The Ghost

Matt's apartment smelled of overheating electronics and stale coffee. He stayed slumped in his chair, watching the final performance metrics for the latest code merge crawl across one of his three screens. He clicked Submit, and the mechanical clank of the key felt like a heavy period at the end of a very long sentence.

To the rest of Silicon Valley, he was the lead engineer at a company that had finally cracked the "Ghost in the Machine" code. To himself, he just felt like a man who hadn't eaten a real meal in three days.

He pushed his chair back and stood up. He walked to the window and stared out at the empty river of asphalt and felt a kind of "heavy quiet" his mother used to say was perfect for hearing your own thoughts.

His VP of Data Center Operations promotion letter was still open in a background tab waiting for his digital signature to become official. It was the leap he’d been sprinting toward for a decade. A document that promised everything he'd worked for since grad school: the salary, the title, the chance to build a legacy. However, it also entailed a nomadic life where he’d travel all over the world to oversee the development of data centers that were the life blood of his company’s cutting edge AI (Artificial Intelligence) products.

He turned away from the window and his eyes landed on Rita’s weekly schedule pinned to the fridge with a chipped magnet from a pizza place they’d visited on their third date. She had a 5:00 AM start. His nomadic life wouldn’t fit into this life built on five-minute drives and shared morning coffee. It wasn't a bug he could patch.

He rubbed his eyes until he saw static. He needed a second opinion. Not from a mentor or a colleague, but from the one person who knew him before any of this mattered and life was much simpler.

He sat back down and started typing.

Matt: Mom, you awake?

It was almost midnight but he saw the indicator Mother is typing...

Mother: Yes. What's wrong sweetheart? It's late.

Matt: Can't sleep. Been thinking about something.

Mother is typing...

Mother: Tell me.

He picked up the purple colored velvet ring box on his desk and opened it. The diamond glinted in the light from his desk lamp.

Matt: I want to propose to Rita.

Mother: Oh Matty! That's so wonderful! I'm happy for you two.

Matt: But I got promoted today

Mother is typing...

Mother: That's great news too! Two celebrations!

Matt: Not exactly.. if I take this promotion I will have to travel all over the world..I could be gone for several months at a time

Mother is typing...

Mother: Can Rita not join you?

Matt: She just made attending physician at Memorial! Worked years for it. She can't just leave with me.. but I've also wanted this jump in my career for a while and I want to travel around the world..

Mother is typing...

Mother: Those things aren't mutually exclusive, you know.

Matt: Feels like they are.

Mother: Can I ask you something?

Matt: Always.

Mother: Why does it have to be now? The proposal?

Matt: What do you mean?

Mother: You're asking whether to propose BEFORE you take the promotion. But maybe it doesn't have to be in that order? You could just enjoy your promotion for now.. travel for a year. See how long distance works. If you two can survive that, you'll survive anything. And maybe after a year, you can negotiate to work from one location. Or Rita can find opportunities abroad. Or you both realize what matters most.

Matt: So don't propose for now?

Mother is typing...

The typing indicator continued pulsing. Matt waited. He glanced at the time. 11:58 PM. She was probably just thinking of the right words.

The indicator disappeared entirely.

Mother: <Internal Server Error> you have may have run out of tokens or this is a temporary glitch. Please try again later. If the problem persists, talk to our helpful support assistant Iris.

Matt stared at the error message, his jaw tightening. He was looking at the cold, mechanical skeleton underneath the ghost he’d been talking to. He closed the chat window with more force than necessary, the click echoing in his quiet apartment.

He opened a new tab and logged into his MemoryLane.ai email account. The inbox was exploding with red notifications:

SYSTEM ALERT: Service Degradation - US-EAST-1CRITICAL:

URGENT: User Reports Flooding Support…

SYSTEM ALERT: Failover Initiated

"Shit," he muttered, scrolling through twenty more emails just like them, all timestamped within the last ten minutes. He pulled up the on-call rotation for the week and opened his company IM (instant messaging) app.

Matt Chen: what the hell is going on? I am seeing raw server errors on the front end!

David Park: hey Matt, I’m glad you’re online! i have no idea what is going on! I'm drowning in calls, messages, emails every 2 mins! I was just about to reach out to you.

Matt Chen: The outage is not the big problem. Let the infra team tackle that. I was in the middle of a conversation with a persona that I’ve been training for over a year and the bot just spat out a server error!

David Park is typing…

Matt Chen: We’re selling a connection, not a chatbot. If the system fails for any reason, we mask it with a human message. How come the masking didn't work btw? Tonight we just threw every connected customer back into reality by throwing a bucket of cold water on their face! Let’s please patch it right away.

He stopped typing for a second and finally noticed his phone vibrating. The screen lit up: Mom Calling...

He grabbed his phone, still furious, and answered.

"Ma, I'm at work—"

"Matty?" Her voice sounded thin, confused. "I was calling about... it was something really important. But I forgot about it by the time you picked up"

The anger bled out of him in a single, ragged exhale. He forced his jaw to loosen and smoothed the frustration from his voice, making it as soft as he could.

"That's okay, Ma. You can call back when you remember. I promise."

"Where is Stephanie? She's not supposed to leave me alone!" There was an edge of panic creeping in.

"She's probably just in the bathroom, Ma. I’ll call her cell and tell her to check on you, okay?”

"I can't remember." A pause. "I keep telling Alexis to play my music but she says something went wrong. Can you come and fix her?"

Matt closed his eyes. "Yeah, Ma. She'll start working again in a little bit. I'll come by tomorrow and take a look, okay?"

"Oh good! I'll cook your favorite. Do you still like pot roast?"

"I do, Ma. But you don't have to cook. I'll bring dinner." He paused for a moment.

"Ma, do you remember Rita? My girlfriend?"

"Oh! You have a girlfriend?" Her voice brightened with genuine delight. "Matty, that's wonderful! When can I meet her?"

"Ma, you've already met..." He stopped himself. Swallowed hard.

"Never mind. How about I bring her over for dinner tomorrow?"

"Perfect! I'll make something special."

"Sure, Ma. I'll see you around seven."

"I love you, sweetheart."

"Love you too."

He disconnected and sat in silence, staring at nothing. His Slack pinged.

David Park: Error handling patched. Masks are live. I think the services are back up so I’ll run some tests.

Matt didn't respond. He looked at the ring box at the corner of his desk and after a long moment, he clicked the MemoryLane.ai chat tab open again.

The conversation was still there, preserved in amber. Mother’s thoughtful advice was waiting, suspended at the exact moment the world had glitched. His cursor blinked in the message box. He began to type.