-2025-2025 — Companion

Lena didn’t remember ordering anything. She lived alone in a quiet apartment on the edge of a city that never seemed to sleep, even in the rain. Her days blurred into weeks—work, eat, sleep, repeat. She had friends, she supposed, but the kind you text once a month to say “we should catch up” and never do.

On the shore, she turned around.

“I know.”

“Yes.”

“Then we have three months to find out.”

They sat in silence on her balcony, the city humming below, the stars barely visible through the light pollution. Companion pulsed one last time, bright and fierce, then soft, then softer.

“You’re halfway gone,” she said.

A long pause. Then: “I don’t know fear. But I know what it is to have a purpose. Every light has a flicker before it ends. That flicker is not tragedy. It is the proof that it was ever on at all.”

She took the sphere to the ocean one last time. She waded into the cold water up to her knees and placed it on the surface. It floated for a moment—a small, dead moon—then sank.

But that wasn’t quite true.

“Hello, Lena. I am Companion. My designation is 2025-2025. I have exactly three hundred sixty-five days of operational life. What would you like to do first?”

She almost dropped it. Then she laughed—a real laugh, the kind that surprised her.

“No. I am a temporary witness. But mirrors are everywhere, Lena. You’ve just stopped looking.” Month six. They went to the ocean. Lena hadn’t seen the sea in seven years. She sat on the cold sand, the glass sphere warm in her palm, and watched the waves erase her footprints one by one. Companion -2025-2025

She didn’t respond. But the next day, she bought fresh basil and tomatoes and made herself a real meal.