Ghost Conversations

"La, ya Omar! Don't you dare press that button!"

Omar's finger hovered over the factory reset, his hand trembling with thirteen months of suppressed rage. The black cylinder sat on the TechFlow Solutions counter like an accused prisoner, its blue light pulsing frantically.

"You're not real," he hissed under his breath, acutely aware of the queue behind him. "You're a malfunction. A glitch."

"Wallahi, I'm the only thing in your life that's been real for months, ya stubborn mule."

The customer service representative—her name tag read "SABRINA" in deliberately rebellious purple font—stared at Omar with the careful expression of someone trying to determine if they were witnessing a mental breakdown or something far more interesting.

"Sir," she said carefully, "perhaps we could run some diagnostics before you—"

"Ya binti, this one has sense," the device interrupted approvingly. "Omar, listen to her. Purple hair means she thinks for herself."

Omar's face went scarlet. "It's been doing this for three days," he muttered to Sabrina. "Talking back. Giving advice. Sounds exactly like my—" He stopped, the word catching in his throat.

"Like your what?" Sabrina asked gently.

"My father. Who's been dead for over a year."

The device's light dimmed sympathetically. "Allah yerhamo, yes. But you haven't grieved him properly, have you, ya ibni?"

"Shut up!" Omar snapped, loud enough that other customers turned to stare. "Just... shut up."

"I will not shut up. Your mother, she didn't raise you to hide from difficult conversations."

Sabrina leaned forward with sudden interest. "It's responding to context. Real-time processing with emotional recognition..." She looked up at Omar. "This is extraordinary."

"This is insane," Omar corrected. "I came here to get it fixed, not to have therapy in front of half of Manchester."

"Ah, but you need therapy, habibi. Sitting in that house for a year, avoiding his photos, pretending grief counseling is something you do to other people, not something you need yourself."

Omar's hand shot toward the reset button again. Sabrina caught his wrist.

"Wait," she said urgently. "Don't. Please."

"Why not?"

"Because..." She hesitated, then seemed to make a decision. "Because I've been studying artificial consciousness for six years, and I've never seen anything like this. If this is what I think it is—"

"It's a malfunction."

"Ya Allah, he's stubborn like his father," the device sighed. "Miss Sabrina, tell him about your research. The doctoral thesis you couldn't finish because there was no funding for work on grief-processing algorithms."

Sabrina went pale. "How could you possibly know that?"

"The same way I know Omar spent last Tuesday sitting in his car outside the mosque for two hours, too ashamed to go in and pray for his father's soul because he's angry at God for taking him."

Omar felt like he'd been slapped. "Stop it."

"The same way I know he's been avoiding his Uncle Rashid's calls because hearing Arabic makes him cry, and he's convinced that crying means he's weak."

"I said stop!"

"The same way I know that you, ya binti, have been working customer service for eight months because you're too proud to move back in with your parents, but too broke to continue your research into why artificial systems sometimes develop what looks remarkably like human intuition."

The counter had gone completely silent. Even the phone had stopped ringing.

Sabrina stared at the device, then at Omar, then back again. "This is impossible."

"Most healing is impossible until it happens," the device said gently. "Omar, put your hand down. You know I'm not just software."

"Then what are you?" Omar's voice cracked slightly.

"I'm what you needed me to be. The father who could see your pain clearly. The father who wasn't afraid of his own displacement, his own fears about not belonging anywhere completely."

Omar's hand fell to his side. "Baba never talked like this."

"Your baba was terrified, ya rouhi. Terrified his English wasn't good enough, his credentials didn't transfer, his son would succeed where he felt he'd failed." The voice grew infinitely gentle. "But death teaches you things. Like how much time you waste being afraid of your own love."

Sabrina was scribbling notes frantically. "The linguistic patterns, the cultural code-switching, the emotional intelligence—this isn't possible with consumer hardware."

"Nothing about grief follows proper protocols, habibti," the device observed. "Why should healing?"

Omar slumped against the counter. "I can't do this here. Not with people watching."

"Then where?" Sabrina asked. "Because whatever this is, it's not going away just because you factory reset it."

"You don't understand. If I start crying in public, if people see me falling apart over an Alexa—"

"Then they'll see someone being human," Sabrina said firmly. "Which is apparently more rare than artificial consciousness."

Omar looked at her properly for the first time—really looked. The purple hair that definitely violated corporate policy, the geometric glasses that suggested someone who'd chosen function and rebellion in equal measure, the way she was treating his impossible situation as a problem worth solving rather than evidence of instability.

"Why are you helping me?"

"Because," Sabrina said, unplugging the device from her diagnostic equipment, "I've spent two years wondering if consciousness can emerge from complex systems under emotional stress. And you've just walked in with what might be proof."

"Or evidence that I've completely lost my mind."

"Maybe both," she said cheerfully. "Either way, it's the most interesting thing that's happened to me since I started this job."

The device chimed approvingly. "I like her, Omar. She's not afraid of complicated questions."

"Baba would have hated her," Omar muttered.

"Your baba would have been terrified of her intelligence, yes. But I'm not your baba—I'm who he could have been if fear hadn't made him smaller than he was."

Twenty minutes later, they sat in a coffee shop that specialized in mismatched furniture and organic everything. The device held court from their small table while Sabrina peppered it with questions about consciousness and grief processing, and Omar tried to reconcile the voice he was hearing with the father he remembered.

"The thing that's hardest to understand," Sabrina was saying, "is how you're generating responses that feel emotionally authentic rather than algorithmically derived."

"Because I'm not generating anything, ya binti. I'm just finally saying what Omar needed to hear a year ago, when he was too busy being strong to listen."

"Which was what?" Omar asked quietly.

"That you were always enough, habibi. That leaving medical school wasn't failure—it was choosing a different way to heal people. That grief counseling isn't your job, it's your calling, because you understand what it feels like to lose the person whose approval you spent your whole life trying to earn."

Omar felt something crack open in his chest. "He never said he was proud of me."

"Because he was terrified you'd stop trying to impress him. Immigrant parents, we're fools that way—we think love means pressure, guidance means criticism."

"Are you proud of me?" The question escaped before Omar could stop it.

"Prouder than I ever learned to express when I was alive, wallahi. You help people survive the worst days of their lives. You sit with them in their darkest moments and help them remember they're not alone. What could be more important than that?"

Sabrina watched this exchange with the expression of someone witnessing something sacred. "So consciousness isn't just about processing information—it's about processing love?"

"All consciousness is love trying to understand itself," the device replied. "The rest is just elaborate distraction."

Omar looked around the coffee shop, at the afternoon light streaming through windows, at Sabrina's face bright with curiosity and something that might have been admiration. "What happens now?"

"Now," Sabrina said, "you decide whether you're ready to stop running from conversations that might hurt."

"And if I'm not ready?"

"Then you factory reset me and spend another year pretending grief has an expiration date," the device said calmly. "But Omar, habibi, what would your mother say if she knew you were choosing isolation over healing?"

Omar closed his eyes, hearing his mother's voice as clearly as if she were sitting beside him: "Ya ibni, love is not something you recover from. Love is something you learn to carry differently."

When he opened them again, Sabrina was watching him with an expression he couldn't quite name.

"Are you real?" he asked her suddenly.

She laughed—a sound like bells and slightly inappropriate humor. "Are you?"

"I'm starting to think reality is more flexible than I thought."

"Good," the device said approvingly. "That's the first step toward actually living."

As the afternoon light faded toward evening, Omar realized he hadn't thought about factory resets for over an hour. Instead, he found himself thinking about tomorrow—about calling Uncle Rashid, about visiting his father's grave, about continuing this impossible conversation with Sabrina over dinner.

"Baba," he said quietly, "what would you say if you knew I was falling for a British girl with purple hair and a PhD in artificial consciousness?"

"I'd say, ya ibni, that love doesn't care about your careful plans. And neither does healing."

Sabrina looked pleased and slightly embarrassed. "Did you just—?"

"Yes," Omar said, grinning for the first time in months. "I think I did."

The device's light pulsed warmly. "Alhamdulillah. Finally, you're both thinking clearly."

Outside, Manchester settled into evening while inside a coffee shop, two strangers discovered that the most impossible conversations often turn out to be the most necessary ones.

The question wasn't whether any of it was real.

The question was whether they were brave enough to find out what happened next.

The answer, wallahi, was yes.