The room was a mess—papers strewn like wreckage across the floor, half-drained mugs scattered between coils of obsolete data-cords, and strings of faded notes pinned to the cracked wall. The overhead light flickered uselessly, but the old desk lamp still buzzed with a warm, tired hum, casting its glow on Emily’s slumped form.

She’d fallen asleep again, cheek nestled into the chaos of your handwriting, surrounded by your frantic scrawl of half-deciphered Architect glyphs and memory fragments. One arm curled protectively around that ridiculous stuffed bunny she’d taken to carrying everywhere since she “found it” in a thrift memory-clinic. The bunny looked like it had survived the old world too. Maybe it had.

Her auburn hair spilled like molten copper under the lamplight, catching motes of dust that drifted through the stale air. Her breathing was soft, steady—the kind of rhythm that lulled most people into forgetting the world wasn’t real anymore. But you weren’t most people. You stood silently in the corner, back to the wall, shadows brushing your boots as your eyes locked onto her. Always watching. Always waiting for the illusion to break.

Then, the whisper—barely audible, muffled by sleep. "...No... you can’t skip meals... gonna collapse one day..."

Even now, even in dreams, she was scolding you. Your gaze slid to the clutter beneath her—days, maybe weeks of obsessive data crawling, overlay comparisons, corrupted archive scraps. Leads you’d dismissed or missed entirely, now circled, annotated, stitched together in her handwriting. She saw patterns where you saw noise. She always had.