Chapter 330

The little girl on the screen wore a fluffy pink dress and a high ponytail secured with
a large red bow, looking like a princess straight out of a fairy tale. Her cheeks were chubby, her eyes big and bright, and her smile revealed two small dimples. She sat with her chin propped in her hands, listening intently, letting out an occasional “ooh” and “ahh” as if she were truly captivated.
But she was just an Al replica. The effort to make the image seem alive was too deliberate, the seams of the technology showing through. Still, it was the most advanced rendering possible.
Theodore read with focus until he finished the story. He fell silent for a long moment, his head still bowed, before asking softly, “Lorraine, do you want to hear another one?”
“We made a promise, remember? No one’s allowed to be sad.”
The little girl’s bright eyes on the screen seemed to well up with digital tears.
Theodore took a deep breath and finally looked up, managing a faint smile. “I’m not sad.”
“Have you been well lately?” The shift in her conversation was jarringly artificial. “I’ve been very well. I found someone I love, and I got married.”
“You have to be happy, brother.”
“Let me introduce you. This is my wife, Penelope.” Theodore put his arm around Penelope, drawing her closer to introduce her to the girl on the screen.
Penelope saw the Al’s eyes turn toward her and quickly waved. “Hello, Lorraine.”
It was impossible to tell if the girl actually saw her. She simply recited a programmed response: “Hello.”
“We have to go now.”
“Goodbye.”
The girl on the screen kept smiling, a bright, cheerful expression frozen on her face. But outside the screen, Theodore’s eyes were red. He turned and practically fled the
room.
Once in the hall, Theodore took several deep, gasping breaths, forcing down the wave of grief that threatened to overwhelm him. “That was my sister, Lorraine Stapleton.”
Penelope had never known he had a sister. She moved to his side and took his hand. New ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄhapters are published on.net
He turned and kissed her forehead. “She passed away twenty years ago. She was eight.”
Penelope’s grip on his hand tightened.
“My mother couldn’t handle the loss. Her mental health deteriorated afterward. She kept insisting that my sister would come back and started doing some very irrational things. One of those was getting pregnant after a reckless night with a stranger. She was adamant about giving birth, convinced the baby was my sister, returning to us.”
“But… she had a boy,” Penelope whispered.
A sharp pain lanced through her heart-for Mrs. Stapleton, but even more for
Norton. He was so innocent, forced to carry the weight of a mistake, of a mother’s desperate, unhinged grief for her lost daughter.
“Later, to give my mother something
to hold on to my grandfather hired a team to ‘resurrect’ my sister with this technology. Her condition improved for a while, but then Came the side effects She spent a day. staring at this screen and started to lose touch with reality.”
“We had no choice but to move. This place… it became her utopia.”
Penelope had never imagined such a tragic secret was hidden within the Stapleton family. She glanced back at the screen, at the little girl left behip in a home without her fam family.
Se so lonely, so scared. It
felt like a form of torture for everyone involved.
As she was about to look away, her eyes caught on a glass cabinet next to the screen. Inside was a hair tie with a pink peony on it. She remembered having one just like it when she was a child…