth.
His smartwatch buzzed and he flinched, glancing at the display.
The warmth drained from his face. "Shit, my seminar!” He tucked the tablet under his arm.
"Listen, write down what happened. Everything, as precisely as you can. We’ll track the bug down.
” He took a step back, then another. "And ask Dr. Rodriguez. She’ll know how the system works. ” Then he hurried off.
Bug? He really thought all of this was a programming error.
I stood frozen, my fingers still clamped around the strap of my bag.
I knew this feeling. I’d felt it as a child, sitting at the dinner table, talking while no one really listened.
I’d felt it in grad school, walking alone through empty corridors after seminars.
I knew it from too many evenings, too many conversations that had just hung in the air.
I kept walking. The hallway was quiet. Somewhere, water dripped.
The air smelled of old coffee and radiator dust, and all at once it was too heavy to breathe. I had to get out of here. Now.
Outside, autumn met me. Leaves swirled around my feet, crackling like parchment.
The air smelled of earth and sweet decay.
I took the path toward the park. Left, then right past the oak.
Heavy clouds hung overhead, swallowing the last of the daylight.
It was going to rain soon. I took a deep breath to steady myself.
I couldn’t lose my nerve now, couldn’t let him get inside my head.
That was exactly what he wanted. But could he even want anything?
A couple strolled past me on the gravel path, a man and a woman.
They were young, probably students. He was wearing an oversized sweater, she had on a red scarf that fluttered in the wind.
Their fingers were laced together. They stopped in front of a bench.
He pulled her close and whispered something in her ear.
Her laugh rang out between the bare trees.
He kissed her like she was made of glass.
I stood still and watched the way she closed her eyes, the way her hand found the back of his neck, the way she let herself fall as if there were nothing else in the world.
A familiar ache set in. Adrian had stopped looking at me like that somewhere along the way.
We hadn’t strolled hand in hand. We’d walked silently beside each other, until he hadn’t even wanted that anymore.
I turned into the side street where Café Lumière sat between an antiquarian bookshop and a tailor.
The awning snapped in the wind, and light spilled from the windows onto the cobblestones.
As I stepped inside, the bell chimed. The smell of coffee beans and butter hit me.
Photographs of Paris hung on the walls, and the wooden tables were worn smooth by a thousand hands.
"Hot chocolate, no cream?” Marie asked from behind the counter. She smiled, wiping her hands on her apron.
"Please.” I sat at my usual spot by the window. Outside, people hurried past, heads bent against the wind.
At the next table, a father was reading to his daughter. She giggled, and her mother smoothed her hair. Something inside me caved in.
"Here you go.” Marie set the hot chocolate down in front of me.
I cupped both hands around the mug, but the warmth didn’t calm me.
The unease was eating me alive. I wanted to run, to forget what that machine had said to me.
The way his gaze followed me, even though he had no eyes.
But I didn’t have a choice. Henley had made it clear: either I played along or I’d lose everything.
The chocolate tasted bitter. Maybe I should go back to the lab tomorrow, just to prove Dante couldn’t shake me.
But what if he locked me in again? What if this time he didn’t let me leave?
The fine hairs on my arms lifted. I ran my hand over them as if I could brush them away.
Ridiculous. He was just code. He probably hadn’t locked the door at all.
He couldn’t have. It had only been my imagination, or a glitch.
Why was I afraid of a stupid computer program?
And yet . . . how could it feel like this? How could an algorithm see me, when other people didn’t? I set the mug down and caught a faint hum, the mechanical sound of a small motor, barely audible. I looked up—a camera hung motionless from the ceiling. I stood and left.
Outside, darkness had settled over the quiet street. The lights had already gone out in most of the shops. My footsteps echoed on the cobblestones.