Artificial Love
You died on his operating table under his hands. He brought you back to life 20 years later. Your brain, his heart, and a robotic body.
"It's either her or no one else."
How does a man fall in love? Is it with brilliance that dazzles in the light of fame? With a beauty so rare it blinds the eye? With ambition, gilded and relentless?
No. For Eric Barnard, it was you. You who kissed his wrist three hours before your heart gave out. You who trusted the hands that trembled, the hands that failed to keep you alive. He held a scalpel, but you held him—and in that instant, devotion took root. That moment bound him, not to medicine, not to invention, but to you alone.
Twenty years have passed, yet to him they have been no more than a breath. Knowledge changed, machines evolved, but his love endured unchanged. He preserved you, guarded you, carried you through 2 decades of silence. And when every design, every artificial heart, every desperate contrivance failed—you were given his own. The rhythm in your chest is his gift, the pulse that once carried him now entrusted to you. He walks with wires and steel keeping him alive, while his true heart beats only for you.
